the headlines: the heads of brazil's army, navy and air force have resigned, as president bolsonaro struggles to contain a crisis over his leadership — and the worsening pandemic. earlier this week, mr bolsonaro was forced to reshuffle his cabinet, after his foreign and defence ministers both resigned. a witness has told the trial of the white police officer accused of killing george floyd that what he saw amounted to murder. on the second day of the trial of derek chauvin in minneapolis, the court also heard from a teenager who filmed mr floyd being pinned down for more than nine minutes. germany is to suspend the use of the astrazeneca vaccine for the under—60s after further concerns about its safety. 31 cases of a rare type of blood clot have been reported among more than 2.7 million vaccinations given so far. most of the cases involved women under 60.

now, understanding the options and decisions of scientists and politicians has never been more important. amol rajan isjoined by experts and members of the public in 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. 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, of course, 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. so, 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? yes. given you addressed the world health organization directly, i think we should go to margaret harris, who was smiling at your question, hopefully it's a positive smile. margaret, over to you. nice to meet you.

i'm very 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 say, 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 judgement. you can't really have exact. instructions for every possible

setting somebody will encounter. i 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 such - 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? i mean, 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 to the facts to appear about what is happening. and that's very difficult to counter because there are communities that want to find a reason to be angry at the world health organization, that 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're the middle of a global pandemic, which is just 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 these legitimate 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've seen during covid is really the 20th century communications methods in the information century driven by the internet. and so making that transition has been challenging for some organisations and the big question i think for social media companies 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're under huge pressure to remove content that may be harmful. and so we're 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. and 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 say, 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 but they don't know exactly how to act. i 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 to the 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 lancashirem which is 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 you 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 about the media's 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 consciousness 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 was how much responsibility must media outlets accept for initially saying this was an old people's disease? certainly right from the startl 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, _ this is — we are all in this and we all have to take l it very seriously. zeynep tufekci. so, 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. again, i write myself on 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's another 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 zeynep 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, please. this is from david moreno, who works in tourism and he's in madrid in spain, good to see you. hi. thank you for having me this evening. - so my question is more - about on a specific thing that happened in spain. during the peak of the firstl 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 its practical,

or, as you say, if itjust 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.

if one single image... 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. 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 we 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, l it is perhaps older, | without removing it and fuelling the exact cycle that eliot and others have i otlined. 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 - and debunking it and explaining to people why it's not happening. i 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 . new 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. 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? how do we go about it? 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 populace 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 the 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 16 or 18—year—olds but the student view example is an organisation setting up pop—up newsrooms in the uk where students are taught how to do investigations but 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 it will in 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. thank you for that. much of it. ofcom is of course the uk

broadcast regulator. margaret, the question from priyanka is how if at all we can eliminate the 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 truism. | i'm 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 to if he will 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 sourcesl that give you the particularly land the media several opinions, | so you were hearing from people who don't agree with.

you have a better chance - of facts coming when you were given the opportunityl 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 the organisation. so that transparency will build trust and at twitter, for example, we've introduced

these labels that we apply on state—run media. people can see if they're engaging with media that is editorially controlled by government, and that kind of extra context means the 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 an 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 to opinion pages are also subject to a high standard and high scrutiny by the media organisations themselves. thank you. 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 is an obsession with narrative. do you think that priyanka is right to hope that we can eliminate the bias from facts?

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 5000—6000 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 just to 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 with 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 istening to the scientists does not solve we need to sort of get beyond who has got facts and sayjustify what your position is. thank you. 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. we need to make, apart from -

media houses and 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. the uk saw some exceptional warmth on tuesday, and if your day ended looking something

like this with a sunset with a pinkish tinge, you were not mistaken. that is saharan dust affecting the way our skies look from the sahara to import the warmth. it's travelled across western europe, and on tuesday, it made its way right the way into the north of scotland, that warm air. the warmest spot was at 24.5 celsius and that was at kew gardens in west london. there is the possibility on wednesday we could see a similar high, somewhere probably across central or eastern england but a little bit more cloud as possible, there could be the odd light shower and that could just peg the temperatures back by a degree or so, but still very warm for england and wales. further to the north though, a front beginning to push south across scotland and northern ireland, weakening as it does so, it won't bring too much in the way of rain. it's drier for western scotland but cooler air moves in to the north and then, that weakening weather front and the cooler air continue to try and make theirjourney south as we look to thursday. basically, the front nothing

more than cloud by thursday, but the colder air already starting to make itself felt out to the north and east of the uk. the high pressure will keep things pretty quiet as we head into the easter weekend. largely light winds, a lot of fine weather, but the big difference will be where you have the sunshine it won't feel anywhere near as warm as it has done on tuesday particularly if you, for example, compare aberdeen from tuesday where temperatures got up to 18 celsius. we'll be lucky to get eight on thursday. still, 18 or 19 possible though across south wales and the south—west of england. by friday, that colder air though has worked its way further westwards. we could see some quite stubborn cloud across eastern counties of england as well and quite a chilly northerly or north—easterly breeze. i say "chilly". the temperatures, well, about where we'd expect them for the time of year. look out for a frost particularly to the north on friday night. easter weekend, it stays chilly but look at this for easter monday. it is a plunge of arctic air,

raw—feeling air, strong northerly winds, and this is the weather chart at the moment for easter monday. it may change a little but that signal is pretty clear there. there is a risk of snow showers, even a good way south, across the uk at the end of the easter weekend.

a very warm welcome to bbc news. my name is mike embley. our top stories: president bolsonaro faces a growing crisis over his leadership in brazil as the commanders of his armed forces resign, and the pandemic gets worse. eyewitnesses at derek chauvin�*s trial describe what they saw and did when the former police officer pressed his knee into george floyd's neck. that is correct. i called the police on the police. and why did you do that? because i believe i witnessed a murder. protests against the coup in myanmar are being met with increasing force — the military is reported to have killed more than 500 people in less than two months. young activists in the cities of myanmar are now learning