pressure from governments and activists over failing to root out hate speech racism fake news divisive comments and whatnot this time it's global giant you need lever leading the charge even threatening to reduce and withdraw advertising from the social media platform if things don't improve. unilever will not invest in platforms or environments that do not protect our children or which create division in society consumers do care about fraudulent practice fake news and russians influencing the us election they do care when they see their brands being placed next to ads funding terror or exploiting children now the message is clear no more deception abuse and controversy and a new era of positivity unity and inclusive ety but a closer look at unilever's own p.r. record reveals a contentious history from this infamous dove soap placed on facebook triggering

a storm of accusations of racism to fair lovely skin lightening products market across asia sporting allegations of perpetuating racist colonial there are types to control this he's with me and sexism culminating in a damning report on chauvinists that marketing. after apologizing unilever has said it's now to change its ways it's released new adverts advocating inclusive ety it wants facebook to follow suit or else let's face it though you leave out probably won't drop one of its biggest advertising platforms money talks but the story probably has generated some good p.r. that butyl uber as any company is primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders to to turn a profit and sometimes p.r. initiatives like this are part of it they're just an effort to elevate your brand i

think it would be difficult for them as a company that makes consumer products to avoid advertising one of the most prominent platforms today but what about the central character in the whole story for. i spoke the platform has shown commitment to the battle against fate can use and abuse but the floodgates have now been truly opened on the pressure left right and center to moderate to censor to sanitize and seems to have buckled under the squeeze well it has made itself very vulnerable because it has made these promises and it's even done some things to try to filter misinformation out of its social network even though they have tried to do things it doesn't appear to be working we're going to see a lot of pressure increasing pressure on facebook unilever thinks it could fix it by giving putting marketplace pressure on facebook i'm a little bit skeptical that that will actually work facebook is tackling an ever

growing list of calls and ultimatums first from politicians and security services now it seems corporations that shipping into facebook spending to dumond's could well backfire. done orchids reporting their next to a top u.s. democratic lawmakers called for emergency meetings on alleged russian meddling that's on top of the three major investigations already underway in the united states mind you jerrold nadler is the guy's name he thinks the current administration isn't doing enough to address the threat which he describes as being equivalent to baldness and bullets we want to protect ourselves this is a very severe threat and this is as much an attack on the united states as if there were bombs and bullets as an attack on our essential governing structure amid the continuing allegations of trump russia ties one of the investigators on the senate intelligence committee has found himself embroiled in controversy with more on that the jackal in vogue has got the details. in case you haven't noticed the democratic

party is very worried about big bad russia the film portals into our society the kremlin clan russia has harnessed the tremendous and quite frankly to me frightening power of social media truly troubling evidence of the scope and reach of russia's interference in our last election and the top democrat on the senate's russian investigation mark warner is no exception to the rule i'm concerned. but the president still does not recognize the severity of the threat but apparently warner does and he will do anything necessary to battle moscow's reach based on leaked text messages between the senator and a second party it looks like when it comes to the russian threat the ends justifies any means and clued in attempting to carry out some collusion of your own several of the messages show warner trying to arrange a secret meet up with christopher steele the former spy behind the now infamous trump dossier we want to do this right private in london i want to send less yet

because if we can't get agreement would rather not have paper trail so who was warner depending on the set up the clandestine meeting with steel that would be one mr adam wildman a lobbyist best known for acting on behalf of the russian tycoon i had to do pasta and according to the text while mine is also connected to julian asuncion another person accused of being a kremlin puppet now this is all way under the table warner repeatedly refused to make the invitation to speak to seal officially in writing while at the same time telling weldon that the pair's efforts would be helping america and apparently in his mind the way to do that is to be in coos with the confidant of one of the richest men in russia and according to republican senator marco rubio the whole senate intelligence committee has known about the contacts for months so if the other the democrats nor the republicans care about warner's conduct is it just that collusion is a problem reserved for only one party or is the reality here that russia is just being used in a political game of chess one or said it one point we have to be careful of

paraphrasing here i don't want a paper trail now if what he was doing was fine and dandy and innocuous and no big deal then why would he care if there was a paper trail he certainly should have or his staff should have known who he was communicating with who this lobbyist represented if you're going to talk to a lobbyist about getting a one on one face to face with christopher steele then you should know who you're dealing with in trying to arrange that need. the fix was in the ta is or between the democrats and russia more so than anything trump ever had to do with russia but it just shows what hypocrites they are and the american media just ignores these things. would come here including the telly museum feels the wrath of a right wing activist suffered over the discontent of those it is that a lot more after the break.

when almost seems wrong why don't we all just don't all. get to shape out these days become active. and engaged with equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

i get folks watching out international so islamic state is not yet defeated in syria says top u.s. diplomat rex tillerson he believes the fight is far from over even though the government of course declared victory of the terror group back in november the end of major combat operations does not mean we have achieved during the few devices isis remains a serious threat to the stability of the region our homeland and other parts of the globe well last month the us announced plans to maintain an open ended military presence in syria it says some two thousand troops are going to stay on in the country to prevent and i still resurgence and counter iran's influence in the region washrooms also says it wants to ensure the civil war is resolved through a political process and the displaced locals can return to their homes are all

laudable aims i guess to that end they have also pledged two hundred million dollars in aid however the russian foreign minister sergei lavrov thinks washington's present might become permanent when you are still the u.s. says its presence should continue not only into military goals are achieved but also until there's a steady political process that should end with an appropriate or in other words accepted by the us transition of power that means regime change overall we have reasons to believe that the u.s. wants to stay there for a long time if not forever. so what's really going on here well let's talk to my work of director of can also supporters think tank with a focus on syria the middle east a the most see today you know what is going on here we're in these conflicting messages one minute america's saying ok we've defeated isis that we were invited in the first place by the way to do it but the problem is over but hey we're going to stay there anyway now they're saying there is still an. problem what's the real

picture what's really going on. well what's going on i think is obvious the united states would like to pressure damascus by whatever means it has to change to or to effect a political change over there that the united states would like to be you know would like to endorse and then later on they could probably say ok you like that sort of change and let's get out of here otherwise we would be getting out of here now it's only the face of it the real thing is that we believe that the united states is preparing the ground for a long term separation or a permanent actually separation of eastern north eastern syria from the syrian state under the guise of a kurdish led democratic sort of state and the two hundred million dollars that are being placed today are not going to bring back electricity and water to the devastated iraq we believe but probably bring more weapons to the

kurds which is going to put some pressure on other minorities in the region to accept kurdish supremacy and the united states you know under the united states and britain so to speak well how is that going to go down to damascus what bashar al assad what what's the fight for him how is that going to fit in with what if you say what's happening is really help me with what washington's going to do. well the syrian president bashar al assad is there because there are enough syrians who say we trust the government to protect us and they're on our interests against whatever challenges we see. the united states and other western countries and regional countries raise like qatar saudi arabia and turkey indeed have tried everything they could to arm the rebels and to basically inflict as much devastation in syria along with israel of course in order to make the syrian government collapse and that didn't happen because again there are enough serious

behind it now. at the end of the day that the road. headed from damascus is increasingly challenging so the last we've heard from prison assad was that kurds who supported the occupation or american occupation project which is exactly what it is indeed good terms of the nobody invited them legally to syria and their presence over there amounts to occupation especially if it's a long term project any syrian who sits the project is going to be dubbed as a traitor and that means the syrian government is preparing and probably is prepared already to start confrontational offer that says that we're going to give you my next question will go thirty seconds or more but if what you're saying is correct then those watched the plans are correct there's going to be more trouble ahead we're not heading to an area of peace syria of peace it's going to get much worse it's going to get much worse and we think that the minorities especially the arabs in northeastern syria are not going to accept you know

a kurdish state and they're probably being. you know intimidated by lots of weaponry coming to the kurdish militia and so on and indeed the americans presence but you know believe it or not out of nowhere you might have a rocket propelled grenade an r.p.g. here or an r.p.g. there they could start sort of resistance operation and then the united states would be in trouble and the syrian government obviously would have its own options not a great prognosis is a work of director cannot as british think tight with focus on syria middle east thank you for your thoughts thank you for having me the time human rights watch has called for international support in clearing the rubble and the mining the syrian city of rocket it says almost five hundred civilians were injured in the three months after liberation and many were killed it says in its report the organization also highlights the growing risk of more civilians being killed as people return to the devastated city now didn't hurry is counterterrorism program director of human rights watch and spoke to us about the group's findings. just describe to you what

i saw in iraq residents are very desperate. and because of the high risk and because a few working off are too nice for many young men you can go to a couple of nights in the city and who are about fifty dollars you can hire people to go clear your house. you know but also. run and some war this is a time where you know they're not trained to do this it's very dangerous and many other countries. need to provide more support what sort of support. to be more meant more funding and an increase in number of the miners and early increase in the training the. mining there have been some. of the mining going to be funded by the international coalition or through training

this is not sufficient compared to the need and local residents are desperate for more support. i mean see if you gyptian artifacts in the italian city instead of by the controversy by offering discounts to visitors so much controversy museums chief was forced to address an angry crowd outside the building . and. yeah the lady we saw in the video. she's a leader of the immigration problem. she accused the museum of discriminating against italians you christine museums chief defended the oil for those saying that

they've got various promotions for other groups throughout the year now video of the confrontation went viral of the elites which the country's culture minister now he defended the disc and said the museum was well people we spoke to were also behind the initiative. i don't see anything racist i consider it a promotional initiative like many others. good looking at the thought i believe that the work carried out by the egyptian museum is extremely important and on guard and the intel in the context of this controversy is absolutely instrumental and necessary part of that i absolutely agree with the director of the museum i think that george maloney did not understand that arabic is a language not a religion. it is really hard a moment to to bear in mind it's only going to elect a new parliament in less than a month it seems today in the issue no matter how remotely connected to immigration race heated debate the latest polls suggest a coalition of center and crucially far right parties is expected to get most of

the vote but not enough they think to have a governing majority will be across the aisle as always happens but for now it's me saying goodbye for now that's the way the world looks at this hour thanks for watching out international peace back to update you again in thirty minutes does get out the dot com cover till then. join me every thursday on the alex salmond shill and i'll be speaking to a guest of the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you then. what politicians do. they put themselves on the line to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president and. want to. have to go right to be

precise as a white woman for three of them or can't be good that. i'm interested in the waters in the cottage. in america a college degree requires a great deal. paying a decade's long debts from. studying so hard it requires drugs just. going through humiliation to end and it leads society. and poaching to death sometimes quite literally. wants other true colors of universities in the us.

i am an astrologer this is the welcome is done once again to get into the nitty gritty the fun and maybe they ultimately expression oh what station i have a confession to make we are actually in mexico right now oh my god that's true we are in mexico for this a toshi round table and we have reprieve recorded this so we're at the situation round table talking about decline with our fellow bit coiners and i'm pretty cording this so just in case the price has crashed zero or the price has gone to fifty thousand we don't know at the point that we're recording this but i do want to talk about the general headline here regarding big coin and it reads nobody puts bitcoin in the corner this is from f.t. alphaville skate i'm super. and he's written for queen telegraph and all these sorts on line wired as well about crypto currencies and stuff and this is gotten

a lot of attention because of this opening these three paragraphs that i want to talk about very very fascinating way to put it suppose for a moment big question never existed and the theory i'm never existed and the whole crazy world of crypto currencies never happened someone comes along and tells you to imagine an electronic network for moving money anywhere in the world that no one owns it's an intriguing idea it's an unprecedented idea in the entirety of human history such a thing has literally never existed would your response really be l o l the true value of big. no no no this is the result of a lot of very smart people thinking about this for many many years about how to move value over the internet or the encounter. what's called the double spend problem that it censorship resistant that it's immutable it's goal two point zero

and it takes advantage of the a some pot a curve and costs in technologies for processing band with and other elements chip speed all approaching that price of zero which means you can have the block chain moving around at ever cheaper cost even though it's expanding in size because the economics of the internet is crashing toward zero that's one of the phenomenon in economics that people like paul krugman don't understand as it applies to bitcoin because he is used to things like increased returns economics based on diminishing returns and how that effects pricing and how that affects economic theory have increased returns where you have the basic raw material that is the say electrons and processing and moving them around is constantly going to zero but you are at the same time as infinite as that sounds the uniqueness of each bitcoin to there only being twenty one million is part of the intrigue that is this technology and

this and this value system that is completely unique and the result of thousands of years of technological progress hundreds of years of economic thought and real true desirability to have a system that is completely outside social control well yeah it's important to understand. whoever you're reading or what analysis to understand kind of where they're coming from and what their background is some paul krugman is neoclassical economists and ivory tower he lives in an ivory tower he's an academic there's nothing wrong with that there's been ivory tower dwellers throughout history in india they have it codified into a class system a caste system he is an academic and he believes in the. right of a hierarchy that you know one should. trained to a doctor at the level and then you can tell the people you could teach people these

poor students ignorant students what what the truth is about economics so. he comes from that sort of background where he believes elite know more and they should govern the economy politics culture so that's his background that's how he comes to bit coin. on the other hand as this article points out there have been a lot of scam stores. but that's attached to anything that is a store of value look at any clint eastwood film for history it's all about some schmuck trying to steal some gold from somebody else and they all fight and kill each other and then you know some woman is gained as well during the whole thing and you know they make off with a gold somebody who gets the gold at the end of the show but here he says there's a lot of that's dumb about crypto currencies the dumb seems to increase proportionally with the price every day some new idiot tries or a lock on the i c o roulette wheel and the hope of making a fortune of

a lifetime for doing little more than writing a piece of paper and sticking a countdown clock on a website but there's a lot that's really profound and you need only look as far as big to see that so he goes into the actual issue which gives it so much value which the likes of paul graham asked and which you've just encapsulated where he says the problem of transferring or holding value digitally without permission is not a trivial one the fact the solution requires huge amounts of energy is just one sign of the difficulty the upshot of solving it however as you get an electronic network for value that governments cannot control or destroy except with significant financial and social cost even they might not succeed i mean you saw that with remember during the arab spring when in egypt. when mubarak was overthrown he tried to turn off the internet and it worked for two or three days

and all his cronies everybody like that he had to turn it back on he had to connect them back to the internet because it was it became impossible he was he was going to be ousted no matter what at that point because he was either going to crash the economy take everything down with it and all his friends and all his cronies or he was going to have to turn it back on this barrier to entry for creating a coin is almost zero over a thousand coins and. hundreds of probably more than a thousand i see as you know i think i liken it to i remember i don't even know how this anymore but they used to have a form of cosmetic. product where you put the tape on your skin and pulls blackheads and you know the ease with which you can create a currency out of nothing as is pulled out the black kids that are a lot of dodgy characters and projects out there. alongside the internet just like you know there are many false prophets and then there was let's

say jesus for example you know enter of being worth something but you know let's go back to. secular world yes toshi is a problem a lot of people are seeking profits but here you know again the internet paul krugman meston every time he tries to offer his opinion on twitter about bitcoin of course if you look at the tweet tweet responses as all pictures of fax machines because of course he said the internet would have no impact on the global economy as much only as the fax machine ever did so he just thought it was a communication not a network and he clearly has some sort of blind spots and network effects and network impacts and changing of the mind and and certainly you were around during the first dotcom boom and. at that time people you know the markets investors went crazy and people thought pets. dot com ty's dot com shirt dot com

you know that was where it was all going to go that was the way to make the fortunes and they didn't see social media they didn't see twitter facebook there was all came along later right thing the basic as i point out that that's missed is that the underlying fundamental building blocks of this economy are becoming cheaper every single day and it's a lot different than traditionally going to makes where you have diminishing returns or you have the need you know if you're digging gold out of the ground it takes ever more energy to dig gold out of the ground now it does require more energy to mind coins but the ancillary markets themselves are popping up in a way that's almost exponential and dwarfing that underlying costs such as just such a degree that the free money that's appearing in people's accounts that they can use then to go and do battle with the money that is the result of coercion by a corrupt state is quite remarkable i just want to also point out something about the first dot com bubble didn't you have some like seven year old pitcher and

a knock knock joke say yeah i was. the height of the dot com bubble when i went to a conference i sat next to as a seven or ten year old kid who was launching knock knock joke dot com for a multi-million dollar valuation and it was the supreme knock knock jokes that one could find and there was also a duty dot com as a daily drawing of. def occasion essentially and drawing def a catering duty dot com but those i.c.a.o. is equivalent yes jason calacanis about this jason remember duty dot com knock knock joke dot com i mean that was jason was of course the king of the dot com back then he's been come out he's against not against but even trying to sound the alert on the parallels between the dot com and the i.c. which is ok it's a fine analysis there is total access in this space but the underlying technology like there were survivors of the dot com like google and. facebook a little later but. another those lows the study yeah there's

another thing going around which. who is the founder of the theory i'm has been talking about this is the notion of a fair coin people are trying to figure a way to distribute coins better that was also an issue up at a meeting i heard some analysis saying that there was a lot of talk about sovereign currencies because at that point at the time of. venezuela has it just announced petro currency. so this is something going forward that could be a possibility as the sovereign currencies i don't know i haven't read the white paper on the petro but i don't know if that's workable but i think in the future there could be something that is like you know the alas alas k. if you're a resident of lasky receive some money every year it's like a thousand two thousand three thousand dollars check that comes in because you live in the state and the oil in the state produces a lot of oil so they get a share of that so there could be a way to distribute instead of having oligarchs and all they sort of

a very wealthy few where they're you know you're in an oil rich country or mineral rich country if it just goes to a handful of people that get to you know for some reason get the exclusive access to the assets of the nation that happened to lie under the nation you know this is a fair way to distribute the coins or a mention of the government in america subsidizes the energy industry tens of billions hundreds of billions probably a trillion dollars of u.s. government subsidies ation of the energy industry u.s. government could subsidize mining of big oil rather crypto currencies and put those into wall it's called american citizens going to each have an automatic wallet tied to their social security account and they can get a daily weekly or monthly airdrop of crypto coins that they can then use to boost the economy with the government can easily do that then we should do that i've said many times and this would be a way to fairly distribute wealth and it has no reason why wall street that gets the subsidisation of free money from the fed.