an impact on an election you can't have that both ways of course facebook can influence elections like we used to joke about how you throw an election using various tools at facebook which facebook actually could do. and tony martinez worked at facebook from two thousand and eleven to two thousand and thirteen and played a central role in developing facebook's micro targeting system. responsibility there was a product manager for ads targeting which meant basically turning all your user data into money for facebook what role do you think facebook played in donald trump's election huge i mean political pundits get things wrong all the time right but a well trained machine learning algorithm trained on good data doesn't often come up with the wrong answer and i spent years building tools to basically defeat human reason or human error you know dominate human tastes it's very weird but don't you think that can be a real problem when used as political candidates in their messages rather than consumer products right now i think politics are somewhat different right at the end of the day our democracy and our political system depends on it and that's

frankly more important than selling a pair of shoes like no question right martinez is much more concerned about the way facebook encourages people to live inside their own echo chamber which is also called the filter bubble to me the bigger issue that i really don't see a solution for is the sort of filter bubble slash fake news problem right where you know citizens used to have a right to an opinion and now they have a right to their own reality you know facebook flatters their vision of the world and then are forced to challenge their assumptions you know they can go off in some rabbit hole of untruth these books mission is to give people what they want in their news feed and executive providing orientation drove that message home to martina's on his first day of work he had this very sweeping vision of you know the new york times of you that the accident from a question is like what is facebook you know and some dumb intern said oh it's a social i was like no wrong right it is your personalized newspaper they basically feed you anything that you engage with but engage means likes comments share etc like their news feed algorithm is optimized for that facebook recently announced changes to its news. feed that will prioritize posts from friends and news from

sites that users rate is trustworthy but the changes could reinforce filter bubbles and do little to stem the spread of bogus news why is it so easy to disseminate fake news on facebook what i think it all comes down to you know what psychologists call coggan of this and it's right views of the world that flatter your worldview you just eat up like candy or french fries and just can't get enough of it and that's that's why fake news is so effective because if the world as you like to see it rather than it actually is today more than two thirds of americans get news on social media do you think this book is contributing to the polarization you know ok but i don't think anyone had any notion that we would reach a level where it's reached today which you have democracies that basically can't function but i mean kind of democracy in which you and i can agree on the ground truth values and realities if we don't have that then how do we form consensus around a policy goal how do we solve it it's not it's problems. information about those exist but the breadth of information that an average person today holds

is the largest in history because inskeep is a psychologist at stanford did pathbreaking research on what you can tell about people from facebook likes we just look at likes that people have not we actually the algorithm can take likes from your profile your facebook profile and would be able to very accurately reveal your psychological traits your political views your sexual interrogation your. ethnicity. what are you take drugs or not a number of other sensitive and intimate things. thinks the upside of using these new psychographic profiling techniques in politics far away is the downside making it possible for politicians to adjust their message in such a way as to make it relevant to people it's great because it increases in a gauge ment of people in politics it's great for the northwest but people can be

engaged because of very narrow issues and who gauge mint within a narrow political point of view is not necessarily good for democracy as in social networks are a great advantage a great boon to them democracy anyone can become a blogger anyone can become a publisher well on one hand it brings us all of those people that say's not real things but on the other hand it protects us from governments or powerful individuals or corporations dominating the communication channels but the algorithms are channeling to the things you really want to see so in some sense that undermines any sense of truth or a common reality in which people can talk and try to work out policy together you know there's data that exists that shows that humans always this is just human nature we always occupied our own echo chamber as we always occupy the universe of me now today. thanks to repeat the recommendation systems

those universes of us of me and you are the largest universes we ever had and they're also overlapping to a great extent. i think the effect of the filter bubble has yet to be quantified and i'm willing to render a hypothesis that when we get decent full assessment of the a fact of filter bubbles it will be different among different groups and different people how have social media platforms affected political discourse social media platforms have divided us have made a shallower you know the very addictive nature of it interferes with our ability to dive deep into one tax interferes with our ability to speak face to face in any depth. and perhaps to come to some sort of mutual awareness of the brain as you know it it does structure our habits of thoughts in ways that are not healthy for

living life in a complex world and living in a democracy i think that the spread of junk news in this information and social media platforms as undermined truth in a sense if you're reading and learning about the world through facebook what you're getting is a mixture of traditional quality journalism and completely out there completely made up stories that look like journalism you're going to have a really hard time distinguishing what is true and what is not. and if you are of the mind that you would like to undermine our ability to think about facts and coherently argue about policy you're going to turn to social media to get your word out there to mess with people to frustrate people to confuse people. because nothing better has ever been invented. larry kim and i'm one marketing consultant so it is just how easy it is to spread this information on facebook who is troubled by all the fake news sites that power. during the two thousand and sixteen

presidential election last october he ran a test to see a facebook and address the problem he took us through the steps of his experiment wanted to know if facebook had close the loopholes and the whole effort took less than an hour some first thing that i did was create a fake news website basically to disseminate the fake stories so my blog i decided to go with the name citizens and news networks the story that i used was actually a very famous fake a story about a doll trump a protester who was saying that he was paid thirty five hundred dollars to protest a trump rally and i was from the election if you can see this is a really ridiculous looking site it doesn't seem very authority of it in any way i did this intentionally because i wanted to see all the facebook kind of fake news police you know be able to kind of catch this little the civil hack in the act then what did you do well so the next thing you need to do is set up a facebook page for my fake website and that's really easy to do and takes you

know one or two minutes so if you want to promote a fake news on facebook they don't check it all when you say i know i. know absolutely absolutely that they don't check i was claiming to be a media outlet but you know that was all self declared information and then i just simply shared the big news article to my fake news facebook page and now we're almost in business here you know step three we need to see to promote this story to to an audience. you know using facebook ads to boost exposure of his fake article in facebook news feed him spend fifty three dollars on a so-called engagement brews experiment he targeted people in three swing states key to trump's victory michigan pennsylvania and wisconsin i went with a demographic that is very likely to eat this stuff for example people who are. republicans who are members of the national rifle association people who do need to

conservative causes after he selected the groups he wanted to target he clicked on the boost post button you know i just want to get caught i want somebody at facebook to shut this down and say like you know this is a violation of some terms but keep in mind facebook is a advertising business and the ad was approved within minutes so what happened did you immediately start getting people posting to it or reacting to it the reaction was bonkers like people were clicking on it and commenting on it and sharing on it and liking it like crazy within an hour about five thousand people sought. for for fifty bucks that doesn't happen that often you know i have companies that are spending orders of magnitude more than fifty bucks and they can drive this type of thing gauger and what did you take away from doing this experiment my takeaway is this is appalling that fake news threatens undermine our system of government so it's very concerning that you know people can still do this year later after that

after the election what do you think can be done to address this pretty obvious first step is there should be some kind of an application process you know like just like when you sign up for a credit card you know it's kind of a validation of advertisers to verify who they are and if they are real or not. facebook declined our request for an interview it pains us as a company and then our platform was abused in this way facebook google and twitter and each announced the propriety of measures to deal with this information these include tweaks to algorithms political ad disclosure increased security staffing and review of articles by outside fact checkers facebook's approach to fact checking is actually not doing people think that content throughout the site is being checked because they're seeing some disputed tax. and that's just not true. robin kaplan is a scholar at the data and society research institute she focuses on policy to deal

with this information and propaganda on social media platforms do you think baseball twitter and google can address the problems of this information over their platforms without fundamentally changing their economic model no i don't these are private companies that creates new challenges because firstly they are driven by their own goals and incentives that need to align with their business model things like clicks likes and shares are the metrics that are used to prioritize or d. prioritize content because that's how ad revenue is based but those signals don't actually tell us much about whether or not that content is truthful or important or more valuable do you think the companies can really solve a lot of the problems by tweaking their algorithms i don't think algorithms are actually going to fix this problem is companies need to start hiring on editorial staff and journalists people who have been located within the traditions of the

news media to start informing some of the decisions that platform companies are making in reviewing content what do you think of the company's argument that if they take a greater role in curating content it's going to lead to censorship we can develop processes to make sure that they are not censoring content arbitrarily so i think we need to start having a conversation about whether or not they should be held to a higher standard of norms and values that we've had with print or radio or cable i think it's time for platforms to step up to the plate and accept the responsibility that their media companies that they're not neutral technology companies here's the ironic thing great people say facebook has too much power so as a reaction they want facebook to assume more power by actually potentially censoring or editing content on their platform as a former employee i'm not sure that i want facebook becoming the editor in chief to the world series papers i'm actually not a big fan of that solution do you think social media platforms can deal with the problem of echo chambers and fake news without undermining their economic model in

a way there's nothing they can do about it and be the companies they are zara but i think that's right. but one thing that might change is i think people might get just more savvy or they might understand that they're looking at fake news i mean something like every every new technology is characterized by in the initial period of discovery being used by either criminals or roads or you know for various negative for negative outcomes and so i think we're going through social media of growing pains right now it's too early to tell but i don't think that that that society adjusts to these it's like in germany in the one nine hundred thirty s. radio and film became powerful instruments of propaganda. they were the chosen instruments of gavels of hitler and they worked beautifully for them after world war two we confronted the fact that propaganda was dangerous we had a fervent public conversation about it we had commissions devoted to it in order to deliver solid dependable information so no we haven't adjusted the technology we've just gotten lucky we have managed to manage through the use of competition the

celebration of multiple voices through the practice of consensus but i fear that that consensus is breaking down when that consensus breaks down our propaganda gets stronger. in the next computing episode of the special reports how russia and the extreme right to use will to make social media accounts known as boasts to spread disinformation and propaganda. it's. really hard the internet is the tool for democracy under threat. in the echo chamber world of fake news in cyberspace the rules of the game have

changed. precedents people out investigates dissent from ation and democracy part too. the nature of news as it breaks although thousands of women have reported other sexual atrocities in. much higher with detailed coverage nearly fifty schools took part in the drive each one responsible for collecting a different school supplies clothing from around the world. are still very new here but these players are very confident they won't be able to leave maybe one day. but . getting to the heart of the matter if. the bill calls you today. would you accept facing the realities what do you think reunification would look like there are two people think the peace corps unification is the only option for prosperity you. hear their story on talk to al-jazeera every weekly news cycle

brings a series of breaking stories but it was in the truck didn't happen on the boy told through the eyes of the world's journalists the images of. the listening post as we turned the cameras on the media and focus on how they report on the stories that matter the most. serious someone from the country who guides you to this story of the bottom line tells us who wrote the post on al-jazeera. you're watching al-jazeera these are all top news stories rescuers in thailand have begun to free a truck football team from a flooded cave the head of the mission's. very ready for the operation they've been trapped underground for more than two weeks emergency crews had been worried about

weather conditions hampering the rescue. there are thirteen international and five tie in navy seal divers involved in this process we're being told there's a two to one ratio with the boys who are being brought out two divers per each boy and then we know based on previous plans that the air tank will be carried by one of those two divers with each boy now it's expected this whole process to take about ten hours so it's going to take it's going to go into the evening hours probably about nine pm local time when we possibly will see the first boy emerge from the cave the same way they went in just over two weeks ago neil bonnett from new zealand diving says preventing the boys from panicking will be crucial for the time you know the time that we really like them john. lennon going to be in full because of the fundamental laws in the mail it's really about leaving the situation placing rob in front of the. schools are never going to happen in this situation in

the normal situation you would have experienced professionals not my neighbors we would need some success and not someone who simply is not a little bit a little bit for someone who's not sweating the refractor is trying to keep that element out of the wife because that's that was designed to assist them with a nuisance a problem come to the rescue with a product on the next to be a danger to the rescuers much as the. the u.s. secretary of state has reaffirmed that north korea is committed to complete denuclearization like pump a brief the foreign ministers of south korea and japan on his discussions with north korean officials in pyongyang he also said the north has agreed to talks in july and to discuss repatch relating the remains of u.s. soldiers who died during the korean war. the road ahead will be difficult and challenging and we know critics will try to minimize the work that we've achieved

but our allies like the republic of korea and japan president trump and i believe that peace is worth the effort. and that's something that we all want as allies we share and are committed to the same goal the fully verified final denuclearization north korea has agreed to by chairman kim jong il japan's prime minister shinzo says rescuers are working around the clock to help victims of floods and landslides at least sixty five people have died in fifty nine the missing after days of downpours more than one and a half million people have been ordered to leave their homes. the sudanese foreign minister says south sudan's warring parties have agreed a power sharing deal reinstating rice vice president regional leaders have been mediating talks in uganda to end the civil war a similar deal was signed in twenty fifteen but fell apart a year later the wars killed tens of thousands of displaced millions since twenty thirty. it's agreed in principle.

we'll work. together with his brother. for the sake of peace understand reality so it's true that it's agreed to will be having. vice president of. the company president of congenial. vice president haiti has suspended a proposal to nearly double fuel prices after violent protests at least three demonstrators died in the capital port au prince friday. and host russia has been knocked out of the world cup by croatia who won in a penalty shoot out russia at level two wall late into extra time in the quarter final gracious called the decisive penalty to send their team into their very first semifinal since one nine hundred ninety eight and they get to play england who beat sweden two nil perry maguire head of the ball home to make it one nearly twenty ninth minute then in the second half delhi seal the win with another header those

were the headlines here on al-jazeera more news in half an hour next we continue with the trial of a dictator to stay with us. this is the first time an african head of state is to be tried by a special african tribe you know. he sent abhay the president of chad from nine hundred eighty two to nine hundred ninety is on trial for crimes against humanity war crimes and acts of torture.

i gave it a fish he said listen to and put in africa much of this just this. last week but also this must have been brought up for us a poker face must suck notebook or i want to move or i got to be set up i'm sure on that shit you're not a pundit did buy them vince think i'm going to. this is. the. to my end yvonne is another a put what you muddy to. say there's just donaghy and then the manhunt is on by doing so. there was a group of us who said no we are never going to give up we were going to fight this until his and heartbreak died or went to court.

you'll lose a son. roxy. made them the least you. did that make you nimo see most young kids from eleven said they saw or known the me. victim. the people you can. set the most documenting. systolic a party. death a lemon that there may come for this immunity the victim who can do some pvp that part of what they saw of what they despise. they more this c.p.c. did to seche a cause they couldn't dishonorably. him with the wolf. is

an aberrated not speak a single word during the eight months of his trial. not looking once of the hundreds of victims that gave their testimonies day to day. the stubborn silence of a dictator denying the legitimacy of the court. when the police arrested him in his villa in the capital city of senegal it's an upgrade had been living as a free man for twenty three years despite having had an international arrest

warrant. in exile in senegal since the fall of his regime in one nine hundred ninety few believe that he would ever be arrested. on it they didn't know he had. that scope will move on i will abuzz legality finally city. or two to click on he said to me who who simply said i bring some idiot give says you then next a shift in africa. you know african near the end up against indy car this africa . count on this in. all the necessary evidence to indict is an arbitrary had been painstakingly gathered over fifteen years ago by a few survivors and with the support of activist reed brody. nicknamed the dictator hunter he investigated is an arborist dreaded political police force the d.d.s.

. that task to stamp out those who allegedly opposed brice regime. within these buildings abandoned by the d.d.s. reed brody made a major discovery. go into the building and there you know in room after room ankle deep tens of thousands of documents. documents had not been touched you know for seven or eight years and they were just strewn across the floor. and we started to bend down and pick up these documents. and we realized that this was these were the files of his and hob ray's political police. sent out he says system very tough it was awful. there were spying reports and they were the lists of people who died in prison i

mean this was everything you know that we needed you know to to build a solid legal case you know. i'm going to give you a minute because we'll go over let's go over these two hundred fifty something the victims association actually spent six months putting these documents together and we put them in a database. we were able to count the names of one thousand two hundred eight people who died in detention or you know or killed twelve thousand three hundred forty one victims of arbitrary arrests and of torture.

that did this. seem to go do you diction. i think he did mean he doesn't make it. super visit. direction about how big. the cream will meet him this and have a new sample. infix your. sample is on. their desk say lafever to have them pass on such shows that you eat the pretty when you know the political markings of odyssey i like that this. is your ice team in norman depends on what. i don't need victim lintian can fix your did not commit suicide and she.