and neil h also dismissed what he called the "soviet style, pravda" disinformation unit.l, one of the editors of that unit, mike wendling, joins me now. and mike, you wrote a book about the online rise of the alt—right in the run up to the election of donald trump and had been reporting on conspiracy theories, as have bbc trending as well, so, thanks for coming on. why did the bbc feel the need to set up this separate unit? because basically, in the world of social media, we find that conspiracy theories, disinformation, misinformation, often from individuals, groups, even nations spread faster even nations spreads faster and farther than ever before. it's systematic unless we need a systematic way to look at this and report on it, and to help people sift fact from fiction. one of the correspondence that you mentioned said that we are wrong to police what people think. that's not true at all. we don't want to make people think a particular way. we want to give them the facts, we want to equip them with the facts so that they know what they think. coronavirus has obviously

and neil h also dismissed what he called the "soviet style, pravda" disinformation unit. so, thanks for coming on. why did the bbc feel the need to set up this separate unit? because basically, in the world of social media, we find that conspiracy theories, disinformation, misinformation, often from individuals, groups, even nations spreads faster and farther than ever before. it's systematic and thus we need a systematic way to look at this and report on it, and to help people sift fact from fiction. one of the correspondence that you mentioned said that we are wrong to police what people think. that's not true at all. we don't want to make people think a particular way. we want to give them the facts, we want to equip them with the facts so that they know what they think. coronavirus has obviously sparked a lot of conspiracy theories. we saw it in that protest in london last week. what sorts of work has the unit done on that issue? the world health organisation called what happened in the wake of the pandemic an infodemic. basically, a flood of information. not all of i

neil: no matter what they come up it is dead on arrival in the senate, a lot of your colleagues, mr. mcconnell is saying, they aren't h aren't keen spending -- >> we had a vote. neil: on nancy pelosi as much as the senate? >> well, but neil, nancy pelosi refuses to move off the mark because she is not interested in compromise right now. the senate republicans put up a 500 billion-dollar bill on wednesday, just, a few days ago. $500 billion. that used to be real money. it has all the things i talked about. it has school money. more than the heroes act initially had. it halfs the money for testing. it has the money for vaccine. it has money for small businesses t was all in there. democrats even refused to take a vote, we got all the republicans, majority of the senate to support it twice. that is what the president ought to be talking out because a bunch us republicans are trying to get something done. neil: last week at this time, senator, last week at this time, make it bigger. i'm willing to go bigger. we'll go over two trillion if need be. mitch mcconnell, some of the colleagues, you were at the half trillion dolla

foundation estimates that biden's tax plan, h it puts bulk of tax hikes on businesses would lead to loss of half a million americans losing their jobs. neil? neil: hillary, thank you very, very much. my point of explanation that 2,000-dollar impact for individuals and families that is borne out by number of studies. fact-checking there. the vice president was right to say that, that is the average gain of the average american family, $2000. now the outcry among democrats is that those cuts were tilted towards the rich. now that is an argument for another day but the fact of the matter is, that issue, that she was raising was in fact accurate on the part of the vice president. the other becomes one maybe of semantics. if you want to junk all the president's tax cuts then presumably they would be junked for everybody and that would mean that it would be limited to just those making $400,000 or more who would have to fear a tax hike. but besides the semantics here, there is the issue of raising taxes period in an environment like this and something we were hearing that the president was keen to address in an upcoming debate that might not ha