tory demonstrators have staged a 2nd day of protests in iran to honor the victims of the downed ukrainian plane adipose the government's handling of the crash protests erupted after the head of the air force accepted full responsibility for the downing of the jet. coming up next social networks have become the world's next battlefields are they better promoting freedom or fake news i'm exposing thanks for watching. because time to take one step further and face the. time to search the. fund for the troops. time to overcome downturns and such. it's time for g.w.

. is coming up ahead. in our hyperconnected world social platforms such as twitter facebook telegram and what's up have revolutionized the way we communicate and disseminate information to society. it's estimated that more than 5000000000 people have mobile devices more than half of these are small they have a camera and internet connection millions of text images and videos on a daily basis through social media making it difficult to distinguish between real and false content the battle for control of the truth has just begun. information warfare is a weapon and a very dangerous weapon if i see a piece of content i have an emotional response to it takes less than a 2nd for me to share the consequence of a very very dangerous. coverage of the scientists in which untruths have legal

meaning. how is fake news created how does that affect society and what impact does it have on states the mainstream media social media and governments are under scrutiny and are being called upon to stem the rising tide of disinflation. real responsibility now to be very careful very transparent to keep trust with their audience in companies have a strong responsibility in terms of making sure that their part forms are being used to the summit hates or propaganda the risk of governments regulating social media is that they will regulate something that we don't fully understand. these platforms pose challenges created opportunities society has been empowered everyone with a mobile phone can step into the role of citizen journalist and share in real time

what is happening anywhere on the planet through social media. social media appearing in our lives we realize that maybe enabled us to gather in the streets and make revolutions we saw how twitter a key role in communicating to the world what was happening during the elections and the police brutality that we saw. marseilles a big city of europe we are a very brutal society with a democrat the book i have a lot of visitors every year so we are an open minded society and for the 1st time in many years on october the 1st of 2017 our government asked the people to waltz in

a referendum just to say if the citizens want to be gumming defend them from spain or not it was like yes or not this confronted with a party of spain. that called out that referendum was illegal. and. the courts gave the order to the spanish police is under civil war to avoid barbara for and they have to they go for the old boxes on the beepers that court say that they have to avoid the referendum but without bias started wars and.

the 1st october i was here in london i was intrigued to see what was going to happen but i did not expect. that it would be a big international news event until suddenly at some point the morning someone sends me a message for what's on and so turn on the t.v. and you'll be amazed at what is happening in catalina i went to this program this is like a big schooling barcelona when i arrived there 'd there was about 200 people more or less many of us did no job and we had to organize through words up and i remember that the people called we are people of beeves we are people of peace. it would have been very very difficult to organized. the voting that took place.

without. social media and without the instant means of mass communication between people books the internet provides social networks are facilitating the logistics that are necessary to organize collective action not only because they make their the fusion of information cheaper and easier but also because they facilitate coordination when protests take place on the streets. they were sitting on the floor peacefully trying to avoid confiscating the ballot boxes. suddenly the police arrived and we could not believe what was happening just what's that there was no damage to us or official government i was there i'll take myself on and i'll just start to record.

in countries where citizens lag fundamental democratic freedoms like iran or china social media play a fundamental role. that these names or tell our information that would ensue kill 8 through more traditional means like mainstream media to flow in reach people that wouldn't have been exposed to that information in the absence of those networks social media platforms are. nowadays so all the opportunities of social media platforms have brought us are mainly to find that they have given voice to all those people that 'd have them boys before and i'm not the only one talking about non-democratic regimes where people go through social media they kind of spread information but i'm also talking about them cutting systems how people

can organize collective action on social media platforms when the bullies and read to the school the violence was extreme i'm sure that without doubt the viewer no one could believe that was happening in that school so that's why i decided to recall that didio. it's as if the spanish government went into this day all government all the spanish police the civil guard just unaware of the times in which we live that

forgotten that every person with a mobile phone with a camera on it is a potential journalist and in a we're not living in an age when there's just half a dozen t.v. cameras. oh maybe in the same place but everywhere where there was voting going on good people watching after that they went out of the school and i just decided to spread that b. the o. and i just send it to all my contacts like groups on whatsapp friends all the people who were here in that school and it was amazing because after about 10 minutes that the same be the 0 came back to me in about 6 different sources so friends family and different people just gave give that video back to me it was like whoa that's pretty great fast. social networks were enabled

citizens to communicate what was happening in real time and half of the world the whole world was able to follow bands of october 1st and catalonia almost as they were happening and this was something that in catalonia hadn't happened at this scale before i shared a video on twitter and after 10 minutes julian assigned we could leaks due to meet that b.t.o. so it was amazing. it was about 400-500-6000 extension 0 words weeks in about one hour or 2 hours spanish government officials asked receipts to at least if i got the same day's different media like i just b.b.c. or c.n.n. use it to explain what was happening in the dialogue. just keep it simple so thank. goodness knows what the images.

social media i wouldn't say social media are the new weapon the weapon really is the message and. the target for social change social media weapon to the extent that they help those messages be visible and they help people's self organize and coordinate and and in a lot of action that will make demands more visible in the public spotlight. sandra gonzalez by lawn teaches at the prestigious annenberg school for communication in philadelphia her research topics include how social networks

facilitate political mobilization and communication among citizens the close is discussing recent examples these video that i'm showing you on the screen is an example of content that is published in social media that goes vita very quickly this footage which was sticking with a phone was taken over by big media outlets and it was shown internationally a lot of people any allowed the message that the referendum was trying to convey to go global with my. face have trying to. specialists. because. on the streets but sometimes people just. protests it's a social media i think well firstly because i'm doing little research but that is

the role of the syrians or. it's. part of the sort of citizen journalism and i happen by the way it is not a social. conflict history. favor that correctly so it's often used to show injury of the war and that report is can get but still make the subject to a lot of issues that more energy has whether it's propaganda or whether it's showing that it's happening in this so it's interesting how socially a lot of people to sort of self report or. what we saw was that the people now. now. powerful tools at their disposal that war for the 1st time not controlled by their governments and that they could use

these tools not only to you know organize themselves among the population but then also to disseminate this news in images and video to the rest of the world the arab spring was really one of the most is really one of the most prominent examples of social media amplifying a message that would otherwise have remained very local in constrain. 2 facilitated. paling out the project is on an international scale entreating these phenomenon of fan page and even though again contagion here is just a metaphor about eating spiers out a movement in out of political context to arise partly because these movements emulated the use of digital technologies to amplify a political message. that i didn't. go into a friend to place in 2017. 100 percent of the people were connected to the internet with cell phones and access to broadband what's up in the direction it's huge and

got alone and everybody was well aware of how important technology and the technological infrastructures were for the referendum whereas it in the springs. but additions some days were of the 15 percent and some down just as libya were 5 percent i recall and not all the people were connected. to these 2 examples of the arab spring and the cuts in a referendum are very different in many different ways. there are many such illogic of different cities in the context from where these movements arise but they obviously share in common a lot of things as well and in particular they have in common they use of digital networks and digital technologies to spread their message so. i wouldn't say that there is a direct relationship between social movements and this information what happens is

that one social media here in our lives it enables people to gather in the streets and make revolutions throughout the whole world but it also empowered people to make this information about this trucks democracy on the one hand the internet has been used to hold very powerful interests accountable to rally the citizens through the public square in order to demand their rights to film and disseminate clear abuses of power by governments and on the other hand it's been used by more malevolent actors in order to subvert the democratic process by manipulating online discussions by smearing journalists. silencing prominent opposition voices on social media in the last 10 years there have been nice huge societal shifts we've had the global financial crisis that we

still haven't understood the implications we've seen climate change we've seen huge migration trends we see people losing their jobs because of all to mission people are feeling much more vulnerable than ever before and so when people are feeling vulnerable they become tribal and when people become tribal it's about them. and that's what misinformation takes advantage of. you not going to get your question about your fake. ass tricks ass tricks ass tricks. the term has become weaponized is being used by politicians around the world as a way of undermining a free press which is critical to any democracy we never make reference to fake

news and we talk about this information for several weeks of the 1st of all it's because. this information that we're consuming has never meant to be news and therefore we shouldn't call it that the 2nd reason is because we're not so sure what it means so we that leads to some confusion and it's actually being weaponized somehow by politicians and the 3rd reason is because when we talk about news we imagine a specific format and when we talk about this information we need to include images videos means adios to understand the whole problem. by 2022 more fake news will be read on the internet than real news organizations such as 1st draft in the united states which is headed by clear wardle provide journalists and citizens with methods to detect dissin formation and fight against it. so as humans we have an emotional relationship to information academics and journalists we like to pretend that people have

a rational relationship to information but that's not true the types of information that we share on social media are the types of informations that make us happy or sad or cry or make us feel connected to others the visual content plays a crucial role in triggered in this kind of channel reaction. that we call contagion it triggers a very visceral emotional response certain images certain videos make it more likely that people would share news and information because their emotional response to that content is stronger and there is a correlation between the emotional response to content and then your decision to participate in the chain reaction or joined by a companion or or simply to transmit that information.

if people isp reading information and that's scaling up it is possible that they're spreading misinformation and that scaling up in ways that it wouldn't have done before so we've always had misinformation it's not something new we are beginning to understand some things about misinformation which are worrying i mean if people are exposed to misinformation and even after that told it you know misinformation they are. carrying on believing it then if seen it the university of oxford is home to the prestigious reuters institute for the study of journalism this is a mark of a scarce research is how social media can serve as a science of social empowerment while also the mining accurate information being disseminated by traditional media social media platforms can be useful in queens the and that one is. in the public debate social media platforms can be used to spread this information information that has. to make harm right and

a social media that hands can also be yours to. highlight devices in the public a sphere. we needed to be of an independent nonprofit platform after a vote get out on elections in 2017 because we realize that this information had arrived in spain as much as in the u.k. or in the u.s. we realized that we needed to dedicate much more efforts and we needed to be very for the citizenship to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is false false news and rumors online have led to the rise of the trick is many of which are non-government organizations they keep close contact with the media and internet users to monitor and lies and verify information we've basically have established 3 reasons for which this information is created the 1st one is

basically because there's bad people in the world that actually want to made this information to see how far they can get how many people become fool with such this information the 2nd one is for economic reasons feeble that makes this information so that you get into their web pages and see their advertisement and they get money for it and there's a 3rd reason which i think it's the most dangerous reason which is this information creative for a view logical reasons this is someone is money relating your take or your feelings are a specific issue so that you decide in one way and not in another that might be in favor of very view ology and those who are creating dissin from ation who deliberately want us to share they know what they're doing they walk share highly emotional content now journalists can't share highly emotional content because they're journalists and they have to work with truth and facts. they have to be rational and so generous in content it's much less likely to be shared so that's why we have that discrepancy.

for me social media is a listening device it enables me to stay tuned in to all sorts of conversations that non journalists are talking about. social media is a listening tour to be in touch with what audiences are engaged on what stories they care about and it's a reporting tool in order to find sources and verify sources and communicate with sources their basic responsibility traditional media have in this information landscape is the fact that they don't have a good business model and they're currently not putting enough resources or enough time in fact 2nd they formation that they publish they have to publish

a lot and sometimes not of good quality and that makes them sometimes publish this information 20 years ago journalist in have to worry about false information journalism is all about the truth so if they had a rumor and i they dismissed it the problem now is that wouldn't is what helped in navigating the information that they're seeing on facebook and twitter and instagram and the social web and so now janice have to actually help what he says but there are challenges about how you report on this information if you repeat the rumor in the headline there's a possibility here actually encouraging more people to believe that. the times has a set of standards and processes and verification methods that are largely institutional there's a standards guide here and every reporter has to adhere to. these standards and they exist for very good reason and they're often re-evaluated as the industry and

as technology changes these enable us to sort of stay committed to things like verification and fact checking and there are built to prevent us from being susceptible to things that we think in danger of free press in other countries such as bribes such as gifts and such as being compromised by people with a political agenda or a monetary agenda technology has afforded us the freedom to communicate with people in video and audio in text who would be inaccessible decades ago or even 56 years ago so we're now able to look at an attack in yemen and get user generated content or eyewitness video and with a lot of technological listening to all this we can verify the geo location of that video we can even strip it down off the internet and figure out what kind of phone or a camera was used to record it and there are all sorts of tools out there that help

us verify this information in the same way that we used to verify information in the old school way with public documents when we just use parchment paper. john condon is the oldest green writer and journalist who's worked for media outlets such as the financial times the new york times b.b.c. and that will street journal he's based in london and barcelona and his pieces analyze the global political system i think we need professional journalists possibly one more urgent leave ever before to make some sense out of the bay bill. voices shrieking and sheltering but we're here. to try to distinguish what is true from what is false and then of course there is fake news which has been hijacked

for political purposes by so many people including president trump it's a fake question your c.n.n. your fake he's making policy and then tweeting it and we've never had that before we've never had a president unpredictable and so i'm willing to be constrained by institutional kind of rules and no homes and his movies or because of social media and he can get instant visibility and it's some control he's on institutionalized completely on institutionalized and i agree that's a problem but i don't think it's. what he's saying to his 55000000 followers and that's the end date propaganda has always been a prominent tool. for government and and other political actors to interfere with the political process freedom house is an independent watchdog

organization dedicated to political liberties and human rights its annual freedom on the net report analyzes the relationship between government institutions and the internet we've seen that the number of countries that display some type of dissent from ation and fake news and propaganda has only risen every year that we have covered this so now we are at a situation where in $32.00 countries these pro-government commentators are paid by the states in order to go online and manipulates conversations away from sensitive issues and towards the government's narrative around. around everything is going ok in the country and making sure that people are not criticizing public officials online. usually when we talk about this information we refer to platforms such as twitter

or facebook but we need to take into account that the problem is much bigger for example there are some countries where consumption of news through what's up is huge we're talking about spain but also brazil or argentina our nigeria or india and in those places what's up and this information what's up is a huge problem we're not addressing yet social media is definitely want to do nothing divisions between people it's contributing to this global dialogue of the dire polaroids ation that you see inside come for is between different countries because what social media does it gives more weight and move value to the people who shout loudest and who are the more extreme views the most effective misinformation is that which divides so there's a reason that populist candidates are emerging in places like brazil and the u.s.

and we're going to see other places around the world because our countries are being divided and so the role of mace and disinflation dividing countries is what we need to take seriously we should be teaching people if you see something on social media that makes you angry then be more critical so i think one of the most useful things people can think whenever they see a piece of content is why is this being shared and who created it when it comes to content sourced on the social web the most important check is provenance who was the fast person that created this piece of content because then you have some idea of motivation. the question is can technology help solve the fake news issues i'm sure it can how or what is the best at something for the industry to the side and figure out and what is the bit more effective way to help solve this problem facebook hack and do

that google can do that and we had solutions for similar problems like spam in e-mail and they're still spam by that's it's much less of a problem that it was before companies have a strong responsibility in terms of making sure that their platforms aren't being used to the summit hate or propaganda. one of the ways around this is you know i think when there are when there is information that is posted on places like facebook or twitter or you tube that contributes to radicalization towards extremist views or the dissemination of a fake news that that constant is removed because it violates the terms of service of these platforms. i think that platforms like facebook and google have more power than some state government if they decide to come in for

a candidate or to throw government i think the out that all the information they need because we gave them all this information all these years facebook and all these companies have more information and more fresh information and more relevant information that any government has and this is probably one of the in the long term these companies know about their citizens about the infrastructure of their governments about the infrastructure of cities and lives of people that are allow them to understand better than anyone what are the needs of cities governments people so i think governments need to think with a lot more rigor about regulating social media come. anyway so it's not just a free for all because if we've learned anything in the past few years it's that social media companies are not incentivized to implement real reform on their own they're going to need the government to rope them in because their financial incentives benefit tremendously from

a good distance from mission story so i think we as a society are going to solve this problem through many different sectors of society but i think it begins with the government. who then you really could. put the. computers the people. who. could get a good. deal done in the. from a government perspective i think that the main thing is to resist the temptation to pass new laws that make of the government the arbiter between what is true and false online unfortunately we've seen a lot of governments go the opposite way and when governments are the ones that are determining what can and can't be said online that presents an opportunity for abuse and also for making sure that the ruling party stays in power and can

criminalize what the opposition is saying. is actually kind of the real problem here is. the social media yes oh it is true that anything now in politics good and bad is going to be spent on social media what we can do is try and restrict the kind of the pathologies the hate speech the misinformation. part of this excessive people like the new president president. i think it was about 2 days after that big deal that the foreign minister of spain for told us this because in a several media. he was just talking about everything was fake news there was no real injuries i think by now. many of those pictures have

been proven to be fake pictures really i couldn't believe that the former prime minister of spain was telling the world that it was fake names i just couldn't believe. january 2018 the european commission on made public calls so that different experts on this information would present themselves for a higher level group on base information on fake news but the high level group has succeeded in formulating concrete steps to provide european citizens with trust 40 information and to make them better equipped to never gauge in the online environment when the e.u. commission set up this expert group the idea was to bring many people from many parts of europe from many different disciplines to kind of have a really honest conversation about what could potentially move the needle of

misinformation so we had people from the platforms we had forecast and it's print journalists academics fact checkers. of a. bluetooth. to make a new film it don't do them to sheerly 1st. they do limited. we ended up doing a report that has i think 2 very important things that we need to take into account the 1st one is it said that we're not prepared to make a legislation against this information because we've done no phenomenon enough we need to study it much more and there's a very thin line between censorship and law and we need to be sure when we make it that we are on the last side and not on the censorship side the 2nd important thing that report said is that we need to invest much more on education and the media literacy how and where should that regulation take place within in a context of international information sharing across social networks where regulation is inherently domestic and based in particular countries so i think

there's a range of battles that we dealing with whether it's between those social networks and users and the government trying to censor. all whether we're talking about the right to privacy and the way in which social networks use and share our information in ways that we may or may not agree with and bigger questions about then how do we regulate that in an international global setting so social networks i think raise numerous problems and concerns around censorship prissie control access. now 8 consecutive years freedom house has found that there's been a decline in global internet freedom essentially what that means is that governments are finding new ways in order to control the internet to remain in power to smeal demand smear domestic opponents and also to monitor what their

citizens are saying and doing online country that received the worst ranking in our freedom on the net report is china followed by iran syria cuba and utopia. for solar social media that these days people are using our own the war is blocking your all including treater face for you to win house and rouhani was elected president of iran he promised to improve civil rights in the country including grace a freedom of expression online class according to a mirror cd of the new york placed since if we human rights in iran not only have my lessons of civil rights increased but freedom of expression and freedom of the press have practically disappeared in iran. we don't have exact number how many people got errors but i think it's fair to say dozens of people get earth said because of a speaking of their mind on mind on twitter or facebook some of them are

not good terrorists and you know they summon them and they you know all we're using into me day shannon techniques likes that in order to keep them silent and keep them it way from the social media even some job they they issue a suntan says or she's like you don't have rights so how access to the internet for like 2 years we did is no way you can you know. it's kind of charge and shake if these guys active in an internet or not but i mean do you use the smith told and take me in order to in. date people are to keep them silent during certain crucial moments like around elections or protests many governments around the world will actually cut off access to the internet in order to make sure that information cannot be disseminated oftentimes information that they don't agree with or that

could lead to them losing power you could say that there is a battle between governments and social networks particularly in the context of protest movements way you say twitter being used as a means of communication between protests as opposed to publicize the fact of a processed and to organize a protest social media is revolutionizing communication the flow of information and also how social protest is organized it poses a challenge to government institutions media platforms and to society itself which is still seeking a solution to the problems associated with the rise of the social media age so there is evidence in the last 10 years where we've taught more young people how to be good consumers of information that in fact and now they don't trust anything they don't trust wikipedia they don't trust the b.b.c. they don't trust the new york times and instead they just trust those people who are closest to them and that's a real consent how can we give people skills and tell them to be skeptical but not

too skeptical and that's a real challenge. there's no way we can go back there's no way we can just disconnect and get off the great and so we would have to renegotiate how we interact with these platforms will have to demand from these platforms that they define their role in democracies in a different way and we will have to work with a particular areas and policy makers to ensure that our rights are protected. may. the future of social networks is to disappear. an unwritten law of technology and this doesn't mean that we will have means of must communication or personal communications broadly much more efficient than the social networks are right now. definitely encroaching on the to writing or traditional media. you know the whole point of be it television be it radio be the

newspapers be it amounted to standing in a call or giving a speech is to have a political influence on people which means to persuade people to win that hans to win their minds on social networks have the power to do that to reach huge numbers of people instantly i'm so the political component which means emotional impact which means persuasive employment is enormous. i think what we need to worry about that misinformation fake news people dismissed it as being frivolous it's not i think it's the biggest crisis that we face as human kind because it's dividing us and as we divide did we're going to get to a point where democracy is no longer functioning and we turned against one another and that i think is the worry that we're not taking seriously enough now. so when

it's really powerful it's like a very important weapon it's just the form but you can show what happening everywhere in the world. and you can speed it just twitter or who or what's up it's the people who is but we're full it's not the media it's the people. these goals india. a paradise for animals and plants. seekers are flies of clean water. and effective protection against flooded. rain naturalize courtland's in and around delhi. the advantages of restoring

natural biodiversity. next details. in good shape loneliness a hidden epidemic. dr carsten lekota talks with experts about the harmful physical effects of social isolation and remedies stick your loneliness. therefore it's high time to put known in as on the topic health agenda. in good change 30 minutes on d w. can i am going to. stick close displaced to hallam's museums and extending cute. entrance does

a camp at all it trains kimi and more ignorant than you. nice news and keeping the unfortunate. mom. balancing all story. because a. must. starts january 27th on d w. this is deja vu news and these are our top stories. demonstrators in iran have staged a 2nd day of anti-government protests they were 1st sparked by the government's announcement that its military had mistakenly shot down a ukrainian jetliner many protesters have called for the country's supreme leader ayatollah ali how many to step down.