now a stone statue, dating back for the half 1000 years, has been found by a farmer in southern garza. the $22.00 centimeter limestone statute depicts the face of the ancient canaanite deity, anat. it was the goddess of love and war. it was unearthed by a farmer while he was working on his land in hon. eunice, the palestinian authority, say the statue was discovered on what was an important overland trade route. ah, i forget check of the headlines here on al jazeera, the u. n says moscow has agreed in principle to allow it to help with evacuation of civilians on the as of style steel plant and the besieged, ukrainian city of matter. you poll, you and secondly, general antonio terrace met russia's president vladimir putin in moscow. full, a russian president described the situation in matter. you pull as difficult and tragic, but putin also said the brutality had been misled about what's happening there. don't even do to leave it. there are no military actions being conducted in the our

style. steel factory. we heard from the ukranian government that there are civilians inside the compound. in that case, ukrainian military personnel are obliged to let them go. the simple thing is with regards to evacuating those people. mister secretary general, you have been deceived and misled. over a 100000 people have left mary paul. they can go anywhere they want. some people want to go to russia, some to ukraine. more than 40 countries have agreed to meet monthly to discuss arming ukraine. the 1st meeting was held at a u. s. air base in germany. early on tuesday, in a change of policy, berlin says it will now provide key with heavy weapons like tanks with antiaircraft guns. at least 3 people had been killed in russian air strikes and shilling in the city of car keys. another person was killed in a rocket attack on the city of zap regia, last, southeastern city under ukrainian control. russia says it will turn off

a gas to poland and bulgaria on wednesday because they refuse to pay for it. in roubles is the 1st time since the start of the war that russia has made such a move. last month pollutant had warned unfriendly foreign buyers to pay the russians state and gas company in roubles instead of dollars in euro's or gara said it's made alternative arrangements. poland says it's gas storage facilities are 7 to 6 percent. and the u. s. sector of state has warned iran could be in a position to develop a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks that's down from previous assessments of about a year and in a blink and says, a return to the 2015 nuclear deal. the best way to reduce any threat, he also said terran has accelerated its nuclear program in recent years. so those are their headlines. the news continue was he announces era after inside story stage and thanks a lot bye for now. ah

. hill musk is set to take control of twitter. that's one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time. so what will it mean for the future of this popular platform and for freedom of speech, this is inside story. ah hello there and welcome to the program. i'm laura kyle: free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and twitter is it's digital towns square. these are the words of the world's richest man. and now the owner of that town square in our musk

sealed the deal for $44000000000.00. twice as board unanimously agreed to sell to the man promising to promote free speech and transparency. but the future of the company is not yet clear. twitter has been losing value over the past year. and mosque is notorious for trying to silence his critics. the social media take over spark this reaction from the white house. what i can tell you as a general matter, no matter who owns or runs twitter, the president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms. what they have the power they have over everyday lives. as long argued, the tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause he's been a strong supporter, a fundamental reformed to achieve that goal, including reforms to section $230.00 and acting anti trust reforms requiring more transparency and more. and he's encouraged that there's bi partisan interest in congress in terms of what hypothetical policies might happen. i'm just not going to

speak to that as well off of the purchase it on must tweeted yes and said i want to make twitter better than ever by enhancing the products with new features, making algorithms open source to increase trust the feeding the spam bolts and authenticating or humans, twitter has tremendous potential. he said, i look forward to working with the company and the community of uses to unlock its on the move his fault. plenty of reaction, both good and bad as well. some people in new york had to say, i just don't think it would be good if he had all my control and just cuz he's a lot of money doesn't give my up our, i think he'll turn it for the better. houser, or giving people more freedom of speech, maybe bringing my man clock back the twitter. i don't think that that one person should have full control platform. people to have their own voice to be able to see how they feel. he wants to buy or whatever and make it a private company,

but it's like, you already got so much money already. awesome with of why are you messing with like, i'm on food or all the combo. why you've over here bar. would you like to learn on will even if you don't have a twitter account, it is unlikely that you've not heard of it. it's been around for 16 years. it's a platform based on the u. s. from micro blogging and social networking services. it's estimated to have more than 436000000 registered users who post and interact using short messages known as tweets. these uses regular people like you and me also, celebrities, organizations, and governments. they use twitter to reach millions of people in our mosque as an avid theresa with an audience of more than 80000000 followers himself. in 2022, it has annual revenue, reached $3720000000.00 us dollars. it's a relatively small amount compared to other giants life like facebook that made more than $84000000000.00 that same year. ah,

let's bring in our guests now and joining us from london, we have quinn, mchugh, executive director at article 19 from los angeles. we have ramez, schriner, vasa, professor, him information studies at the university of california, and also from london, charles arthur, a journalist, specializing in technology and social media, very warm welcome to all of you quinn. let's start with you. why has twitter accepted ely masks offer when? just a few days ago, the board unanimously agreed not to let the take over go through. i think maybe some of the people who are more inclined on business in the charleston speech that relatively well, it's clear that the offer that was ultimately made and exceeded the share price, where the presence rate such that it was a very attractive big even after the twitter board had put in a poison. tell the toys lee just last week, and any kind of attempts to stay or towards your claim,

that was just an offer that was simply too good for twitter to refuse in the end. well, it's interesting to, to was due to records. it's 1st called results this thursday, and it's not going to do this. so some people feel that with the general or slow down in the world economy, that maybe things was a good actually, this was the best offer actually on the table was easy for them to refuse the offer initially because most didn't have the financing than they were hoping that maybe someone else might turn up to have more money with less. so moshef ross was the $50.00. it must be offering his lesson share processor last year when it was all about $80.00, but it's more than it has been. so that's the sort of thing, where was the best offer around and possibly they didn't see things improving. so yes it's, it's pretty obvious not respect why they took it, they take money, but man, i remish is a loss of money for a business that's been described as wastefully unprofitable. why did it on why is

it almost wanted oh, 1st of all, even musk loves to get into little, you know, battles and turf wars and little, you know, sort of arm wrestling matches on twitter. he really enjoyed being active on twitter . and i also think that it fits within you on mark's ideological portfolio, if you will, right, we see him owning multiple other types of companies. and he's always kind of been this person who likes to be a little bit outlandish in that sort of claims for free speech. and so now he owns a social media wing to his media conglomerate empire. and so for him, it's a major achievement. and twitter, despite not necessarily being profitable, remains extremely influential, especially on media itself, right? reporters all around the world, often source and engage with stories by a twitter or less given the twitter is so influential in society, if it right. but such a powerful tool should be in the hands of just one man. i think it's extremely

problematic, actually not for many, many different reasons. first of all, twitter was already encountering huge issues with algorithmically powered dis information. what i mean by that is content was being targeted to people and going viral that tended to be hateful, conspiratorial, and really kind of grabbing people's attention. so that's not the way any sort of media network should function. there should be some baseline of kind of commonality to what people see. it's really problematic even more so because musk himself has boosted quite widely that he's a free speech absolute strength. so what does that mean? that means in any given society, when we talk about free speech, we should have lots of different kinds of speech be part of the platform. but what we found again and again on twitter and mosque is highly unlikely to do anything about it. is that hateful speech or speech that is intended to grab your attention?

is the content that ends up going viral again and again. so, must have been always against regulation of almost any times and calls himself a free, free speech. absolute is as a private, you know, well, the hyper wealthy person, wealthiest person in the world. this, this recipe is a concoction for even greater problems with big tax takeover of all of our lives around the world. and i want to do everything we can to sort of rain in and balance the playing fields a little bit more. that that's a small aside from that, why is that hate speech so popular on people's news feeds? that's a great question. so the reason why is what is happening with all technology platforms is data is constantly back being gathered about hundreds of other hundreds of billions of people. hundreds of millions of people, excuse me, all around the world. so data around what we look at, how long we look at it, what we tweet, what we comment on, et cetera. this is all fine grained behavioral data. so based on the data that's

been captured about all the time without us really even being aware of it. content is being suggest it based on prediction all based on correlation prediction of what will capture our attention. so the business model of the technology or is to keep us all locked in there all the time. and one thing that gets all of our attention no matter who we are, is crazy or outrageous concepts. so unless that is fundamentally intervened with and mosque has given no signals that that's something he really ultimately cares about, which is an instrument of democracy. some baseline of common understanding are problems continue, but couldn't. how much could that be counted by making the algorithms open source exposing them? so the people have more control over what they see, because that is also something that mask and said he wants to do. i think we need to be clear what we're talking about when we talk about algorithm transparency,

which is something our organization has called for numerous other people have as well they're, they the transparency of what the algorithm is itself. but then there's also transparency in terms of how it actually operates, just having the code out there doesn't necessarily tell you about the various things that are going on. so one way of making companies more festival is making more of the code out there for people to look at to evaluate and otherwise. but as, as i mentioned, saying the fundamental problem is the attention of economy. and that is what drives the business model of this company and much more successful companies, the twitter, if you look at facebook and youtube, and it's that the fundamental business model is centralized control over what we see and what we do, what we interact with in a few small, howard companies for charles is what ill mosque is wanting to do with twitter? is it realistic means given very few details,

new details on how he proposes to reduce censorship. we don't even know if he can sort of expose this algorithm. how would that work? is there something that he's actually going to see happen? what he says when quite contradictory is talked about things like getting rid of bots, but at the same time being a free speech absolute us, but utter of all free speech. so where's the line there? similarly, you know, are you going to allow terrorist videos? are you going to allow child sexual abuse material? obviously not. so your free speech atlas. absolutism clearly has a line and the question is, where does it draw the line? and i think that's the complicated part that, that you know, it's very easy to talk about these things, the conferences, but actually when you're running the company, some sort of question, i think that the, the point, the remission cannabis made about the hour was, is interesting. actually, if you were to remove the algorithm that amplifies content of amplifiers outrage,

which is the thing that we pay attention to, then you have a sort of a strict back a twitter $1.00, which is much more just about what people are saying rather than things being thrust that you to gain your interest because that's what get advertising in front of you. and if twitter doesn't necessarily have to survive on advertising, then it might be able to take on a different sort of character. but he's given no clues about that. he's made vague noises about subscriptions, but then he was to change the character of twitter that way, but that could actually have a big impact both on that is this information and on the attention economy, is it quinn? describe it, do you think people will still want to use it having a, as human beings, we do tend to be drawn towards that sort of dramatic speech. if it's not very, if it doesn't exist, what's the point in using it? we won't be entertained as well. as the mentally personally, i never see any twitter ads, and i don't get the algorithmic twitter feed because i use a 3rd party called tweet book. and it only gets the sort of chronological timeline

. and though, and so in that sense, i'm getting the truth of it, but it used to be a must possibly could be. so, you know, this is totally possible and i use it all the time because i'm a journalist as from a sent in a journal. so drawn to it because that's where you find news, where to quickly find sources you find information. when he has said that he would allow the laws of each individual country to govern the free speech or, or predict, or dick determine what free speech is allowed. but how does that work when twitter is a global entity, and there are so many different countries for so many different laws. i think you 0 then on this one to be a fundamental problem to the idea of really enforcing what we consider the global international norms on freedom of expression. which is at present time, according to your own research question, globally that it will this level in 20 years. and this is increasingly driven by

laws passed at the national level that restricts significantly severely what global media companies like twitter, facebook, and others are allowed to do, or that gives company or gives government huge control over the kind of content, whether it's through data localization laws, requiring companies, the whole data and all of their users in the country within the country, whether it's things like landing. so for example, requiring companies to have local offices in country. we then get the government's a form of pressure. man influence over what's being done because staff can be held hostage. so the global picture becomes much more complex when you take into account the different laws and the fact that actually democracy is lowest in 20 to 30 years . that being incredibly complex to find places where that view of freedom of expression is supported, as he may think it ramos, we heard that from the white house that biden is concerned about. such

concentrations of power in social media companies. that was the fact that they went to, they didn't comment specifically on this case, but what can government do about it? i mean, how can they police this sort of takeover even if they wanted to? right. and i think we're, we're headed to potentially and very problematically, will be this false choice between a free speech absolute as a private hyper. well, the guy who basically kind of says, let, let, let the wild furs go and the backlash is going to be a censorship. kind of model by a lot of restrictive and sort of authoritative governments and states and, and this is going to end up being a really problematic flash point because the real issue should be governing these platforms. not so, not solely in their private accumulative profit and valuation driven interest, but in a democratic interest. right. and so here in the united states,

i have several colleagues connected to the administration and also people i work with in congress. and there's widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo we have seen very little in terms of actual action either taken by the federal trade commission, the federal communications commission, or on a congressional level, despite this widespread kind of discontent. and i think the reason why is because the biggest lobbyist in democratic administrations and to some extent and republican administrations despite sort of high profile, you know, flash points like little controversies, aren't the big tech companies. we should no longer think about big technology companies as simply social media or simply technology companies are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world. when our military budget gets expanded under the byte in administration to record levels, many of those contracts go to technology companies, right? so they've taken over every aspect of our lives by monetizing our attention by grabbing our data and by basically taking our anxieties and emotions as their raw

materials for a new, expansive immersive form of digital capitalism. so we need to think about what people need in their actual interest, right? what a real free speech looks like in balance with a free media or really need to think about those issues. so people can be uplifted along with these companies as well, and does how concerning, didn't find it that all of that power that ramishes has been talking about, at least in twitters concern, is now in the hands of one man. my home in social media in the for facebook is in effect in hands amongst gra, google is effectively held by surgeon and larry page because they have all the voting stock. so here we're very much in a situation where you have an incredible concentration of power and, and the u. s. congress because they're american companies, struggles to find ways to regulate these companies because it's not quite sure what

it is that it wants to do or not do it not to be bad, but it doesn't know quite how to do that without turn tripping all over the 1st memo, which of course stops, there's government from impeding what companies can say in effect, what citizens can say. there's possibly more movement on in europe because of the digital market track. and the digital services act, which may have some sort of leverage over these companies. but that remains to be seen, i think that'll sort of become bit clearer in the next couple of years. but again, the question becomes one of all, if they, if the company is withdraw their services and they say, well, we're not gonna, they're not gonna show up in france, germany, italy, or ever do the government's cave in because the citizens to mon, the services, all 2 other services spring up, it's difficult to say, let's not forget, of course, that governments use the services themselves. i mean, governments use twitter to release their policies. i mean, it's, don't forget that trump was hugely successful, largely on the back of his tweets reporting. them all the time at 3 am here it out

. is there what chance do you think trump might get his account back? well, i think considering that he almost himself has talked about restoring the account. i think it's a fairly significant likelihood. and while i may be living in britain right now, i do remember the very problematic days of yourself that recording constantly the tweet coming from donald trump. and at the very moment when that there was the significance of insurrection planned, an attempt to overthrow view of the election orchestrated by donald trump. i think we need to take seriously that, that the real risk politically and for democracy in the united states and not be due to the each one of the, one of the, the powers of freedom of expression is leveling between the powerful and the power less. and one of the things that we're concerned with because of deal on my own experiences,

is that he's actually more concerned about ensuring that those are already powerful . don't find their voices constrained. and when actually the attention should be placed on those who are not in positions of power and ensuring they're not driven all the forms where they have the same kind of access as those who are billionaires . but if people do want to leave twitter, they can do you think we will see a lot of people leaving the platform? quin it's very difficult to say one of the things i think we need to taken into account is globally. twitter actually is not one of the largest tech companies. twitter has an audience about 43440000000 as you said, you know, just taking into accounts, apps that are just strictly messenger out. like what that net has over 2000000000 use. telegram a much smaller was his 550000000. we put a lot of emphasis on twitter because it is really important for the media and

therefore content on twitter get amplified and cross over into mainstream media a lot more, but never leave the potential for innovation to this. i think charles mentioned that media platforms are constrains other services will jump up to take their place on a problematic said. we've already seen this happen in china where the large western social media companies are effectively band or out right down. and yeah, there's a very vibrant, very centered social media environment that's there. so i do think that if somehow twitter does disappear or becomes a less hospitable place for people to be, that there will be alternatives that arise. charles can must walk this tight rope. of course a new leaders but also uses but also stopping defects and a holier many things are possible. and as we said that there he, he has had successes with building electric vehicle company and has le billing

reusable space on the space x. and this is a, this is a different game because this is dealing with humans and the very, very way that humans behave. i mean, it can be done. i mean, we haven't mentioned the financials of this yet, which, which are tricky because he needs at least a $1000000000.00 a year to repay just the interest on his dad's put has never come close to generating that sort of money. so he's going to have to find some sort of new business model for it really in order to make it thrive. and everyone agrees the twitter has an almost value, but they can't quite see how to unlock it. advertising clearly isn't the way to do it, but if it was to make it a sort of a backbone, almost as communications backbone for the world, then you could see that there's an enormous value, as you said, you know, to, to wild leaders to people with huge celebrity followings, or why would they not want to pay a certain amount of money in order to be able to make their voices heard and possibly that's a white ford so that you can in effect,

you pay for your spring free speech. it might sound like a contradiction, but i'm sure that he be very happy with that. as i mentioned either he says he wants to unlock and twist as tremendous potential. what is that potential deal? thank. well, the potential is for it to be being disposable and indispensable tool for us all to communicate with one another, you know, much like what basically facebook slash matters. portfolio has really taken that over. so i think his real goal would be to unlock twitter to be the absolute tool that we use to connect with one another and also just sort of learn about the wider world. the problem is the wider world as being presented to us is not an open public sphere, right? in any public sphere, there are of course, going to be some hateful voices or some people who are saying things that are just not true. the problem is, is on twitter much like on facebook, which of, as you all pointed out, dominates sort of the global south in the global kind of marketplace on a lot of levels. especially to include instagram and what's up in their portfolio.

and the problem is, is that content, the content that they are fueling to us again and again, and again, is the content designed to grab our eyeball. so they're going to have to explore different kinds of business models that perhaps maybe more rooted in a certain kind of humanity, ray, in all of our choices. and i do want to make the point, despite the potential challenges in making the funds to pay off this debt mosque is the wealthiest person in the history of the world. he's made a huge amount of wealth during the pandemic. as have all the tax, you know, billionaires approaching trillion, they've double their well in many cases and reinstating the former presidents onto twitter will be an incredibly effective success in terms of supporting must interest to grow and build up the platform and have it boom. even more because the former president was a central node on twitter himself. he was a central note because of his messaging, often outrageous and pulse contents, which went viral all the time. certainly some interesting times i had to move,

i have to say on twitter to see what happens. many thanks for you for joining us today. could mccue romesha should it should have ethan and charles arthur and thank you to for watching. you can see the program again any time by visiting our website this al jazeera dot com. and for further discussion do go to our facebook page, does facebook dot com forward slash ha inside story and yes we are on twitter. handle is add a j inside story from me laura kyle and the whole team here in doha is good bye for now. ah

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a community facing environmental and cultural change. out is there a well joined the regulars on board techies, shin kaya bus analogies, emer, ah, hello, i'm darren jordan and go have a quick reminder. the top stories here now to 0. the un says moscow has agreed in principle to allow it to help with the evacuation of civilians and as of style steel plot the besieged ukrainian city of mario pope, the un secret general antonio quoterush met russians. president barnett putin in moscow for the russian president, described the situation in matter. you bull as difficult and tragic, but putin also said that cottage had been misled about what's happening that needed you to be there are no military actions being can.