for that despite 99 year old prince philip perry's grandfather recovering in hospital after heart surgery there are no plans to delay airing the interview behind palace walls the royals are bracing for impact the barker al-jazeera london . time for a quick check of the top stories here saudi arabia has confirmed another attack on its energy facilities by the rebels in yemen the government says a ballistic missile was fired at all facilities and ron earlier a drone hit rust and a report on the world's biggest oil shipping facilities riyadh says there was minimal damage in both attacks but who the rebels say it was much bigger was he learned joey was a out of the artillery and drone divisions were able to conduct a wide offensive in the depths of saudi arabia with 14 drones and 8 ballistic

missiles we targeted around cole in ras outmaneuver a port and other military facilities in the mom more military sites were targeted in a serious design and the strike was precise in equitorial guinea the government says at least 15 people have died in a series of accidental explosions more than 400 people have been injured in the blast at a military base in batter city president theodore obiang says the explosions were caused by mishandling of dynamite people are being urged to donate blood and hospitals in the area overwhelmed the explosions tore apart houses around the base . both sides of claim victory in ivory coast parliamentary election despite polls showing a win for the ruling party the victory would strengthen president alassane ouattara his position he won a 3rd term in the vendor in an election marred by violence. a british iranian woman imprisoned in tehran on spying charges has completed her 5 year sentence gary radcliffe's lawyer says an electronic trucker has been removed from the ankle but

that she now faces another trial the u.s. sect of state has sent a letter to the afghan president outlining outlining for the 1st time the biden administration's strategy for the country several proposals have been made including a revised plan for a 90 day reduction in violence at least 18 people have been killed in to land bomb explosions in the central syrian province of hama dozens more were injured in the blasts the syrian observatory for human rights says the victims were farmers explosives left in fields along roads and in buildings have killed hundreds of civilians in syria's decade long conflict and pope francis has celebrated mass with thousands of worshipers an arab ill in iraq scottish region earlier he met with members of the christian community in kind of course which was one of the towns once held by eisold those were the headlines the news continues on al-jazeera after a statement thanks so much. frank assessments the world is on the brink.

is that a fair assessment catastrophic. white. informed opinion should we be calling ultimately it will be sovereign governments who are buying this that is the direction this is all headed in-depth analysis of the day headlines inside story. 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. trump's impeachment trial and his life long 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 sub stack 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 me an 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 but i tell it 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 it 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 savaged 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 so that's 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. bids a discussion of israeli politics so he the same minister wants free speech of a certain kind but his red line is anti semitism i got it ok 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 a 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 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 prospering facebook to delete palestinian journalists and activists from using their pop form by claiming that their words hurt their words incite violence their words incite entire summit system and that's the problem once you endorse this framework that says authority whether it's a state or corporations or a 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 marginalized 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 through 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 the 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 put it 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 did they not keen on that they want the great digs on please 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 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 in your introduction that you alluded to the fact that people often talk about this as a conservative war against woke the idea that there's this free speech to be going on and somehow conservatives at least have posturing 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 awkward before i was journalist and did a lot of personal cases and if you look at all the major 1st let me free speech case they're protected free speech even of heat groups like you nazis and you take somebody to 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 wing weapon and what i try to say to bill 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 said 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 look 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 about 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 view so we are right for major newspapers and major outlets that's an end 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 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 i 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 incorrect 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 act or size in a way to be liked but ultimately i think will backfire and all kinds of way. you know 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 yeats 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 i just tweet 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 year 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 a time sigs and we will 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 completely that the term is incredibly imprecise you know weigh that up you skates more than a limb an aids and for that reason i rarely use it. so you know i think part of the problem is that my oppenheim's the people who complain about my complaining about it from their own perspective from their own experience and yet those people are very powerful people they're people with big journalistic clout more 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 in 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 a truck driver in california who had a traffic light a made a gesture it was 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 at 50 p. 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 ha ha or dry to speak 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 8. 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 all 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 they're 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 is 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 him to mediate 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 here i understand their feelings but you know what their loads of things i feel i want to say that i don't say 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 government's 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 are you just up to 2000000 people that i don't hurt and that's an easy question to answer but i nonetheless believe but overall it's important and 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 markets to facebook yes you now has the monopoly because it has been set you do have to use pot as 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 yet a market to get an important point there the right way has an idea that 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 carry on i have no answers but i know this can 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. mocked on al-jazeera studio b.

unscripted brings you 2 special guests in called the citation exploring ideas and finding common solutions 10 years on from the tsunami that struck japan al-jazeera revisits the people most affected by the disaster. football rebels eric cantona presents a u.c. reason about iconic players whose influence has been as great off the page as on it's israel's 4th election in 2 years after the unity government's failure to pass the national budget up front smocked lamont hill cuts through the ad lines to challenge conventional wisdom. minds on al-jazeera. levanon is grappling with its worst economic crisis in generations. exasperated by the coronavirus pandemic and that this. one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history shone a light on a nation already in economic and political freefall people in power travels across

the country to find out what's next for the trouble states lebannon the state to collapse on a. saudi arabia's biggest oil port comes under attack from yemen's who the rebels riyadh says the attempt was thwarted with minimal damage. down jordan this is al jazeera from doha also coming up at least 15 people were killed and hundreds injured in equitorial guinea after 4 large explosions at a military base in the city of data. after 5 years in custody british uranium and.