their opening arguments in the trial of a white former police officer accused of killing george floyd. the prosecutor replayed the full nine minutes of video showing the former officer kneeling on mr floyd's neck as he struggled to breathe. brazil's president, jair bolsonaro, has been forced into a major reshuffle of his cabinet, following the resignations of his foreign and defence ministers. the president's popularity has declined sharply, as brazil suffers a second deadly wave of the pandemic, and major delays in the vaccination programme. ships have started sailing through the suez canal again, after the ever given, a giant container vessel that had blocked the channel for almost a week, was freed. rescue tug boats honked their horns in celebration. officials say the backlog will be cleared in around three days. now on bbc news,

world questions. this is the bbc world service. i am amol rajan, and welcome to world questions. this is the programme which brings together questions from the public around the world and puts them to the experts. for this edition, we're looking at information and misinformation. how have the big institutions, governments, health organisations and the media informed and misinformed us about the pandemic? and has the rise of what is sometimes described as fake news, though there are reasons to be cautious about that term, of course, impeded the battle against the spread of covid—19? i'm joined remotely via zoom by a panel of leading journalists, academics, health experts and a representative from one of the big social media companies, who will take questions from members of the public, from all corners of the globe. let me introduce

you to our panel. from new york, zeynep tufekci is with us. she is a technosociologist who has written extensively about covid—19 and won plaudits, both for her analysis of the pandemic and for her work covering the technology giants. zeynep, it's good to see you. also with us is nick pickles, a senior director of public policy strategy and development at twitter. he is in colorado, usa. nick, good to see you. from geneva, we have margaret harris. she is a spokeswoman for the world health organization and has worked all over the world fighting pandemics, including ebola. margaret, good to see you. and from here in the uk, eliot higgins, founder of bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists. eliot, it's good to see you as well. welcome to you all. now, let's go to our first question. and this is from annetta in skopje, macedonia. she works in the air freight business.

over to you. thank you for having me on this bbc panel. it's very nice to meet all of you. my question was how can government, and this means also including medical experts, can offer simpler explanations about the pandemic and about covid—19? because here in my country, we don't have so much official explanation from the government and from the medical experts and from the world health organization, we don't have almost nothing. so, how can governments best offer simple explanations about what's a complex subject to the public? given you addressed the world health organization directly, i think we should go to margaret harris, who was smiling at your question, hopefully a positive smile. margaret, over to you. nice to meet you. i'm really sorry you have not heard anything from us because at the beginning we had daily press conferences and we still have twice—weekly press conferences on this very subject, and also our regional

director, dr kluge, gives weekly press conferences. but perhaps you are saying you wanted to hear the more simple information about what the public can do and what they need to know. and sometimes it is difficult to get that. but i promise you, we've got it, but from what you are saying, we need to do better. so, it's important to hear. thank you, margaret. zeynep tufekci, the question is how can government best offer simple explanations about the virus from official medical experts? i think the best way would be l to provide accurate information about the transmission _ mechanisms and empower people to use their judgment. you cannot really have exact instructions for. every possible setting - somebody will encounter. so what i think the health. organisations like the who or national public health - authorities should do is to go in front of people and explain,

"look, this pathogen - is airborne in this particular- way and this is what it means," so that a person who sees - somebodyjust passing by them without a mask outdoors, they don't need to panic. | that is a fleeting encounter. that's just going to dilute, that's not a big deal. - whereas if you're going into a grocery store - and even if everybody i is wearing a mask, if it's really crowded, that's not the safest environment —| i even if everybody is a few feet i away because it can accumulate. given the, sort of, vast variety of experiences i we all live, the best wayi is to explain mechanisms which empower people rather than rules, which i think can. fail because how can - you predict exactly what we're going to encounter? eliot higgins, the question is how can governments best offer simple explanations about the virus including from the official medical experts? in my experience, using online platforms to see how these things are discussed, it is often these discussions over the language which allow

conspiracy theories and alternatives facts to appear about what is happening. that's very difficult to counter because there are communities that want to find a reason to be angry at the world health organization, don't want to trust doctors, so it's a real challenge. the world health organization has found itself at the front of the communications issue in a world that has changed rapidly over ten years thanks to the internet and the way we communicate with each other. and it's difficult for many organisations to deal with that in normal circumstances, but when you are the middle of a global pandemic, which is one of the biggest crises of the modern era, you then have this kind of internet community that is looking for conspiracy theories and it's very hard to predict how they're going to use these debates that you're having, these legitimate debates and discussions, to push their own agendas. thank you, eliot. nick pickles from twitter. i think as eliot says, one of the biggest challenges we have seen here is you have public health agencies communicating through press conferences with journalists in one way, which is primarily

intended to inform the media. and those same communications devices are also being used to inform the public. and i think one of the big challenges we have seen during covid is really the 20th century communications methods in the information century proven by the internet. and so making that transition has been challenging for some organisations and the big question i think for social media companies is often trying to referee some of the debate we have just heard. we want to allow people to have a debate, to engage on the issues, but at the same time, we are under huge pressure to remove content that may be harmful. and so we are trying to strike that balance between elevating credible content, but also remove content that could be harmful. and often during covid, one of the hardest things for us has been to make a decision about what to remove when the health advice and the scientific community themselves have not aligned on a clear outcome. that makes us the arbiter

of a scientific debate, which is not the role we should be playing. we should be helping people find credible information and the scientific community should be coming to its own conclusions. indeed, as you said, these are incredibly complex calculations involving trade—offs. annetta, what has it been like where you are? do you feel you can you trust the main broadcast media forms of communication there? could you get information from them? yes, you can. - you can get them. but they are not so much . explicit about the situation, about how it is transmitted. nobody is still sure, for- example, that in indoor places, they know that they have - to wear masks, but they don't know exactly how to act. there are many indoor places here, like restaurants, - they are allowed to work. and i visited one, to be - honest, a week ago, i have not been in a whole year, - and i'm entering with a mask and there i see people l who do not wear masks. so who are we kidding?

i'm kidding myself outside to wear a mask where - the possibilities to catch - the virus are less because i'm outside, and when i enter- the restaurant, and you know, i did not know what to do. should i wear the mask, - should i not wear the mask? i think you take us on to the questions basically of who you can trust. and perhaps a question of whether or not you can trust the media, which brings us nicely to our second question. this is huey, a social worker in child protection in lancashire in the north of the uk. hello from beautiful lancashire. my question to the panel is how much responsibility must media outlets accept for initially saying that this was an old people's disease? thus young people worldwide have never protected themselves, thinking that they are safe. so did the media cause ageism and did it make the pandemic worse? do you mind me asking who you're talking

about specifically when you say the media said initially this was an old people disease? well, initially all media reported it. it was many, many months before media, particularly in the west, started to talk about young people being affected by covid—i9. thank you. eliot higgins. do you accept the premise of his question, and what do you think about — broadly speaking — what he calls the mainstream media and its performance? ithink... yeah, overthe initialweeks and months of the crisis, it felt like the messaging coming from the media was changing every single day. and i think part of that may have been informed by a sense of cautiousness about not wanting to feel like they're the ones exaggerating the danger of what is happening. but then again, this comes down to an issue of trust and the trust in the information that you were getting. and if that information's changing on a regular basis

and it seems to contradict what you've heard before, you're going to lose trust in those sources. and i think that becomes very dangerous especially, again, when you have so many people who are looking for the conspiracy behind these kind of things. and it's very damaging. now is that a... i would never really approach this as a question of is the entire media guilty of doing this? maybe you could do a study to see exactly who was saying what and when, but i think it was certainly a pattern i was observing in those early weeks of the crisis. margaret harris, the question is how much responsibility must media outlets aacept for initially saying this was an old people's disease? certainly right from - the start, we were saying and indicating people that anyone could get it. - but the epidemiology did - indicate that the people most likely to get the severe form were older. - this was one of the tricky things about the virus, i everybody could get it, i but the people most likely to get the severe form and most likely to die were older- or had underlying conditions. but i do remember continually trying to emphasise that - a young person could get it,

could get very severely ill. i because, there did seem to be very early on up, oh, well, - it only affects old people sort of attitude. - and i do remember even saying, do not think like this, _ we are all in this and we all. have to take it very seriously. zeynep tufekci. i think media did a lot of things in a way that did not serve the public as well, because it was a hard adjustment for them. i write myself on a more traditional media, so i do have sympathy. but we went from don't worry about it, at least in the us, it's like the flu, it affects older people maybe and don't worry about it, i think, early on, which was almost underplaying it. and then it almost swung the other way at times and it became a young person shaming. there is the other kind of swing where people are constantly, to this day, sharing pictures of beaches and parks and young people

just hanging out outside as if that's a major crisis, which is not correct either. either end of the spectrum is not correct. what i think we need going forward is to try to fund these public health agencies and agencies like the who so they have resources to be really quick and out there. what do you make of what she has just said? do you feel, reflecting on what zeynep tufekci said, that you were let down by the mainstream media? yeah, i do agree that the conflicting information that people were given was very confusing. although i do think that this had a wider argument in society. because i think the media, arguably, were too quick in picking young people against old people. so i think outside the remit of covid, this brought a wider impact on society. rather than bringing people together, it drove people apart.

so i think it impacted the wider society. thank you. let's go to our next question. this is from david moreno, who works in tourism and he is in madrid in spain, good to see you. hi. thank you for having me this evening. - so my question is morel about on a specific thing that happened in spain. during the peak of the first| lockdown here, the spanish government censored taking pictures of an ice rink- that was turned into a morgue. actually, we have very. rarely seen real pictures from inside a hospital. so my question is in this case, do you think censorship - is practical or it just feeds the monster of conspiracy and fake news? so, your question is about censorship, david. about whether or not censorship is justified, whether or not it's practical,

or, as you say, if it just feeds the monster of conspiracies and fake news? i should, i guess, say, eliot higgins, in defence of many governments, it is notjust the spanish government who would be against these sorts of pictures of what's going on inside morgues being shown, lots of people and governments around the country would not want that shown, and lots of media organisations would not allow it to be shown on grounds of decency, basically. but eliot higgins, what do you say to this idea that censorship may be justified or it may end up feeding the monster of conspiracies? i think most often, if you have an image that is then removed from social media platforms or banned from news sites, that will absolutely fuel conspiracy theorists. that is absolutely their bread—and—butter, they love that kind of stuff. they will talk about that for years. because i've seen this happening on a whole range of different topics where stuff is kind of taken off—line or something is deleted, and even if it's not an act of censorship, the perception that something has been removed

will be enough to fuel conspiracy theories and draw more people into it. because then it does look like there is a cover—up. margaret harris from the who. there are times when you would not use photographs but we have strict rules for instance about not identifying children, and about how you would show certain procedures or even the wearing of personal protective equipment, if we have a picture that's not correct we will not use it. so there are reasons for not using particular photographic items. but also i agree with what has been said before about when you remove the thing, we don't even, we would only remove it because of an error or in language, our technical language is difficult and we make it simpler, we actually archive the older stuff because you're quite right. the conspiracy theorists then see the update as meaning that you are doing something very suspicious when all you're doing is actually trying to improve your work. nick pickles at twitter,

you must have in your calculations as whether or not to take down certain content or stop certain content being uploaded the first place and you must reckon with the fact that you would be accused of censorship. is that a trade—off in your mind, whether or not it was worth going through the accusation? well, we have certainly been accused of censorship - in the past and i myself have sat in congress and been. accused of censorship - baselessly by people saying that we make decisions for political reasons. i the reason we introduced labels i was exactly to give the ability. to add more context to a piece| of content without removing it. and that intervention allows us to give people a signal that- says, this image is not what you think it is, i it is perhaps older, | without removing it and fuelling the exact cycle that eliot and i others have outlined. the big challenge is that often and certainly over covid i've . seen the response from any public health agencies - and from governments

in the circumstances, i is to ask the companies to remove the content. | rather than being proactive . in debunking it and explaining to people why it's not happening _ and that is a big change that still has not happened - in communications. look at something like 56, l the endless list of things that 56 has been blamed for at this point is in itself a very- powerful way of explaining that 56 might not be responsible. . and actually unfortunately, when covid happened, - we wanted to signpost credible information_ explaining why 56 was safe, | but there was basically none to point to because governments themselves had never— produced that information. so we need more persuasion - and more education much faster, but content moderation is not going to solve this _ problem alone. that is fascinating. let's go to our final question and this is from priyanka, an accountant in new delhi, and shejoins us now. very good to see you. hi, everyone. my question is about the blurred line that has been created between the opinionated reporting and factual reporting.

how do we make it more obvious so that we are able to eliminate the bias and the facts? and the big question is how do we do that? great question. eliot from bellingcat. you're all about getting to the truth and getting to the facts. the question is how can we limit the bias from facts? if i may paraphrase is how can we make facts fashionable again instead of opinion? i think partly really comes down time and time again for me of having a kind of educated populus who understand how the media works nowadays and it's important, and i don't want to train everyone to be media studies student, that's not what i'm saying. i'm saying we need to have looking at a new way of teaching civics because we are engulfed in media nowadays, it's coming to us from every angle, as we carry on ourselves we can be engage with the media on a device. yet we cannot have a really just have society think about that and from a very early age we are not really addressing the issues

that is raising and i think ofcom were saying 50% of ten—year—olds in the uk have smartphones. so why don't we actually get a way of having a class and maybe not at ten years old, it may be at 16 or 18 years old, but the student example is an organisation setting up pop—up newsrooms in the uk where students are taught how to do investigations, where it is not about turning them into a journalist but about engaging them with a local community. and making them learn that they can actually have an impact in their local community but that also gives him the protection and understanding against misinformation and also against the way of confusing opinion for fact. and i think if we don't do that, especially with this kind of new online communities and societies, then the situation there are just going to get worse and worse and worse because we are not addressing the underlying issues. a fairly pessimistic outlook, but one obviously rooted in your efforts. ofcom is of course the uk broadcast regulator. margaret, the question

from priyanka is how if at all we can eliminate bias from factual reporting? i think again being able - to understand the difference between opinion and fact is critical, but also being| learning how to search for some support for what somebody - is saying, or saying as fact. learning to always check your facts. i one of the glorious things that ijust love is the fact _ that we can search now so easily, and there - are so many things we | have taken as truisms. i remember hearing an academic saying the surgeon general said | in 1968 we can close the book on infectious diseases. - he never said it. if you search, you actually find that it's fascinating i how many have repeated that line and made this a truth - that is not a truth. so we are in an age we've got the ability to check our facts, | i would also look at sources that give you particularly i

in the media several opinions, i so you were hearing from people who don't agree with. you have a better chance - of facts coming when you are given the opportunity to hear from all sides. _ absolutely, nick pickles. i think this is a good example about what the people clear—cut context, will help build trust and one of biggest challenges is newspapers have gone online, the structure of how you are reading a newspaper and the opinion pieces being in a physically different section to news pieces, we have lost that. so i think transparency of the content will build trust and i think that also applies to transparency around the contributors themselves. i think there is long—running debate of people not appreciating that someone giving a comment might have been a political candidate or maybe has received funding from an organisation. so that transparency will build trust and at twitter, for example, we've introduced these labels that we apply on state—affiliated media.

people can see if they're engaging with media that is editorially controlled by government, and that kind of extra context means people can still access information but they also have a little bit more context. but a big part of this still goes back to media responsibility. during the us election, we had a pretty strange case where the opinion page of a paper was being debunked by its own news pages because the opinion piece was so out there on questions of voter fraud. so a big part of this as well is making sure the people who are given the opportunity to share their opinions through opinion pages are also subject to a high standard and high scrutiny by the media organisations themselves. zeynep tufekci, your fellow columnists in america fear that the american attachment to the idea of news is disintegrating and what we have now is instead an obsession with narrative. do you think that priyanka is right to hope that we can eliminate the bias from facts? the reality is i think there is an enormous amount of demand for intelligent, complicated explanations that are not being filled.

i don't mean to say that i'm the only one doing it. there's a lot of great stuff. but two of my most popular articles last year, one was about ventilation, aerosol transmission and what it means, that i published in july of 2020, and the other was about over dispersion, which is how the transmission is concentrated in a few superspreading events, and most people don't transmit. these are very basic important facts about this particular pathogen. and they are both 5,000—6,000 words, they dive into the science, they go against the grain of what everybody will tell you is popular. so i feel like what we need to do is get beyond the simplistic, is this opinion or fact and say we're going to make a case and we are justify it and do

the work and i trust you to give as much information as you want and we are going to link to everything else. so this is like what conspiracy theories do but either bad faith or a wrong way and like what eliot was talking about with we are going win that argument with justifying someone saying we are saying what we are saying rather than... i can see on the side of facts, somebody else will get up and say i'm a scientist and that does not get us out of the problem for any position you want, i will find you an expert with excellent credentials who will make that point. saying listening to the scientists does not solve the problem because they also don't... we need to sort of get beyond who has got facts and say justify what your position is. priyanka, what are your thoughts on your own question? do you have any hope we can eliminate bias from reporting? i think from where i come from, what i feel is that there - is lack of sensitivity— where people don't even realise that all the information that| they are getting is accurate.

the government, also need - to hold individuals accountable to validate something before they go on and share it - for the masses, which is - what i've seen a lot happening during this pandemic. i think that's a wonderful and cheery note on which to end. thank you so much to our esteemed panel, the questioners who have discussed so many important issues, and of course to you for watching wherever you are around the world. goodbye. hello. monday brought us the warmest day of the year so far with temperatures in the southeast at 20.1; celsius, and things will get even warmer over the next few days. so, a lot of warm, sunny weather but not everywhere.

some wet weather holding on across the northwest of scotland, really quite persistent rain there. and then later this week, from around about thursday onwards, things are turning colderfor all of us with the return of some overnight frosts as well. for the here and now, here's the weather front that's slow moving across the northwest of scotland. that's producing further outbreaks of rain, we could see some localised flooding for northern and western parts of the highlands, also for the western isles and the northern isles too. elsewhere, a dry story, quite cloudy for parts of northern ireland, southern scotland and the far north of england. but the could should thin and break up through the day, long spells of warm sunshine further south and light winds too. temperatures up to around 23 degrees across the southeast of england. but above 20 for england and wales, up in the high teens for scotland and for northern ireland. through this evening and overnight, we are going to see that rain persisting again across the western half of scotland, but it will start to edge its way gradually a little bit further south.

temperatures first thing wednesday morning won't be quite as chilly as first thing tuesday morning, so typically between 7—9 celsius. now as we head through tuesday night into wednesday, there is the weather front, which slowly during wednesday morning will start to filter its way a little bit further south. so the rain's continuing across parts of scotland through the day, very slowly, some of it nudging across northern ireland. really, england and wales staying dry once again on wednesday, and with those clear, blue skies, it will be another warm day. very warm in fact for march, between 19—23 celsius once again, but things starting to turn a little bit cooler across scotland and northern ireland too. 11 or 12 celsius here and single figures across the northern half of scotland. that's down to the fact that this weather front is introducing colder air from the north, towards the end of the week, as that slips its way down towards the south, then the blue colours are going to return to the map. so this colder air moving in from an arctic direction, and that is going to feel very different as we head towards good friday and into

the easter weekend as well. so certainly turning colder later this week, some wintry showers possible, but the next few days looking warm for many of us. bye— bye.

welcome to bbc news — my name is mike embley. our top stories. the death that shook the world: a police officer who knelt on george floyd's neck stands trial in minneapolis. both sides lay out their cases. you'll hear it and you'll see at the same time while he is crying out mr chauvin never moves. the knee remains on his neck. sunglasses remain undisturbed on his head and itjust goes on. derek chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do. the use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing. brazil's president, reshuffles his cabinet — as latin america's largest country descends into further covid—induced chaos. freed at last: the giant container ship that's blocked the suez canalfor almost a week — is sailing once again. and — beijing is accused

of using questionable tactics