user growth but it's not the only thing overshadowing twitter president trump claims the company is limiting the visibility in its search results of quote prominent republicans the practice is known as shadow banning trump has branded it discriminatory hinting that it could even break u.s. laws twitter however has denied political bias or behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets we're aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address. me now to john gaunt radio host and journalist nice to have you on again john what do you make of this the claim is that you know twitter weeding out the fake accounts the stopping misinformation bots the the fear is that they could just be silencing people they don't like the views of well they are they're based in san francisco they've got a soft liberal view of the world as ours indeed the whole san francisco house and

they are definitely. introducing and exercising political bias donald trump the president of america is completely correct this shadow banning is not happening with those of the voice of the left i.e. democrats in america or indeed those in labor here in the united kingdom but it's definitely going against anybody who's right of center with this shadow ban and it's disgraceful because they're meant to be a platform not a publisher. and it seems that not too many people know where the laws lie when it comes to law the social media companies don't trump suggested twitter could be breaking the law if they're reducing the visibility of certain users but do we know is it legal is it illegal you know are they exploiting this very strong position i have oh this is the thing isn't it these new media oligarchy i believe they are exploiting their position zuckerberg and indeed twitter always maintained they are not publishes like a newspaper they are just

a tech platform but it's interesting platform they must allow all views as long as they don't break the rule of the country that they're in if they're exercising bias which just face it newspapers do t.v. stations aren't allowed to in our country allegedly books newspapers come on if they are doing that because they want to put forward a left wing liberal view the world then they suddenly become publishers and i would say they are then definitely breaking the law or they'd come under the law and they could come under the governance of the united states or the united kingdom and maybe that's what needs to happen because at the moment they are acting like dictators and it's very frightening because their excuses oh you can still see this stuff if this person you follow if you go to their profile well that's a bit like the postman show you waiting for a letter it doesn't cook and you have to keep guard at the post office to say you got the post for me today eight frankly ludicrous they've been caught absolutely

here red handed doing this and we got to say well done to vice you broke the story i don't know for example r.t. and spread it also chasing it and rightly so they cannot have it both ways new york what they're doing at the moment he's wrong it should be a great platform for political discussion they use that for political ends they try to discredit trump with all this nonsense about russian bots and the rest of it now it turns out actually that kind of working for the other side well that's just not fair is it. so essentially you think donald trump's got this right you know he says that there's shadow banning going we seems remarkable because you know the public i am sure think that if they're on something like twitter all the messages they sign up for following people that they will be delivered to them but essentially saying that's not happening. it's not and hasn't been happening for some time they say as

your reports report said there's a photo in the system they're going to fix it not they have been shown it influence the global conversation now that is frightening as i say if they trade that large basically a newspaper then we would know wouldn't wait always a certain internet sites where you know they've got a left wing or right wing kind of view of the world and you accept that when you sign up trick you're in facebook we gave them all our information all our life all our photos because we thought it was a kind of democratization of the internet and that they were going to treat as honorably we now find out these meet these social media platforms or exploiting all our information selling off to all and sundry including political parties and now if you are right of center they're also effectively silencing you well even george orwell couldn't have made this up i mean george orwell had that famous line didn't i'm going to misquote which is the party didn't like history so the party rewrote the history and then the history was good or whatever it was they went in the sense

that's what trichet and facebook are doing why are the why are they so scared of road course to buy try columbia on r.t.r. say what i think no doubt later you have somebody with a different view and that's who people are what they want strong opinions fairly debated and they thought they were getting that which which had facebook and other media plus social media platforms but it's quite clear now then you know the people who own this the people in silicon valley who are predominantly left leaning certainly liberal in the right you to the world are controlling it just like an old fashioned fleet street editor and we are being conned and facts just ask me shallow ban completely now or is it that i'm surprised on we've not heard the phrase trying to influence elections being used yet because if you're withholding information that you know can can influence somebody's political opinion it doesn't it just as

much as it fits for any other argument that's been used. i now to kind of imply that earlier all the accusations against trump and indeed against russia and then of course russia the kremlin and putin these accusations that they influence the e.u. referendum which is farcical but that's what some of the people are saying it now turns out well true true facebook perhaps we're doing it for the other side as i say i mean in the referendum for the people who wanted to remain in the year it is rank hypocrisy though why they have attacked. president putin and indeed russia the way they've even attack trump over this issue when it's quite playing h. quite clear that it was the left who would doing this the soft left i would cite liberal left who are doing it and i think when people begin to realize that the algorithm rhythms are doing this and devil because people who are ready realize not

like you've got to be careful what you say because now employers will look through your social media history and if you're not careful you can because you're where the storage of the week about. russian citizens who are being tagged as interest in treachery or treaties or i mean who do these people think they are to make these value judgments unless the other thing they're making value judgments on people to say well or no it on my their opinion or maybe they're anti islamist terror all that means they must be used i'm afraid because well it just this it could be going on here and i think it is very frightening i think i don't really want laws put in place i want them to start acting responsibly they should have no bias whatsoever unless a treat breaks the law of the land or is defamatory or libelous there is no way they should be altering the political conversation especially after they've accused

president putin and donald trump. the true most powerful men in the world of doing well actually they were doing it themselves yeah i'd say that's probably guaranteed you a very good shadow band many thanks for your time and opinions john john go on my guest radio host and journalist rachel pitches. and twitter isn't the only tech giant facing questions twenty companies like tesla and spotify they are posting big losses down bushell looks at the reasons and how their employees and consumers could be affected. wall street soaring around all time peak and driving that growth locomotive these guys who corporations like tesla spotify and dropbox are invested darlings committing even the general public who use their everyday products to buy in her role.

as the leader in stream music i say some sometimes the most successful american tech companies. just one tiny problem these firms are losing a refit money tesla is worth more than car colossus is ford or general motors despite selling a tiny fraction of the cause and losing billions music streaming giant spotify is just an out vast losses now the biggest startup in the world but it's lost money every year of its life and last year the worst an i was four and the whole of billion the whole of his one fine day will book. in to cause while uploading spotify music to the dropbox cloud or something like that but new economy new danger these aren't small companies anymore they affect millions of workers and

users and cracks beginning to show suggesting far from expanding some of starting to for their workforce and in the new economy relationships are shall we say complicated hundreds of thousands of paid for tesla cause the poor company hasn't even built if it goes bust these ordinary people would likely be quote wiped out definitely there's a there's a bubble not just in tech stocks but in the general stock market itself and you know as we're already seeing companies like general electric to caterpillar and some. the others. wells fargo in financial stress that there are signs of financial fragility as i call it where fragile fragility is really a condition where the cash flow to finance previous debt there becomes insufficient and they can't roll over the debt and they can't borrow the dead so then they have to default or sell off some of their assets first or better assets and then they

did they default that after the can sell off those assets well that financial fragility in my book systemically jilin the global economy is an indicator of pending financial instability and i think we're approaching that and we may see there emerge in the next year or two. u.s. lawmakers and the american civil liberties union of raising the alarm of amazon's facial recognition tool after it falsely matched photos of members of congress with criminals they're now calls for a ban on its use by law enforcement and identification with accurate or not could cost people their freedom or even their lives congress must take these threats seriously hit the brakes and enact a moratorium on law enforcement use of face recognition on the american civil liberties union compared photographs of all the members of the u.s. congress with a large database of criminal mugshots amazon's facial recognition till may twenty

eight matches but all of them were false eleven of the mismatches involved people of color and that's prompted additional concern the union claims that the two as an in-built racial bias forty percent of the mismatches involve people of color that even though congress was formed a task group is overwhelmingly white we spoke to technology analyst project k. about the issue. when the software is trained to recognize faces it has to train our corpus and the corpus is made up of lots of the images of people and for whatever reason the images are mainly copulation people then it will be better at recognizing them some of the minorities if they were well represented in the training so that if you just grabbing me any images that you find and many of them will be dark you know absolute people who have darker skin tones may just do just may be harder to see it should be understood their vision recognition is not

a matter of taking a photograph and sort of comparing it to another photograph and saying no this one looks like that and that's what it is human we do know what a computer is though the measures points in may the a.c.l.u. revealed amazon is trying to sell its facial recognition technology to government and police agencies that have numerous civil liberties groups to join together to campaign against it even amazon workers join the protest however the technology is already being tested by some u.s. police departments but next of course comedy as kate said you could expect this public safety commission is are already working with government agencies to deploy this technology at the a.c.l.u. we obtain records that show that amazon signed a secrecy agreement with one county to keep details about the technology out of public view they've also invited law enforcement to suggest new features and they offered free consulting to help the city of orlando build its own system but thomas honest hit back at the a.c.l.u. test saying that a used lower accuracy settings than recommend it. well eighty percent confidence is

an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs chairs animals or other social media use cases it wouldn't be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty when he's in facial recognition for law enforcement activities we guide customers to set a threshold of at least ninety five percent or higher from amazon's point of view what they said was that the train there are law enforcement clients not to use the software or who are making decisions but rather to narrow down the pool to where shuman can look at the final results and verify yes these do make sense either the same people or they're not the same people amazon is saying well we think it's quite helpful we can find lost children and we can find criminals and things and that's all very positive so then the a.c.l.u. is saying yes but you also may use that as a way to sweep up people there's a possibility of abuse of the technology and there's also the use of it for good

facebook has blocked the accounts of rightwing activists in brazil ahead of elections there they say it's part of a crackdown on fake news we'll explain all after the break. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation let it be an arms race in this on offense clearly a dramatic development the only i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time time to sit down and talk. but politicians do listen to the.