winter fuel payments. time for the weather. hello there. there was a lot of cloud around on saturday for northern and western areas. the best of the sunshine was further east — and part two of the weekend looks pretty similar. we start dry with lots of sunshine, and then the cloud amounts will tend to build up into the afternoon, producing just one or two showers. now the azores highs continuing to nudge northwards across much of england, wales, northern ireland. so, light winds here, but fresher across scotland. it will remain breezy throughout the day here. we start off with plenty of sunshine after that fresh start, and then clouds will tend to build up into the afternoon. it could turn quite grey in a few places. the odd shower likely for western scotland, maybe western hills of england and wales. otherwise it's mostly dry, up to 25 celsius in the southeast, the high teens further north. sunday night, we do it all again, the clouds tend to melt away for many, and the clear skies, it'll turn quite fresh again with temperatures of 8—12 celsius. now, some changes taking place to start the new week. the first of a series of low pressure systems will work its way

in to the country during the day. so we start off with plenty of sunshine, but the clouds will tend to build in the west, and it'll turn wet and windy through the day. some pretty heavy and persistent rain for northern ireland, and it will turn windy with gales, perhaps around some irish sea coasts, but lighter winds again in towards the southeast, where it will stay dry and sunny all day. so temperatures responding, up to 25 celsius or so — that's the high teens further north and west, picking up a little bit more humidity as well from the south. and then monday night, that area of low pressure and its weather fronts crosses the country. it stays quite breezy into tuesday, with the low sitting to the north of scotland, and that will bring a day of sunshine and showers, some of them will be heavy and thundery, particularly in the north and west, some of them merging together to produce longer spells of rain for western scotland. temperatures down a touch, i think 22—23 celsius will be the high, mid to high teens further north. mid—to—high teens further north. and then we look out to the atlantic, this next area of low pressure contains the remnants of what was hurricane ernesto. and that potentially could bring quite a lot of rainfall to the north

west of the uk around the middle part of the week, certainly so for western scotland. but further south and east, it will tend to stay dry, i think, with some sunny spells, and it will turn increasingly humid as we pick up these south—westerly winds. stays pretty unsettled for the end of the week across more northern and western areas. a better chance of staying drier towards the southeast. this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour which is straight after this programme. i'm katie razzall. this week, how is elon musk getting involved in politics, and what impact will it have on x? plus, a masterclass in sports commentary from an olympics broadcaster.

it's all coming up on the media show. in recent weeks, parts of the uk have seen violent riots fuelled by misinformation online and anti—immigration sentiment. hello. good evening. the prime minister has condemned the violent disorder that's been seen in a number of english towns and cities today and over the last six days since the murder of three young girls in southport on monday. sir keir starmer, speaking from numberten, described the violence as far—right thuggery. he said those involved would be swiftly brought to justice, and the home office announced that mosques are to be offered greater protection. some rioters have since been sentenced using evidence from social media accounts. to explain how this worked, i'm joined by nazir afzal, former chief crown prosecutor for the north west of england. the internet is a force for good, but it's also on this

occasion a crime scene. and so you've mentioned social media. yes, there's an enormous number of platforms. the ones we know about, there are others. there are messaging apps, there are people who've been whatsapping each other and groups have been broken into, or people from within the group have shared what the content of those messages are. there are forums and discussion boards, you must know of reddit and lichan and a few others. there's livestreaming platforms, there's video, photo—sharing platforms, there's email correspondence, there's blogs, there's crowdfunding platforms. i mean, you're giving us the impression that it is a lot, a lot to trawl through. presumably... i mean, i mentioned that you were chief prosecutor the last time the uk faced rioting on this scale. is it a huge amount more material this time than it would have been back then? oh, yeah. it's stratospherically more. um, we had... back in 2011, we had fewer smartphones. now we have many more smartphones and fewer smart people, because what they've been doing undoubtedly is filming themselves committing crimes,

sharing that with others and sharing other people's commission of crimes too. there's an extraordinary amount of material, which is why i constantly keep saying about the riots, that this prosecution, this investigation will have a very long tail. it will be many months in some cases for the material to be properly analysed. and you could be on a beach nextjuly before you get a knock on the door. although they're getting to a lot of them pretty fast. oh, they are. yeah. could ijust bring up the question of civil liberties issues? because accessing this level of data on the activities of private individuals, are there civil liberties questions involved? well, undoubtedly there are. and i think you'll hear from lorna in a moment about some of the internet law that applies to this. there undoubtedly are. but of course, fighting crime is an exception to many of our...any of our rights that we may have got, for example, from the european convention. so, um, that's what they're doing.

they're fighting crime, and they have to do so in a proportionate way. as i said, there is an enormous amount of material. they are focusing on those where there's real threat of harm, or serious harm, has already occurred. those are the cases they're dealing with now. in due course, i imagine there'll be others who are less serious that will come into the window of police investigation. but are you saying essentially, you know, you can take a day off from civil liberties? is that what you're suggesting? no, no, your civil liberties apply, and undoubtedly you'll get a fair trial if you are brought before a court, and you'll have your legal representatives arguing whether or not the investigation was appropriate and whether the evidence amounts to a crime. so, um, you know, absolutely not. you will get, and you do have rights, undoubtedly, and they'll be applied. and prosecutors...you know, i always used to say the prosecutors are the best human rights lawyers, because they have to remember that they're simply there to present the best cases, but they have to be fair to both the suspect and the other witness in the case.

0k. so that's the evidence side of things, how it's being gathered. but the courts are also using the new online safety act. that was legislation that aims to protect against harmful content, and they're using that to prosecute alleged misbehaviour online. that act came into effect injanuary, only partially for now, but some people are describing what's happening right now as its first significant test. so, nazir, it was already possible, wasn't it, to prosecute people for online activity in cases of incitement, for example. but what did the online safety act add? well, i think the thing that people are most excited about, or most critical of, is the legislation that says if you put a false communication out there that causes harm or threaten people, that causes harm, that that actually will be a crime. what it does, as you say, the malicious communications act has been in place, computer misuse act being in place, it gives another level of... ..another tool, and that's all it is, to policing. as you say, i think in the seven

months that the law has been in place, i think it's only been actively used in the last few days, really. we've had the prosecution of the... talking about two—tier policing. the first person prosecuted under the false communication was actually somebody that made up a story about the far right. so, um, the reality is, um, it's there, it's available to them. i'm not entirely sure they will use it as frequently as people think they will, because there are other tools in the box. you mentioned the incitement offences, the fact that racial hatred, you know, violence, all of those things are available to them. and i imagine that's what they will go to as their first port of call. and we did speak last week, in fact, to a journalist from the times about one of the cases, one of the people involved in this prosecution, using the online safety act, as it turns out. that reporter had tracked down a woman alleged to be the first person to wrongly identify the southport attacker as a muslim immigrant. she was arrested on suspicion of an online safety act offence and one other offence. and my understanding is the online

safety legislation applies when a person knows what they post to be false. but she did include the caveat words "if this is true" in her post. so i wonder what you make of that. well, i mean this... when you've got new legislation, katie, it'll be tested in the court. there are lots of occasions, and there are others on this programme that will say the same thing, that generally we often post something, we know what we're posting. we put a question mark on the end, as if somehow that means we're not actually saying what we're really saying. so this is something that will undoubtedly be looked at in great detail, whether or not simply saying is this true or whatever it is to actually... means that you're not saying that it is true. so, you know, the english language is quite clever in this regard and it makes it more difficult. but as i said, this is new legislation. it will be tested. and i have no doubt that that particular question will be answered. and just give us another couple of examples, if you've got them, of the kinds of people being prosecuted right now using that act after these riots.

so i mentioned that the young man, the man in derby, there was no disorder in derby that night. he was livestreaming that he was running from the far right, running for his life from the far right, which he knew to be a lie. he was then prosecuted under that and, actually, he was convicted and pleaded guilty and has gone to jail for three months for what he says was a joke, but unfortunately, it wasn't seen as a joke by others. and there are others that are outstanding, which is why i can't go into great detail about them. but as i said, we've literally scratched the surface. there are tens and thousands of messages out there which will have to be examined in some detail. 0k. well, thanks, nazir. you mentioned lorna. lorna is an academic whose thinking on issues of online safety actually helped bring this legislation about under the last government. lorna woods, she's professor of internet law at the university of essex. and lorna, you're also here on the media show. so thank you very much for that.

hello. just your original idea, i think you said you wrote it on the back of a sandwich wrapper. what was it? the sandwich was cranberry and brie. delicious. yeah. it was an idea sparked by the government's internet safety green paper, which was autumn 2017, and it had identified a whole host of problems on the internet, but had sort of come to a dead end because it was looking at how you could make social media platforms liable for the content of their users, if you like, using a traditional media publisher model, which really doesn't fit what they do. so my idea was to say, well, are they like a quasi public space, and to take the health and safety at work act as a model.

and that requires employers, people controlling public spaces, to look at the architecture, the fittings, the environment, and try and remove obvious dangers to safety, obvious hazards. and it's become increasingly apparent over the last ten years that the choice architecture on the platforms do affect how people behave. so the idea was, i suppose, essentially product safety to test the features, to look at how the system was running, to resource customer complaints. that's content moderation, effectively. but the act, the act we've got, did it get anywhere close to what you were suggesting? um, yes and no. um, yes, in the sense

that the act requires services to be safe by design. and it does look at the features and the functionalities of the services. but the act is also very focused on content and talking about the harm created by the content, which is not so much a good description, say, of content that on its own may not be a problem, but content, once it goes viral or repeated, becomes a problem. so in terms of linking to content and also the act distinguishes between different sorts of content, that makes it quite complex and puts a sort of prior question in place, which is, what sort of content are we looking for? rather than just looking at how the systems and the functionalities are operating.

0k. so essentially you wanted to focus on the fundamental structures of the platforms, the algorithms, rather than worrying about the posts of individuals. but that's actually where the legislation has ended up. is that right? yes. and so, therefore, i guess i should ask you, what do you make of the way it's being interpreted now, when it comes to the prosecutions after the riots? well, i think in some instances, i mean, first thing to say, these duties... so while the criminal offences that we were talking about earlier are in force, the duties on the services aren't yet in force because they required further guidance from the regulator ofcom. and although ofcom has moved quite fast on this, the fact is, they're still consulting on what the format of the codes

and the guidance will look like. so if the law was fully in place "ow, properly in place, if ofcom had, not got its act together, because it takes time, but you know what i mean, could the riots have been stopped sooner? i mean, might they not have happened at all? how do you view that? well, i don't think we can blame the riots entirely on social media, but i think that, um, if platforms had got better systems in place, perhaps introduced triage mechanisms, uh, perhaps invested more in moderation tools, um, then things would have been better, i think certainly at the more severe end, where we are talking, uh, say incitement, the stirring—up offences, those sorts of clear—cut uh, criminal, um, matters. i think it's much more problematic when we are talking about the misinformation.

for example, the people who were spreading the rumour that the attacker in southport was an immigrant, was a muslim, and sort of linking that all to a particular community, that sort of content is much more difficult. the oblique content is more difficult to classify directly as criminal content. and the reason that's important is because companies will only have obligations as regards adults, that is, um, for criminal content. and i think that's why the offence, the false communications offence is going to be significant in that regard. 0k. i was just going to say the mayor of london, sadiq khan,

has said he doesn't think this legislation is fit for purpose. the government has now said it's going to review the legislation. what do you hope will come out of that? well, i think there are possibly, uh, some gaps. so, how do we think about content, um, in the phraseology that was being used when the bill went through about content harmful to adults, and that is the content that is sub—criminal. but if it were on another major public platform, for example, broadcasting, would probably be regulated. i think we need to have a look at how we tackle that, especially where you have got accounts with very large followings, or accounts that are, if you like, um, aping the get—up and behaviours of traditional media. 0k. just one question for you, um, before we move on, which is,

we're going to discuss later elon musk�*s latest forays into politics. but he's had a lot to say about the riots. and bruce daisley, a former senior executive at twitter, said on monday that the uk should issue an arrest warrant if musk�*s keep stirring unrest, as he put it. are there any powers in the online safety bill to do something like that, to prosecute foreign entities, or even ban x in the uk? well, ithink, um, prosecuting is subject...outside the jurisdiction is only possible in very limited circumstances. there are powers, however, to block services. there are a series of powers in the act called business disruption measures. the first type addresses what's called ancillary services. so, advertising or payment services.

and the regulator ofcom can go to the court and say, "this company is not complying. "won't comply. will never comply. "can we have an order to tell these ancillary services "to stop doing business?" if that doesn't work, ofcom can go to the court and actually ask for the service to be blocked. right. 0k. lorna woods, thank you very much. and nazir afzal. you may have seen elon musk�*s interview on x with donald trump, but what impact will the tech billionaire�*s political views and his content moderation policies have on the social media platform? i spoke to lara o'reilly from business insider and began by asking her about that interview. yeah, it didn't get off to the best start in that it took 42 minutes for the live stream to actually begin. musk said that there had been some sort of cyber attack where bad actors had kind of tried to flood the platform with traffic, and that had sent it going haywire. we haven't got any evidence that that was the case, but, clearly,

as the kamala harris campaign pointed out, it's 2024 and this is a platform that still can't run a live stream, unfortunately. and it was just audio. not video, just audio. why are musk�*s activities apparently scaring advertisers off the platform? is that what's going on? i mean, yeah, where to begin? i mean, as soon as musk came in, he made a big deal of cutting about... we're up to about 75, 80% of its staff. so that includes the people that keep the platform safe. it includes the people that grease the wheels with advertisers and make sure that the campaigns are running and that money is coming in. also, at the same time, they've reinstated accounts that were previously banned, the likes of tommy robinson, andrew tate and others. and anyone who's experienced x recently, might have noticed lots of bots, lots of strange crypto scams accounts. all in all, it seems like a risky place for most advertisers to want to spend their cash. but they're going to now take legal action against them. just explain how they could possibly do that. yeah, so essentially,

bear with me on this one because it's a bit of an alphabet soup, but there is an advertising industry trade body called the world federation of advertisers, and it consists of some of the world's biggest brands and accounts for about 90% of all the biggest spending on digital platforms. and trade bodies, pretty innocuous things, they get together, they have meetings, they talk about making the industry better. and in 2019, what the world federation of advertisers did was it formed this initiative called the global alliance for responsible media, and it was formed in the wake of the christchurch shootings in new zealand. so if you remember, this was a horrific act of terrorism, and the perpetrator livestreamed it on facebook, and it opened up this huge conversation about what are advertisers doing, not only appearing next to this content or adjacent to it, but effectively monetising it. so the idea was to create this initiative to help advertisers steer themselves away from this content and defund things like hate speech.

so that was that, 2019, all very vanilla, all very innocuous. but then last year, what happened was a conservative—led group in the housejudiciary committee began looking into garm looking into whether, um, their activities had suppressed conservative media and causing a boycott of conservative media and suppressing their views because they were losing out on advertising revenue. and that investigation led to the x lawsuit about this illegal collusion. 0k. so, if it's illegal collusion, then it's illegal, right? so they say! if a group of companies conspire to say starve another company of revenue, that is illegal. but equally, people might say, but isn't it fair enough if advertisers don't want to use a platform, they shouldn't have to? yes, so if you're on that side, in the us, you have a thing called the first amendment, which is all about your right to free speech. advertisers do have a choice commercially and under the first amendment to advertise where they want and also not to advertise where they want. and a lot of advertisers choose where to advertise based

on where their audience is — x's audience has apparently plummeted — and on the platforms that are performing, and x doesn't necessarily perform well for them, compared to something like google or facebook. well, that begs the question in the end, does it matterfor x? can the platform make money in other ways, through subscriptions, for example? it's a private company. can muskjust bankroll it if he wants to, from his personal billions? he's already done that, i suppose. so technically, yes, they could try other things. the issue is that advertising made up 90% of x's advertising revenue. so everything that they've tried so far is a drop in the ocean to make up what they've lost. so they have tried subscriptions. they've got a new ai agent called grok, so they could license data to other llms, to train their data on that. they've tried all sorts of kind of like... ..you could pay to be verified. nothing is going to make up the billions that they have lost through lost advertising revenue. there we go. lara o'reilly, thanks so much for coming in. the olympics has given us 19 days of tv gold, and a key part of the viewing experience has been the expert live commentary from the sports broadcasters. andrew cotter is one of the bbc�*s finest. he tells us about his approach to commentating

on the closing ceremony. both the ceremonies in france were very, very difficult. usually, for the opening ceremony, you get a full rehearsal to watch in the stadium, but because it wasn't done in the stadium, it was impossible. we didn't know... there was a real deficit of information and they apologised afterwards for that. so that was very difficult because things came up on screen and you were saying, "what on earth is going on here?" sometimes that's nice, to have the natural reaction to that. the closing ceremony, there's... i was going to say it's a storyboard, but it's not because it's far more vague than that. it willjust say, "this section is about this, and a golden man "will come down from the sky." "and, oh, by the way, don't talk over this, we suggest." so hazel and i took the decision, well, if we don't talk, people are going to be utterly confused. so a lot of broadcasters didn't talk at all over the closing ceremony. so we decided that it would need a little bit further explanation, but i think the french theatre director behind it was quite precious and protective of it. you know, it was his brainchild, but it was... yeah, it is a huge challenge. that's the best way to describe it.

but again, you want to try and be entertaining without going too far. yes. so i was going to say, i wanted to know about the art of commentary because, you know, viewers really take to yourjokes and your sense of humour. but how do you approach humour in your commentary? is it performance? and how do you develop your own unique tone of voice that you have? ithink... i like the idea that it's... i suppose it is an art, you know, everything is an art, isn't it? and so i suppose commentary is an art. so, um, i think you try and be yourself. if you try and fall into the cliche of not just phraseology, but the cliche of how one thinks one should sound, then you'll end up sounding like partridge, and it all becomes a bit sort of formulaic and similar. and oh, this is a sports commentary, you can hear, they sound like a sports broadcaster. whereas the best ones... i had john murray on the radio, who's the football correspondent and commentator.

brilliant. that'sjust him. that'sjust him amped up to, you know, commentary levels. but he still maintains his identity. so i think people who know me would know that i am a little bit, um, not world weary, but a little bit sort of... you observe things with a certain detachment and you don't... not everything is dramatic and amazing and fantastic in sport. so, occasionally, you have these moments which are ridiculous and silly, or moments which are boring. and that's why the dramatic moments stand out. so you've got to, i think, become a little bit detached from it, is the best advice i could offer. and i'm sure, you wouldn't be now, no—one would dare to now, but have you ever been told to tone down your sarcasm and wit in your sports commentating? no, i don't think so, no, i haven't... oh, good. no, there's very little feedback given. and i don't mean that in a negative way. you know, ithink, for a lot of people who are coming in as ex—sportspeople to commentate, they're given a lot of broadcasting advice. but i think if you... the way that the bbc works

and i work for a lot of other organisations as well, the way most of them work is, the way they tell you you've done a good enoughjob is you get invited back the next week. i think it's fairly obvious everyone should have their own inner control of the safety valve, of knowing what not to say. even though i don't have any legal training, you're very well aware of what is going to cause offence, so you just keep the right side of that line, hopefully. and we've got less than a minute left, but i've got to ask you, because you went viral during lockdown for commentating on your dogs, olive and mabel. where did the inspiration come from and did you script them or did you record it on the hoof? oh, no, they were recorded on the hoof. but then i'd perhaps change things up afterwards because i thought that didn't quite work there. so, um, the commentary ones were the... the later ones became quite. . . productions. but, no, it came from an idea from a sort of 19905 big train sketch where they were... they had barry davies, the great barry davies commentating

on the world staring championships. so it was the idea that something very trivial and mundane or silly was given the sports commentary treatment. but then i stopped commentating quite quickly on my dogs early on in lockdown, because you cannot be parody for ever. if you carry on doing parody, then that is what you are, a parody commentator, and you know you've got to go back to do wimbledon or the six nations or the olympics at some point. so i enjoyed it and they enjoyed it. they're just the other side of that door, waiting to get in. but, no, iwon't be commentating on them again. ok, you work on the principle less is more, or keep people wanting more, anyway. thank you so much, andrew cotter, for coming on the media show. that's it for today. ros will be back next week. thanks for your company. goodbye. and if you'd like to hear a longer version of today's show, search bbc the media show wherever you get your bbc podcasts.

live from washington, this is bbc news. an israeli team says it is cautiously optimistic about gaza ceasefire talks — while hamas describes suggestions of progress as an illusion. opposition supporters rally across venezuela against the president's claim he won last month's election. and two cases of mpox are found outside of africa — in pakistan and sweden — as fears grow of a wider outbreak. hello, i'm carl nasman. israel says it's killed two senior hamas militants in an air strike on their car, in the occupied west bank on saturday. israeli officials claim the militants were involved in the killing of an israeli in thejordan valley. tensions continue to rise between hezbollah and israel. hezbollah has fired more than 50 rockets into northern