it's borders to solve. taiwan and hong kong we see his heart lawn he looks to the future the wants to beauty is political in the military achievements like a. beijing considers taiwan a rude chinese province has warned it won't accept any move toward independence but the island's leaders say they will continue to defend its democracy and freedom. i'll just irritating. quick recap of our top stories now and we've been keeping an eye on developments in somalia where medical sources saying that at least 20 people have been killed in an explosion which took place in the capital now this happened at a restaurant damage issues central prison the attack has not been claimed by any armed groups at this point but we do know that a further 30 people have been wounded and nearby building collapsed during rescue

efforts which were underway earlier on at least 2 people were killed and 3 wounded in a separate attack on a prison in the city of a saucer. has been a day of violence on the streets of senegal's capital protests as there have been fighting with police after a court decided the opposition politician as months should remain in custody while it's broke out 2 days ago off to sancho was arrested for taking part in an unauthorized rally he's also facing rape charges which he denies saying the accusation is possible plot to block him from running for president in 2024. the response from the government itself has been muted just a statement saying and telling people to stay indoors and to follow the rules and regulations instilled by the government but look at the protests behind me here this is a defiant crowd. that seems to be unwilling to listen

to the government's advice so they want to get towards the march that is ahead of us where they are the opposition archers and civil societies that have gathered to go together that i've called on this march against the government and also calling for the liberation of these about so quick. and violence in the in mars moving towards an acute humanitarian crisis the un special envoy issued that warning to the security council saying that now is the time to act in the country itself security forces of again targeted and he could protest as with rubber bullets and live ammunition in several cities across the country one man was killed in a peaceful march in mandalay while hundreds of people in yangon want a protest killed on wednesday was the headlines this hour up front is the program coming up next i will see you with more news in about 25 minutes time. it's been 10 years since the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in japan and caused

a massive tsunami taking 18000 lives and igniting the world's worst nuclear crisis since the chernobyl disaster join us as we revisit those most affected in a series of reports on just. is the right to free speech absolute or should there be limits and what do we do about the unprecedented power the big tech companies have over who gets to be heard that's our debate in this week's upfront special. free speech debates have been around for centuries but with increasing political polarization the rise of so-called fake news and massive power wielded by tech companies it's one of the most talked about and divisive issues in democracies

today in the u.s. trumps impeachment trial and his lifelong ban from twitter renew the discussion over censorship and cancel culture while in the u.k. the government has said it will appoint free speech champions to investigate issues around censorship and university campuses the movie has been described as a conservative war on work so who should be the arbiters of free speech if any at all and should some views be kept out of the public sphere joining me to debate this are from rio de janeiro glenn greenwald an independent journalist on substract and the author of the book no place to hide edward snowden the n.s.a. and the u.s. surveillance state and from london i'm joined by yes i mean alibi brown she's a columnist and professor of journalism at middlesex university thank you both for joining me on front yes i mean let me start with you what do you see as the biggest threat to free speech currently today in democracies around the world. well i have

to answer your question by telling saying i have never believed in absolute free speech i absolutely believe that words can hurt words words can incapacitate it i think if you use words carefully censorship is something done by the powerful usually governments but at the moment probably the the big tex. and i certainly feel that our government's response is deeply hypocritical and actually quite sinister. but i don't believe in absolute free speech i think words hurt. me understand what you mean when you say you don't believe in absolute absolute free speech because words heard what type of words that are heard for should be limited or constrained what it will how does that play out for you well let me tell you 2 things a judge a u.s. supreme court judge said and this is what i believe as well i think he was at the

nuremberg trial judge justice jackson this is in my book in defense of political correctness abuses of our freedom of expression tear apart a society brutalized its dominant elements and persecute even to extermination its minorities so that's what i mean a few months ago just a couple of months ago i was being so savage online because i'm a woman of color in the public space forthright and that muslim that i actually had a total collapse it was on social media nobody was coming for me with a club or gun but it totally totally brought me down since what i mean so that i'm clear with my other part of the question of course was where are these threats coming from would you say the threats are coming from social media as well in addition to tech companies and governments. yes i think this idea of. you know rampant free speech as

a total right has given people permission and you know we the problem is everybody has their lines. the same government here who says they want to free speech champion in universities is the same government which has passed its it's a regulation saying. that we have to accept a definition of anti semitism which in effect absolutely. forbids a discussion of israeli politics so he the same minister wants free speech of a certain kind but his red line is anti semitism. glenn i suspect you see it a little differently. yeah you know i certainly agree that words can hurt i grew up as a gay kid in ronald reagan's america when the moral majority was in its ascent then me only discussion of homosexuality was in connection with the fatal disease in the

middle of an aids kind of mc i think it was only jewish person in my neighborhood was more exotic for that reason still i live in brazil where i had an interracial marriage with a man who's a member of congress of a socialist party and were often targeted in those a vicious way by all kinds of attacks but if you look at the nurnberg trials what makes what the nazis did so horrific and historically evil was not the words that used to talk about jews it was the actual extermination the actual gas chambers they constructed and i think when you look at the a question you have to look at all sides not just how much words can hurt but also how much censorship can you damage and i think the example that got me excited in the u.k. is a perfect one the 1st time i ever started reporting an online censorship was in the context of the israeli government pressuring facebook to delete palestinian

journalists and activists from using their popcorn by claiming that their words hurt their words incite violence their words inciting types of attacks on and that's the problem once you endorse this framework that says authority whether it's a state or corporations or member of the power to draw these lines of yours are permitted at these ideas are not. usually what's going to happen is the marginal are going to be the ones who suffer and the powerful world get even more powerful because they'll use that censorship power to protect it so yes me when you make a better argument. it is in fact the powerful who can do most damage to censorship but i don't agree about germany i think that it started with words it started with what the newspapers and pamphlets started saying about jews. and in rwanda where we had the terrible genocide it started with words in bosnia it started with

words in my country at the moment the demonization of asylum seekers and migrants has become so frightening that i wouldn't be surprised if there will be even more violence directed against them using the same words that cockroaches they are vermin this was used in germany it was used in rwanda it was used in bosnia and not lean it was used by the powerful and the powerless yes and we often see cries of censorship coming from conservatives but some of the harshest rhetoric to suppress free speech and threats to the media come from the right how do conservatives sort of thread the needle how do they square that circle. because they're horrible hypocrites and her pig not talking about is free speech what they're talking about is approved free free speech which is what i wrote my call and they don't want free speech at universities which criticizes israeli politics or

you know holds tony blair to account properly although he hopes we forgotten what he did in iraq. they don't they're not keen on that they want it that's it the great big sam plays history we're not allowed to remind people. that many of the statues in this country are off slavers and those who profited from slavery apparently this is censoring history when we argue and when a group pull down a statue of a profiteer they want that old history and shrine and and unquestioned and at the same time they want approved free speech eighty's a disgrace that the double standards really play yeah you know i think mark and i noticed him in your introduction that you alluded to the fact that people often talk about this as

a conservative or it woke the idea that there's this free speech to be going on and somehow conservatives at least have posterity as being on the side of free speech although as both you pointed out repeatedly there's a huge property often because they're often the ones who lead the way in getting people fired or suppressing ideas as all 3 of us know from our own experience but what i think is that one of the things that really concerns me is that free speech as a movement. came from the left at least in the united states if you look at you know i was a constitutional litigator before i was journalist and did a lot of personal cases and if you look at all the major 1st that in any speech case that protected free speech even of heat groups like you nazis and anti-semite the k.k.k. they were often defended by jewish lawyers the still use steeped in a lot this tradition and the thing that concerns me so much is that now censorship has become a left way weapon and what i try to say to pull up all the time is look if you want

to go to the conservatives and object when they get professors fired because they criticize israel where they talk against zionism and all things they should up the right do you need to be a part of 1st demonstrate that you believe in the principle that you're defending a principle when it comes to their speech and therefore urge them to join you in defending the principle in all cases and i've seen now work sometimes but if the left in the right are only invoking free speech when it comes to protecting people what they agree then it's just another partisan weapon it will have no real pose. i'm still sitting with what yes i mean say in a few minutes ago about the type of harassment that she receives as muslim as well as woman as a person of color. and we know that that certainly happens. in amnesty international is even declared a human rights abuse are there situations where people having access to

a platform like a twitter for example can make it actually more difficult for other people to express themselves freely and openly in other words is there waving that yes means freedom of speech and freedom of expression can be limited by the fact that everyone else has access to it because again their power dynamics and all of these platforms it's never purely apples to apples. yeah i work i mean i spent you know 20192020 doing a year's worth of reporting that destabilize the ball center of government my husband and i became the prime anime's of that movement which is a very powerful movement of mine almost every day i would wake up and go online or at work and there be a house have at my name urging me to be deported or president you know terribly bigoted attacks launched at us and you know i don't want to sound harsh about this but. the 3 of us right now are on television articulating our views we are right for major newspapers and major outlets that's an end it looks that we have that

most people don't have been well never at and the solution for me is not to then go to those companies social media companies they please protect me from the crowd that's angry at what i'm doing and saying but to try and manage myself how it is that i'm going to shield myself from that kind of abuse by managing how i interact with twitter about how i go online so i don't in any way want to minimize the problem completely i've lived through some really terrible things when it comes to that but i just think that when it comes to politics when it comes to journalism it's a struggle for power and people feel very strongly about many things and they're going to be angry if you take controversial positions like all 3 of us do and there's really no way to stop that without giving to attack our guards enormous power to police our discourse that in the 1st instance they may exercise in

a way to be liked but ultimately i think will backfire and all kinds of 'd way. i agree with that as i said you have to civilize this space. because it what is happening is suppression of. those who find it tranquilly unbearable why would you go in for this it's not like it used to be i've spent 35 years arguing with people on the right the civilized people on the right ok you can do that and i think in any democracy you have to learn to speak to your opponents this is not civilized discourse it is often coming from and i hope this doesn't offend anybody from some of the least educated and the most angry right as ye said to remember what he ate says the best best have

lost lost all conviction was the worst stuff full of passionate intensity and it's very emotional and it's very wounding and 8 helps nothing nobody understands anything a bet i'm not it's not even about a controversy you know i can write. to eat something very simple like oh the raspberries were beautiful today and they will attack me and they will tell me to go back where i came from i have no right to be here and that i deserve this in a deserve that and i deserve to be raped i'm sorry i'm sorry that cannot go on and it's not helping anything or anyone least of them least of it then so i think that it's not the power to them but they have a responsibility the take giants have a responsibility. do you do you to have some kind of regulation of this law banga ok i want to move on just just for time's sake as i know we won't resolve

that one in particular i want to talk about cancer culture because that's another freedom of speech issue that is what everybody is talking about these days but i'm not sure we always are precise about what cancel culture actually is some say it's online abuse some say it's firing somebody some say it's harassment others say it's not a real thing this is just free speech and accountability i want to know where you to stand on this little start with you. thank you do you complain that the term is incredibly imprecise you know weigh that up you skates more than it limits and for that reason i rarely use it. so you know i think part of the problem is that mopping times that people who complain about are complaining about it from their own perspective from their own experience and yet those people are very powerful people there are people with big journalistic clout moore does it work for the largest media outlets they're supposed to be you're supposed feel sorry for them because people are angry about what they've written or what they have sat and

a lot of people look at that say that's not a real problem you know you and i agree with that the concern i have is for people who don't have power who you know you saw not especially after the. protest movement over the summer against police abuse and systemic racism and the like lots of people losing their jobs or a truck driver in california who had a traffic light a made a gesture but people claim that was a white supremacist gesture he was like t. know he was a wage worker he got fired there and journalist who feel like they can't break anything or they're going to lose their jobs if t.v. it's at all from orthodoxy so i worry about it when it comes to people who don't really have the kind of power to immunize themselves and that and i also worry about it to the extent that it is decreasing the range of ideas that can be heard particularly in those institutions where free and open debate ought to be must encourage such as academia and journalism i would say would be in the 2 leading

ones where i think you have seen a constricted ability to question orthodoxies and pieties in a way that i find an elf. yes me no i don't agree i think often these are made up instances. in this country quite a lot of serious academics and journalists have looked at just how many incidents there have been of this so-called cancel culture we live in times where our conservative government is now absolutely it's trying at the moment for example the same people who are talking about council culture are demanding that the b.b.c. stop having left wing comedians on any of their per on their programs because too many of their comedians are left wing so there's a huge amount of double talk here going on and also there is another thing. i think when we talk about freedom of speech if people want to invite the hard drive

speaker say on campus then those who object and absolutely have the right to demonstrate against that decision to yell at that person to turn up at that meeting and nonviolently register their objections it seems to me freedom free expression is warriors do not want part 2 of the game they only want part one so we could one argue go though in the same way that era saying people have a right to express dissent through protest or not coming to the speech for example one could say that you could do the same thing by just not going on twitter. yes but it's part of my whole i didn't often do it i mean i know i got to it very late i don't do anything else i don't have facebook nothing nothing but it as we know journalism is or is competing with social media but it's like saying to women don't

walk out in the street at night because then you'll be raped this should be a safe space for everybody no but i guess ultimately as i mean yes i mean ultimately americans who becomes the arbiter of what's within the bounds right because again there are big there will be people like you who will say that the things that are being said to me are awful and they are awful no one should be saying the things that you're describing but there on the other side there will be people on the right or there will be people who who are settlers or there will be people who are white supremacist the united states who will say this certain kinds of language makes them uneasy that black lives matter makes them feel uneasy as a white person like this is the type of frame we're going to get some saying i hate the slippery slope arguments but it seems to me that we're setting ourselves up potentially for a situation where we can just go around knocking everyone off the table in the news no provocative speeches no dialogue there's no space to even engage. there's dialogue and this dialogue but i don't think dialogue is what we're talking about

here we're having a very calm very interesting conversation this is not what we're talking about we're talking about people who want to use weaponized words to intimidate and that is not acceptable and in the case of women it's still happening isn't it there are still people who feel they have the right to turn up to campus some male writers a couple of them from the one from north america that their rights are being abused because they're not allowed to turn up on campus or on our media channels fair to say what they want to say about women and i say yeah i understand their feelings but you know what their loads of things i feel i want to say that i don't see and we all have these mechanisms when before we go i want to ask you about these tech companies because they're not just shaping the media conversation i'm thinking about 20000 facebook admitted that it had been used to incite violence in me and

more they said that they failed to prevent the platform from being used to call for meant division and incite offline violence some of these polls were from the country's military when you look at that horrific situation do you still believe that facebook and other tech companies should be regulating this kind of content. i don't even mind the torture debate brady spent 10 years arguing that the us is governments use of torture is immoral and should be banned in all cases in fact it's criminal and of course you cannot come up with an instance where it might be hard to argue that right like the proverbial terrorist is part of the bomb and is not known location and if the debt meets at the next 2 hours 2000000 innocent lives were lost and the only way to find out where that nuclear bomb is is to torture the detainee is it justified or do you just let the 2000000 people die i don't hurt and that's an easy question to answer but i nonetheless believe but overall it's

a or have it on torture because of the damage that it will be done so you can definitely come up with instances. where my instinct is to say oh my god that speech is so harmful that yep course the world would be better off without it the problem is once you in that perfect case my lawyer not the lesser alex jones or nigel ferrars or people in my mark trying to foment genocide once you after we asked that free market say to facebook yes you now has the monopoly disguise we set you do have to use pot to arms if you work as a journalist and increasingly in any other field you don't really have a choice and if you say to them you know of the power to decide who gets to say what your plot gorman who doesn't who disappears on the internet that isn't meant our to that and these billionaires an oligarchy who are completely unaccountable the democratic process and that's the concern that i add not that there's no keys where it might be better off if people are silence but that the whole if we empower

that framework to exist i think we're going to pay a much worse price before you all go i actually do it as whom i think when you said something that struck with me and i'm thinking about the power of these tech companies with its facebook with its amazon whoever. a few weeks go ahead yanis varoufakis on the show and he said that capitalism. has morphed into what he calls techno feudalism meaning that we no longer have a competitive cappers economy but that companies like amazon and facebook essentially own the market when we look at how concentrated this power is but are we looking at really in a free speech problem here or is this a capitalism problem you know how to get an important point there the right way has an idea but there should be a perfectly free free market capitalist economy and all that once government intervention would be up the power of those we have neither of those we really have oligarchy that these tech companies have such immense power that they control almost every sector of our lives and i agree their power it has grown so much as to

be unsustainable with helping of obviously there's going to be less work. over iowa but i think this is more complicated than we have. kind of considered so what's happening with gov it conspiracy is killing people and it's a free for all on social media and nobody's controlling it and i don't think we can just let that be because otherwise the tech company would take over our democracy what's happening with certainly some of these crises. in the health crises the environmental crisis the democratic crisis. not doing anything about the. sort of absolute garbage that is being thrown out and people us swallowing it and putting their lives at risk can't carry on i have no answers but i know this con carry on well thank you for your insights this is

a conversation a debate that will continue will continue to track it glenn yes i mean thank you so much for joining me. that is our show this week we'll see you again next week. the protests started cheerfully in front of the x. museum in amsterdam hundreds of protesters got on to demand the government ease lock down with st johns and lift a curfew the 1st in the country since world war 2 this threat is that we loose our freedoms to protesters who are not funneling social distancing rules her repeatedly ordered to disperse by police but police are trying very hard to close friends a scenario that happened last week and thousands were rioting in cities across the nat'l. after some protesters started throwing stones at letting off fireworks

police on horseback moved in to clean the area. when freedom of the press is under threat demonstrators and journalists are dealing with internet outages police intimidation and charges of said dish on the state line becomes the default so media in any way devoted looking for images that that lead to death let it get to these guys and just how did he create a nuisance makes it hard for people to know what's real and what's not step outside the mainstream shift the focus covering the way the news discovered the listening posts on a. they captured the hearts of sounds around the world they did for poland's unlike most of those they full of hard. time put themselves in the minds of something more important than the beautiful game footballing legend every cancer dollar introduces fivefold of players who bucked the trend and stood up for what they believed didn't that's the way. the new season of football rivals coming soon

on al-jazeera. al-jazeera. the. i'm maryam namazie in london our main story this hour medical sources in somalia are saying that at least 20 people have been killed in an explosion in the capital it happened to a restaurant near mogadishu central prison the attack so far has not been claimed by any armed groups but the information we have suggests that 13 people have also been wounded a nearby building also collapsed during the course of rescue efforts it's been a day of violence on the streets of senegal's kaput.