our top story: tyhoon mangkhut batters china's most populous province of guangdong, after wreaking havoc in the philippines and hong kong. at least 2.5 million people have been moved out of the typhoon‘s path. in nearby hainan province, chinese authorities have cancelled flights and closed all coastal resorts and schools. the authorities in the us state of north carolina are warning of a rising risk to life, after record amounts of rainfall were dropped by storm florence. and this story is popular at bbc.com: a five—year study claims there is no benefit to healthy elderly people taking aspirin to help guard against heart attack or strokes. it says it could actually increase their risk of potentially fatal internal bleeding or cancer. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, newsbeat debates. walk down any street in the uk today and people will have their heads down looking at their phones.

chances are a fair few of them will be on the world's biggest social media platform, facebook. carnaby street is a busy place in central london and is no different. but here today are some of the top bosses responsible for the content that people are scrolling through. it has been a tough year in the news for facebook, but this is a rare opportunity to put a face to the platform and ask the questions that you want answered. hello, my name is steffan powell. and joining me in central london are some listeners to bbc radio one and 1xtra's newsbeat. facebook has invited us in to this public space ahead of their it's your facebook weekend. we have selected the audience and nobody from facebook has seen

any of the questions that we are going to be asking tonight. everyone with us here has got something to say, or some issues to raise, so let's go to them briefly. duncan, what do you want to find out tonight? for me, if you're going to watch my browsing habits, and market relevant products to me then that's a good thing but how much do you really know about us and who else knows that information? 0k, thank you, duncan. what about you 7 i take my online privacy extremely seriously. i would like to know how much control do i truly have over my data on facebook. thank you very much. to answer these and many other questions are some experts from facebook itself. why don't you introduce yourselves? thank you, my name isjessie de la merced and i work at facebook with the teams that build our products. so the features, all the updates, the buttons in our apps. for example, things like facebook watch that we rolled out recently. i'm richard allan, i'm on the global public policy team at facebook, which means that governments anywhere around the world, if they have issues they want to raise with the company, they come to me and my team and we try to work with them to resolve the challenges

they've brought to us. i am steve hatch and i run our business here in the uk and that includes working with the advertisers that use facebook to market. and i am julie de bailliencourt and my team works on keeping people safe on facebook, so typically working through challenges like bullying and harassment. 0k, thank you very much, guys. now, let's begin. steve, what are we doing here? well, first off, thank you for coming, and this is part of a number of days where we have this space here, which is it's your facebook, that people can come in and ask questions and understand some of the things that we know are uppermost of people's mind. like, we are really aware that as technology has become a bigger part of people's lives and facebook is a big part of that, that raises a lot of questions, sometimes about the good things that people are experiencing in social media that they would like us to do better with, in the way we produce our apps and products. but also about some of the challenges and some of the bad things that we want to hear directly from. so, we want to make sure that we're

part of that debate and that's one of the reasons why we're here today. the other reason is we're always trying to make things better, always trying to improve the products that we make for you and i have no doubt that over the next few days and over the next 45 minutes, you're going to give us some things that we can take back to facebook and hopefully make it even better than it is right now. 0k, thank you very much, steve. right, let's get to it. we're going to start tonight by talking about the data which facebook has about you. who wants to get us started on that issue? hi, my first question of the night is facebook stores and actively uses facial biometric data of users without our explicit consent. and ijust want to know why there is not an option to opt out of that, why sometimes we get a pop—up saying this might be you on a photo, maybe not everybody wants that. that is a great question. again, one of the things that we want to do is to try and explain where we think there's a misunderstanding and this is one of those areas. to be very, very clear, in the european union, of which the uk is still a part, if you are a facebook user, then the biometric use, the use of your biometric data is absolutely optional.

so you will have been shown a screen saying do you want this turned on, and we will only have turned it on if you agreed on that screen. if you have, then you now have that feature, which we actually we think is useful. we think most people do want to know when someone uploads a photo of them. but we absolutely respect the fact that you should have a choice over that. so you get to choose to turn it on and at anytime you want to, if you turn off, we delete the biometric profile and we won't use any more. people want more and more control and i think tonight a number of you will ask us for more and more control, so we build more and more controls and they feel it has got too complicated, so we simplify it again and then they say i have not got enough control. so it's a real challenge. we are trying to get it right. we try and make it both powerful and simple, and that's a really tough challenge. but it's one that is on us.

and if you feel it is too complicated and you give us that feedback, as steve was saying, that is exactly the kind of feedback that we can take back to the engineers, the people who design this stuff and i say try and achieve that magic point where it is powerful and simple. we have had, this is one of the big issues that has come up in the lead up to this debate, we have had a question in who said, is it fully properly possible to delete all of your facebook data? yes. so, again, to be very clear, if people want to stop using facebook, and we hope that's not the case but we understand that people may want to make that choice, there are two things that you can do. first, you can decide that you just want to take some time out of facebook, so you can say i want to deactivate my account. when you do that, it means all the data is still there but nobody else can see it. so it's not visible to anyone, but if you come back, it's there as it was before, you don't have to rebuild it all. if you, on the other hand, decide you never want to come back to facebook, there is an option to say delete my data.

and if you do push the button and say you want to delete it, we wait a couple of weeks to make sure that you really do want to delete the data, it wasn't someone leaning over on your computer and pushing the delete button and deleting the entirety of your social life, so we wait a little bit of time and check. but if you say to us, you confirm you really want to delete that data, then we will take it off our servers. let's go back to the audience. i think naomi wants to speak on this one. hi, my name is naomi and i am 26 and from london. i've reduced my use of facebook since about 2016 due to concerns over privacy. the terms of service or terms of use, i found them to be quite convoluted and inaccessible. so ijust wanted to know why do you need all of this data and what does it mean? so, again, some of the data, in fact most of the data you put on facebook is just part of the normal use of the service. the whole point of the service is that you're going to be sharing photos and status updates and things that you're sharing with your friends. so with a social network, perhaps unlike other parts of the internet, the data is an integral part of the service. we can't do it if there's not some data there. so that is really

the primary reason. but i do want to say and i think this came up in introduction, as duncan asked, what have you got? we have a tool called access your information, which you can search on there, and that will show you literally everything that we have. ok, let's go back into the audience. what do you guys think about what you've heard? hi, i'm pete from wales. wales is a big place, peter. it is a big place, i'm currently in cardiff, if you must know. now i don't mind my data being used for reasons like we've mentioned. but data is a huge new resource comparable to gold, oil. i've done economics so i've seen the sort of data implications. i don't mind it being used but i do mind it being misused. mark zuckerberg said that facebook will be for fixed in terms of data misuse in 2019. but given the current political climate, there may be a general election, sorry, theresa may, or a referendum before then, what assurances can you give us that this data misuse will not happen again if there is a vote soon rather than later? thank you. i think back to me again. so there is a huge amount of work

that's been going on since the stories came out, which i'm sure you are all familiar with, a company that took data that they shouldn't have had and used it in political campaigning in the united states. so we are absolutely determined to stop those methods and we believe... let's just be clear, we're talking about cambridge analytica. yes, cambridge analytica is the company. and they are actually now out of business, but companies like them, we've tried to make sure that they can't do again what happened then. it shouldn't have happened, we've said it shouldn't have happened and we have tried to make sure that that kind of data collection is not possible. that is one piece of the equation and mark has got the whole company, he's a very strong chief executive who says to the company,

i need you to focus on this and we do. so he is really driving that hard. hi, i am from north london and i wanted to know how much accountability is facebook willing to take for posts that perhaps shouldn't be publicised? there doesn't seem to be much filter in what we are able to see if you compare it to instagram, where it has quite a good algorithm, what i see is what i'm actually interested in seeing. thanks for your question. i think we're always looking to create new tools and new things that will make sure you have a comfortable and nice experience on facebook. so instagram launched those specific filters that you were talking about, facebook is slightly different but we're always looking to see what we can do to make when you come and connect with your friends and family your experience as enjoyable as possible. and i think we do this through two ways as well. one is we use a lot of technology, artificial intelligence, some really exciting stuff to make sure that a lot of bad content or inappropriate content never even gets seen by anybody. the second thing is if you see something on facebook that you think shouldn't be there because it's abusive, it's inappropriate, it makes you feel uncomfortable, i do not know if you know, but you can report this to us. so there's a little reporting button beside pretty much every piece

of content on the site. and when you do that, it gets to our team, they review it with 24 hours, we remove it, and you're delighted, hopefully. we've said that this year we will go from 10,000 people working on that content review world to 20,000 and working on preventing harms. julie and i have grown up with the company and that's an order of magnitude greater than we used to have. it's not everything, it's notjust about throwing people at it, but i hope you take that as a sign of how seriously we take this. i want to be clear, we're on a journey and we don't think thejob is done. i don't want anyone to take the impression we think it's done. so both in terms of making that reporting system work as people would expect it to, that's something that we are constantly improving, but also in terms of our policies. again, i want to be very clear sometimes we get it wrong, we write a policy with a good intention. so for example, we might want people to be able to share awareness of animal cruelty so we allow a certain amount of content because people have said it's really important you can see what's happening in this

farm or some place. and then we find other people use that policy or slip through that policy to publish animal cruelty material that people don't like. we have a team, and julie is part of this, that meets every week, understanding the kind of complaints that have been raised and refining the policy to try and get them as close as we can. we want you to enjoy the service and if you are coming to the service and seeing content that you do not like, that's not great for us. so we really are on that mission but we totally accept that it is a journey, we're accelerating but there is quite a lot of ground still to make up. 0k, we have a finite amount of time so we'll have to move on from that topic now and talk about our next theme tonight and that is going to be all about trust. something that we have touched upon a little bit already. we are going to go back to that. how can users trust the decisions that facebook makes about the content that we see on the platform? and who's going to kick us off on this one? hi there, my name is tom.

do you as facebook see it as your responsibility to control fake news accounts and where does the line draw between fake news and satirical news? i see quite a lot of satirical news, but should the reader understand the difference themselves or is it up to facebook to control the content that gets out there? when it comes to the spread of kind of misinformation, as we call it, i think where we work is with particular the third—party fact checkers, so we looked at independent voices to verify things. if something's flagged as being in question, we also make sure that there will be times when we directly take things out from the feed. it's clear that that needs to be removed. but there'd often be times where people mightjust get something wrong and if there's a sense that a piece content is just wrong, then we downgrade what's called the kind of ranking in the feed. simply put, it means people fewer would see that if people think it is in doubt or it's disputed more than those things that people are more comfortable with and believe. so that's the system working there. a really complex...

yes, i was going to say if i can build on that, if you choose to follow a satirical page, for example, you probably know it's satirical. you're saying i find you funny, i want to see this in my feed. it's when you share that and i see it as your friend and i do not know the source that it becomes a bit more problematic because i think it is factual when actually you know it is a joke but i do not. so we do not want to take stuff off the site because hopefully you were enjoying the satire that you are reading. but we do want to, in the instance that steve talked about, make sure that it's not spreading into what is causing misinformation and confusion. so that's why we take the approach of not taking it off but making sure it reduces distribution so that you can keep enjoying it, but if it has been flagged as potentially false, it is not going viral. how responsible is facebook to have healthy political debate on the platform? the people are sharing ideas and thoughts but not spreading misinformation. whose responsibility is that? is it yours or is it the users? i think as a...

it's shared. we are very clear that the platform we're trying to build is one that builds healthy communities. i hope everybody in this room believes that elections should be conducted in a free and fair way. and as a platform, we have a responsibility to support those healthy communities and that healthy debate. it is hard. we all know we're living in time where political debates have become very polarised. and so people will do get very angry with each other and they don't like what other people are saying and one side will say the other side's views are fake news, and the other side will say the other side's views are fake news. so, that's a really difficult environment. but within that, i think as steve and jessie have described, we are trying to make sure that we don't amplify that division or amplify those stories while still allowing people to express themselves. some of the comments that have been coming in, this is a comment from andy who is mentioning something richard said earlier on about facebook

being on a 12 yearjourney, sort of working these things out, suggesting that it isn't working. jennifer is also suggesting that facebook‘s been running for so long that these issues should have been ironed out long ago. why is it taking so long? surely it's no surprise that people are having political discussions on facebook, steve, before an election or referendum or whatever. that's what it's there for, so why are we still asking these questions all this time later? thank you for that. the context of a journey as well is that often we're dealing with things that have never happened before. and, in a way, the focus that we've got is how do we respond to these things when they come through? of course, we have teams of people that are focused on preventing bad things from happening in advance, but often when we have the connected nature that we have of our platform, we can't always predict what is going to happen in advance so we have to respond to them. we're sort of hearing loud and clear that we need to do a much betterjob of helping people to inform in a really clear and simple way how to use those systems.

i've spent a lot of time dealing with advertising and our approach to advertising is that you should be in control of those ads and it's interesting already to hear that already people are saying, i like seeing relevant ads, i don't like seeing irrelevant ads. so that means we've got a system. also... sorry. it's ok. at the top of every single ad in facebook there is three little dots and if you press on that, you will be able to see why am i seeing that ad? so i did thatjust as i came, it was a credit card. it said because this campaign is targeting people in the uk 25—64. it's bringing in those little nudges, those little ways of being able to help you to be better informed where we weren't in a position to do that at that time. and now we really are and we're really ramping that up. shall we head back to the audience, what do we think? hi, i'm jordan from birmingham. we have seen social media impact things like brexit and the recent general election and obviously soon to be a general election. my younger brother is 18 years old and in the next upcoming election he's going to be able to vote for the first time. how are you going to ensure that what he sees on facebook is going to allow him to have a fair

and balanced opinion when it comes to him voting for the first time? so there's a few things here. one is that your newsfeed is full of the posts from friends, family or pages that you have chosen to follow. that's sort of the fundamental underlying way that it works. so if you've chosen to be friends with me, for example, you'll see my posts. if you're not friends with me, you shouldn't see my posts. so, in that way you sort of build up what you personally want in yourfeed. we think that's important that people have that ability to decide what they see. within that, there are lots of things we can do around helping to make sure people aren't seeing misinformation in the area that we were talking about earlier, or to try and get them to see other types of information that they might be interested in. so, for example, we have a unit called related articles where when you read an article and you come back, we pop it underneath and what we do is try to fill that unit with either if we've got a fact check piece on the piece that you've read, or other things about that topic that are coming from a spectrum of different outlets so that you can see another opinion on it.

let's move on now to our next topic of the night and this is one that the nhs estimates that one in six adults in the uk have symptoms of a common mental health disorder and a group of mps at westminster is currently carrying out an inquiry into the impact of social media and screen use on young people's health. we are going to talk a little bit about mental health. who from the audience wants to start us off here? hi, i am connor and 23 and my question is what can facebook do to support those affected by online bullying and hate speech, etc? i don't think not enough has been done, as a result, a lot of people, especially people i know have ultimately committed suicide over it. so i want to know what is facebook's response to that? thanks, connor. that is a topic that we care very much about and we have been working on those type of issues for at least over 12 years.

i think there is number of things that can be done here. one is our ability to understand what's happening on the platform. so, for example, if someone was posting from a fake account, they have created a fake account and their intent is to bully another person, to get this fake account off the platform really quickly. that is one of the things we can do. the other one is our artificial intelligence that is able to detect hate speech, for example. we're not quite there yet. it's difficult but we are publishing numbers every six months where we show how much progress we are making in identifying this really quickly. i think the tricky thing about bullying is that it is very nuanced. so you may know somebody in your circle of friends who is harassing you and they're posting nice comments on your facebook but you and them know exactly what it means. we don't. so the rules that we have created when people report potentially bullying content to us is to really trust your gut and what you're telling us to remove this content from the platform.

if anybody who's watching this or on the feed who is being bullied or suffering from harassing comments, please report these to us. you can report something anonymously in literally five clicks. our teams are ready to look at your report and they will get the comments off the platform, they will get the bullies off the platform. and what we're suggesting you do is to reach out to expert organisations like childline, like childnet who can actually help tackle this in the real world because we can remove the piece of content really quickly, it doesn't solve the issue of it happening in school or in the workplace. a lot of the people that are messaging in are suggesting that there should be more proactive work from facebook to help find those links and they hear words like please report it, let us know, but they get frustrated because they feel they are doing that and they are not getting the answers that they feel like they need. do you recognise people's frustrations? i understand people's frustration and i speak to a lot of teens and parents and teachers throughout the week and i get this. i think what richard mentioned is that we are very much... this safety element is at the core of everything we do. we want to make sure we get things right and improve and having worked

at the company for over eight years now, i have seen the massive progress that has been done on the tools side, on the support side. please report to us. your signals are very, very important, particularly when it comes to bullying. it is so nuanced that we need you to tell us, hey, i don't like this. so, last question, i will turn to you, steve. would you ever consider banning people who overuse facebook, who are on there for hours every day? similar to what gambling firms have done with problem gamblers. was that something that you would consider doing in order to help protect the mental health of your users? i think the first step in this is awareness and some of the tools thatjessie alluded to, they'll also be a time when just not using social media at all is going to be a good thing. from what we seen, facebookers might correct me in this, but sometimes some of that long usage can be from people that that is their connection with the world and it can be incredibly helpful to them. so time spent is not a metric that we spend time thinking about in facebook.

we don't design products to encourage more time, but i do think we do need a broader debate as a society about use of screens and that's many of the things that richard's talked about. thank you very much. so just one more comment from the audience. and we're going to go over here, thank you very much. i am rebecca from liverpool. i am a med tech. millions of people freely post their personal information on facebook every day. when we think about mental health and the burden and the pressures on health care in the uk, especially, what can facebook do with analytics and the data that you have to actually create a healthier population and exciting things in the future? this is one of the areas that we do want to work in, we've seen people, for example, already using banks of photos to be able to pick up particular conditions. if you work in med tech, you'll understand artificial intelligence, machine learning, a lot of that depends on being able

to see millions of photos of people's eyes and you can start to spot those who have a particular condition of the retina. so, that kind of usage is great. there are huge privacy implications, and we want to make sure we get that right. so i think you will see conversations which i hope are very open and honest conversations around the ethics of the use of data, where i think health applications actually most people will say i am very comfortable if i trust that person to use data in a health application. very sensitive but i think as you point out, potentially this is one of the areas of the greatest benefit, that we turn this data into something that actually helps all of us stay healthier for longer. thank you to all our newsbeat listeners for coming along and thank you to richard, steve, jessie and julie from facebook for your time as well. and before we go, there is just time to say, since we're talking about facebook, you have to go on bbc newsbeat‘s page and check out all our great content and while you are there, give us a like as well. and, for now, goodbye.

hello. there is some turbulent weather in the forecast over the next few days and it is mainly down to this area of cloud. it is the remnants of what was hurricane helene, it is no longer a hurricane, but embedded in this is a lot of tropical energy. what that will do is strengthen the winds over the coming days. you see this area of low pressure tracking it's way northwards to western part of the uk, the squeeze in the isobars means there will be strong winds, gales and heavy rain, but also ahead of it is drawing up some very warm, tropical air and that will extend all the way northwards into parts of northern ireland and southern scotland over the next few days. yes, it is going to be windy. there will be gales at times, some spells of heavy rain, particularly the further

north and west you are, further south and east, dry and warm as well. here is how monday pans out. further outbreaks of rain across western parts of scotland becoming heavy and more persistent as it works it's way north and eastwards, some of that rain affecting northern ireland, the wind starting to strengthen. across england and wales, aside from one or two showers, most will have a mainly dry day, some spells of sunshine, often cloudy, but feeling warm for many, temperatures between 19 and 23 celsius, 2a or 25 for east anglia and south—east england. as we go from monday night into tuesday, our area of low pressure works its way northwards across western parts of the uk, notice that squeeze in the isobars will bring strong winds, likely to see gales through irish sea and western coasts, some heavy rain as well, particularly for northern ireland and some of that extending into northern parts of wales, northern england and into scotland. a blustery start to tuesday, these are the wind gusts, the average speeds will be somewhat lower, but it is a windy day for all of us on tuesday and even though the winds do lose some of their strength, we will pick up strong gust particularly for western coasts. could be some rain around for northern parts of scotland, showers for northern ireland, northern england down into wales.

again, further south and east it stays mainly dry and it could be quite warm for many, 19 to 23 celsius, perhaps a degree or so higher across south—east england. our area of low pressure is in the north of the uk, but on its southern flank we have some very strong winds. we could see gusts of 60 or 70 mph across parts of northern england, southern parts of scotland on wednesday. so it's a windy day. heavy spells of rain across northern england, northern ireland and parts of scotland, still very little rain further south and east, where it again it will stay fairly warm. some unsettled conditions over the next few days. i'm sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines: deadly tyhoon mangkhut batters china's most populous province of guangdong, after wreaking havoc in the philippines and hong kong.

from bitter enemies to political allies. malaysia's anwar ibrahim tells me why he is building bridges with prime minister mahathir mohamad. yeah, but then we decided, look, the conditions have changed, and we have to work together. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: in britain, salisbury is in lockdown after two people were taken ill in the area recently hit by novichok poisonings. my body is a canvas. we will hear from a south korean artist who uses her own face to express her talent.