john hendren al-jazeera chicago the u.s. space agency nasa has released the 1st pictures of its perseverance rover landing on the surface of mars applique it indicates she supports. navigation have that the parachute had the flight and we're feeling again the celebration it's the 1st time a mars landing has been captured on video it's already sent back pictures from the surface and it's expected to start moving around and exploring its new home by the end of the month. and this is all it is here with these are the top stories the united states has now recorded more than half a 1000000 deaths from covert 19 by far the highest toll in the world flags at half staff and president joe biden has commemorated the victims with a moment of silence the people we lost were extraordinary they span

generations born in america emigrated to america but just like that so many of them took their final breath alone in america as a nation we can accept such a cruel fate while we were fighting this pandemic for so long we have to resist becoming a nun to the sorrow. bells have been told in 500 times in washington d.c. in memory of those killed during the pandemic it's been a little over a year since america recorded its 1st death from the disease more than 28000000 people have been infected there since then but its prime minister boris johnson's laid out his plan to lift pandemic restrictions schools or jews a reopen and to people from separate households will be allowed to meet outside starting march the 8th. and a ball of vaccination campaign against being delayed because of bad weather on

thursday the world health organization announced it was sending more than 11000 doses but the flight couldn't land in the capital conakry because of heavy fog and it had to be diverted to senegal it's an exam or to democratic republic of congo has died after a u.n. convoy he was charming in was ambushed look at a nazi his bodyguard and driver were also killed the congolese government is blaming the other one hutu rebel group for the attack iran's supreme leader has warned it could boost uranium enrichment up to 60 percent ayatollah ali harmonies comments follow a new agreement with the u.s. nuclear watchdog it allows this practice to continue monitoring tech runs nuclear facilities for up to 3 months but access will be reduced and will be no more snap inspections there was the headlines the news continues here on alt is it after inside story goodbye.

the facebook and friends australia the tech giant blogs news articles on the platform angry at a plan to make it pay to media companies the content so who will win this battle and how will it affect the way we view and share information online this is inside story. and i welcome to the program i'm nick clarke a battle about to news content appearing online is pitting australia against 2 of the world's biggest tech firms the government wants

a law to force google and facebook to pay media companies for journalism news organizations argue the online john says sharing their contents but not giving them a slice of the advertising profit the web companies dispute this on thursday facebook blocked australians from viewing and sherry news articles from local and international outlets on its platform pages for government agencies and emergency services were also taken down they have since been restored facebook says a proposed law miss understands its relationship with publishers and traffic to australian news sites dropped by 13 percent the government is standing firm but says facebook appears willing to find a compromise. we want to work through these issues and so i welcome the fact that they're back and guiding with the government as they should and does actions were completely indefensible when i strangest to taking the lead on this and so i'm

pleased to abide had the international the strong international support that has come forward but i'm also i pleased that facebook has decided it would seem to tentatively friendless again and get those discussions going well google had threatened to pull out of australia if the lord's post has now announced a deals with 2 of the nation's biggest media firms to feature the news content agreements reported to be worth $24000000.00 a year. other countries to are debating how to make big tech firms pay for journalism in france google lost an appeal to avoid paying news publishers for their content they agreed on a copyright framework last month facebook announced last year it would pay u.s. news organizations including the wall street journal and the washington post to feature headlines in spain google shut down its news website after a 2014 law required it to pay publishers canada is vowing to be the next country to follow australia's lead its government saying it will put forward similar

legislation this year. all right let's bring in our guests now in oxford in the u.k. we have julie posetti who's a global director of research at the international center for journalists and in washington d.c. courtney advocacy director at the committee to protect journalists and in the netherlands catalina grantor assistant professor in private law at university and co-manager of the mass trick law and tech lab welcome all to the program so facebook and the australian government still arguing this out and the outcome as we've just been talking about will have global implications. first of all scott morrison said that facebook's action was indefensible but was it on facebook right when they say they help news organizations get new subscribers and help drive revenue. yes facebook is right when it says that certainly the

discoverability of news on facebook is really important to a range of news organizations not least of all small news organizations that don't have the same ability to pay for distribution etc and we've actually seen a reaction by community broadcasters and 1st nations media and australia to this decision because it's really negative lee impacted their ability to be seen on the platform and reach their audiences and we've seen an impact throughout the region as australia has a really important news source for other countries in the region that have a much smaller news industry so we're seeing a pretty you know ripple effect here juniper said he was you know if it was about this said do you think that it's very spokes action was indefensible. i think it was reckless and indefensible and highly demonstrative of a failed p.r. campaign despite the fact that public relations in this space is probably

facebook's greatest force. historically in terms of trying to forge relationships with journalism i'm a stray and as you can hear i was a journalist a political reporter in a stroller with the a.b.c. for many years before becoming an academic and are now monitoring this globally with a real concern around the implications for freedom of expression and access to information on 2 fronts because what i call platform capture is in full display here this is the process whereby news organizations and a whole range of other public interest information groups have been sucked into facebook under the encouragement of facebook's. operating systems and also sometimes within tasm and so some of the funding that's funneled into journalism for example is used to train journalists specifically how to use the tools this this capture also extends to news organizations becoming

beyond codependent on a platform like facebook for distribution of content which is corny points out has become you know a really fundamental facet of the way independent journalism has often read it over the past decade to me to cut off access to public information that is essential you know public health nature for example was extremely high risk as a strategy this happened in australia the week that vaccinations were supposedly being rolled out and as you've already mentioned health websites domestic violence call centers. facebook pages were blockaded and so in fact with a deep struck of irony was facebook's. corporate page with an astounding because it was seeing itself as a news provider you know that was some massive shooting in the foot but really you encouraged and ecosystem facebook which people have become dependent on your

network for information use free speech as a defense against regulation and yet you respond to attempts to regulate. in the defense of ok to analysts to buy ability with this response sure it gets me to go into out of must you do wonder why facebook a peeved at this law and they acknowledge themselves the news any represents a small share of what it why they worry about this what it is pay options and be done with it. i think it said just to agree with the what julie and courtney were mentioning i think this was just a very bad p.r. campaign and generally speaking i believe the australian bill is a very innovative piece of legislation that aims to do exactly what julie was mentioning earlier to really reduce the balance between smaller news organizations and smaller players and these very large tech companies which are really now dominating the way in which information is being accessed by billions of users what

i find particularly interesting is that as you were mentioning earlier news are only a part of the type of speech that we find on these platforms especially social media platforms and what to what really was striking to see in the australian news band situation was just to to identify these these streams of content that come together in the melting pot which is a user's news feed what we see is that social media platforms are now you know bringing together social commerce they're bringing together political speech social speech news and all of this is done without any kind of labels so i personally very much admired the initiative of the australian legislator to try to. i'd least put some labels on ok these are news we're going to treat them like this and this is how we're going to be bargaining power if it isn't right to say catalina that facebook is more useful to news organizations and the than the other way round face

but through a counter for something like 5 just over 5000000000 clicks on a straight in news websites last year i agree with that partially because indeed the question is what kind of revenue does a social media make from news organizations but i would also like to ask perhaps also yourself and also julian courtney what exactly is a news or is asian what we see on social media for instance so this doesn't necessarily apply to google as such because it's a different type of platform focusing on this search engine dimension but on social media platforms we have also a lot of content creation and this content creation can very well also fall under this idea of. becoming a news organization or of these producing news so i think it's very important to to really reflect on what exactly do we mean by by news and i think even in the bill itself the definition of this is i think one of the more critical points that i've

also seen around that the definition of news is quite over and calm passing and i think that this also led to the the the very unfortunate overhaul of news content from all. feeds from australian facebook users there's a massive reset going on isn't there julian things have changed completely traditional news out outlets or across the world let alone a straight they need cash badly they old revenue streams advertising particularly has just dried up how serious is that situation in australia as far as you know publishers and so forth and consign really serious it's very serious some of the outlets that have closed during the pandemic which is exacerbated the situation. news publishers of facing with the collapse further collapse of everton's in revenue have left cities you know swathes of towns without independent outlets apart from the national broadcaster which is also being gutted by the same

government trying to funnel funds through these mechanisms to other news media it should be noted and a stranger has bury very poor levels of media diversity it's often referred to as a murdoch receiver with allusions to the dominance of the murdoch press in australia and it's fair to argue that these laws this legislation will privilege the murdoch press which is in alignment politically with the australian conservative government so i'm saying all this to give you ample context for understanding that despite this i would argue that it's still fundamentally important that the government propose ways to try to ensure that appropriate investment is made in journalism it's all very well to say journalism benefits more from facebook than facebook does from journalism but facebook and other tech giants have really up ended the information ecosystem with really devastating effects for democracy in parts of the world as well as news organizations and so there has to

be a recess and this it's not just about economics in the sense of what is the value of x. compared to y. there's a moral and ethical responsibility to support the public interest journalism that has collapsed partly as a result of google and facebook as 2 companies sucking up 80 percent of digital advertising in a strength i just i'm going to come in there too i'm going to come to court in a 2nd but i just want to come back on that but the problem with this law as you've acknowledged is that there's this concentrated kind of news scene in australia with what is it news corp fairfax and 7 network they stand to benefit from this but while the smaller set ups are kind of the town the small town publishes if you like they'll just go to the wall won't they. not necessarily because i mean google for example is promising to forge agreements with some of the smaller publishers as well there does need to be you know a diversification of the kind of funding and for me this points to 2 things and one

is to acknowledge which hasn't really come up in this debate properly yet the real problem of the viral amplification of dissent from ation in an environment where news organizations have pulled out of facebook the 2nd is to suggest that there needs to be some kind of mechanism some sort of independent or thoresby which like a press council that has some sort of funding capacity which can make decisions at length about where to invest this money collected from the platforms on a needs basis in the public interest and i think that's the piece that we're missing and i hope that's where we hid this issue of this information of course it's a big issue it's a big problem. there's what the australian government is what is running government doing is it going part of the way to assessing that dealing with that. i think we're going to have to see i mean 1st of all i want to push back on this idea that the only way we should evaluate whether facebook brings more value to news or vice

versa is through an economic analysis i mean the fact is if you look at facebook statements and reactions to dissent from ation the rise of fake news harassment all of these issues is to try to entice journalists and news organizations to use their platform train them they're spending millions of dollars which of course is a tiny drop in their revenue but get to you know support the journalistic initiatives that they feel like they want to support because it improves the information vironment on their platforms i've had dozens of discussions with company representatives that a 1000000 different forums i'm talking about the importance of a healthy information environment and news and journalism you know independent real news and journalism is doing that and so there is a greater value for the platforms than a simply capture and looking at traffic numbers or how much revenue one brings to the other and i think that this point about this information is you know it's just

ridiculous that in the midst of what you know the u.n. has called disinfo demick around the pandemic of the importance of accurate information to public health to democratic governance that you would have major dominant platform for sharing information both news and rumor decided to kick off australian news and to not allow that to circulate i mean that seems to go you know to find a face of what they're trying to find as a solution and we have to recognize that the status quo does not is not the right way for things to be so i think legislators experimenting with ways to rebalance power in the media ecosystem and the information environment is really important but i would also urge them to get down into. the fundamental business models that have made it nearly impossible for mainstream media and much less independent or community media to compete with these platforms as julie mentioned they have an

overwhelming monopoly on the digital advertising market which is how our digital economy now functions so regulators also need to look more broadly at the type of economy you know the data for cation monetization of data targeting individuals through targeted advertising and all of this upon which the modern economy is based and in which the information it environment is existing because sure people can go in and type you know an individual u.r.l. into their browser but that's not how we work anymore that's you know we are in the information right ecosystem of walled gardens of a cousin of a this issue of dissin from asia in a sense it is sense through degree there's nothing new in this in the way that the news is influence because you know meadows news corp have been doing it long dictated in the existence of influence over the shape of news and look at fox in the united states. yeah i think i just took bill's on on some of the things that

were said earlier i think and didn't misinformation and disinformation are some very important drawbacks the situation that journalism faces nowadays i would also like to say that to a certain extent so i completely agree when i think julie mentioned this earlier that there needs to be also more public funding that that needs to be pumped into journalism because at the end of the day all of this money so we're talking also about advertising it needs to come from somewhere so corrosive that a public money could come could come charging through the platforms for running news right. it could come from charging platforms indeed that is one model or another model is to also just try to to revisit the the failed business model of actually asking citizens to pay for the news as they might have done in other iterations of media so right now the idea that a user a consumer has a free contract with facebook has just created this narrative of there there is

just 3 access to information and in spite of the fact that a lot of industries need more funding than this has been a little bit the status quo but going back to the disinformation point i think what we see right now in social media the idea of having a ban on news and i think gordon was mentioning this earlier of having this in the middle of a pandemic you can see how social media influencers are really the only the only opinions and the only voices that remain on such a platform and they have been vehicles of misinformation and this links back to the idea that we need to really consider exactly what the definition of news is because there are so many new small companies that right now offer content which traditionally we wouldn't qualify as news which doesn't have the same editorial format as journalism but which is spread. very widely on social media platforms and

that is the problem right julie sir that in this era of sort of go ahead julie go ahead are going to say i think it's really important to note too in discussing the disk and summation factor here that we can take from this that facebook is able to act exceptionally quickly when it suits them to do usually as a profit motivation right during the pandemic during the you know the alleged genocide in places like me in my during the the transformation of the philippines into a teetering democracy all of which of being tied up with facebook's viral power that what so slow to act that even in the course of publishing a major report for the u.n. last year about freedom of expression challenges connected to this information which n.s.a. commissioned which i coauthored we were struggling to get facebook to explain why they were taking more time to do x. then y. and there were arguments back and forth and trying to clarify information that took

months to trust a result and yet i've been not they will block a independent journalism on their own platform in a country in the middle of a pandemic i mean i can underline that enough i think that is that fundamentally needs to be part of this conversation that there is a need for regulation and accountability and transparency that at the moment this company in particular facebook just does not seem to want to engage with so it doesn't lead to what model in your view would provide that regulation and that transparency that julie needs to. yeah exactly so i actually wanted to build on this because i think the bill the australian bill has a very very good model in this respect because what it does and julie this is exactly what stays with or why facebook is acting up so dramatically because what this bill does it it creates a framework for. platforms to negotiate so the bill says the state is

here to really create this framework for negotiations and then if you don't agree on negotiating with news corp's and then really have the remuneration established for the news then there is even arbitration that is mandated under this bill so the platforms are thinking right now while our freedom of contract is the severely endangered because the state is coming and is telling us how to conduct our negotiations a what exactly will happen if we don't agree to pay and i think this is the source that a lot of these destructive an operator and not but if the companies have been really struggling to just stay out of court i'd like to follow up to that but also in this area when big tech can effectively control news consumption and the platforms control more importantly probably the access of the audience who already has access to news. what's what's best model what's your best model for rectifying this

problem. well i think we need to go back to core principles of independent media media freedom which includes pluralism so not just pluralism in the choice of outlets but also pluralism and terms of you know how what the funding models are and if you know carol as i'm in terms of how you know how the news is gathered so you need a lot of different. you know sort of these core principles because if you don't have different choices then you end up having a monopoly or you know one tomine at way to get information for example in the philippines and b.m.r. which julie mentioned earlier many people think that facebook is the internet and in many countries you have subsidized access to and to face but provided and so that's the only way that people are getting their news so we need to look at making sure that we and we encourage pluralism and we also need to have regulators

thinking about how they can actually mandate transparency so part of what we're going to need to know after this law is implemented is what is the impact on news organizations and on facebook traffic so if we had better data from the platforms we could make better regulatory decisions and so i think we need to get you know a lot more sophisticated in terms of how we do this and make sure that when this law is implemented there are fire walls between the government and decisions about what is included as news media you know having independent ok voters and decision makers because otherwise you don't want the government choosing winners and losers in the journalism business records are to jump in there but i just want to leave it with julie we've got about 4550 seconds i'll say let's spend 420 is how will the news landscape look in 2 decades time radically different one point to make is that if we cannot figure out how to support critical independent journalism that holds

power to account. what we've learned over the past decade of allowing the wild west ecosystem to evolve is that access to reliable information will be extremely difficult and our ability to rely on information is accurate and factual will be extremely problematic so it's really urgent that we put human rights in the form of press freedom and access to information at the core of what we're doing being mindful that we do not see all 32 dictatorial regimes for example in this regard which is one of facebook's concerns of course but that we have international protocols to ensure that we can maintain this kind of information environment or at least return to us yet there's going to be a radically different environment and that's it that's all we've got time for more for a fascinating discussion do appreciate that thanks to all our guests julie pathetically a courtney rides and catalina go on to thanks very much indeed and thank you for

watching you can see this program again any time just by visiting our website al-jazeera dot com and for further discussion just go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com ford slash a.j. inside story and you can also join the conversation of course on twitter we are at a j inside story from a macleod and the entire team here in doha it's goodbye from. one in 3 brazilian women is a victim of domestic abuse it seems every day a woman dies and it just becomes

a statistic but some have broken away from the cycle of violence it's not easy to move you have to ask for help and inspired others to turn their lives around i call the straw hat program the dream program my life changed after the course it gave me opportunities for my business women make change on al-jazeera. in india identity politics on the rise what we're seeing is the construction of partitions and cuts and loads of music but across the country and as it docks i can do is you do see the grit from his office the majesty of the hindu fix into something more like the team i didn't see of the british today i meet with victims of violence and discover what life is like for minorities in the country join me on my journey in search of india's soul on al-jazeera what should americans be thinking and doing right now it should be about ideas they don't care about their work is all they care about is making money china is not going to be left out of

the calling for the bloated defense budget to be trying to force them on and on us politics and policies and their effect on the world on al-jazeera. i'm not madison in doha the top stories on al-jazeera the united states is not recorded more than half a 1000000 deaths from covert 19 by far the highest toll in the world flags are at half staff and president joe biden has commemorated the victims with a moment of silence and an emotional address to the nation the people we lost were extraordinary they span generations born in america emigrated to america but just like that so many of them took their final breath on my own

in america as a nation.