Countries have dubbed held efforts in combating terrorism with it militarily financially or in terms of political and intelligence cooperation and those are the headlines on aljazeera inside story is coming up next and a reminder you can always keep up to date with all the news on our website aljazeera dot com. A number of International Brands have pulled the ad for us from you tube its in response to a u. K. Investigation that found the video sharing site running ads next to inappropriate videos of children so how should we release online content this is inside story. Hello there and welcome to the program im nora you tube is the worlds most Popular Video sharing site one point five billion users watch and upload videos on the website which makes it a natural fit for advertises but the company has come under fire after a u. K. Based newspaper found out of its running alongside inappropriate videos of children and comments the times investigation found there were many videos of preteen girls which were then lights and commented on by hundreds of paedophiles one such clip of a young girl drew six point five million views well several Companies Including chocolate maker laws have pulled their ads from you tube which is owned by google newspapers said the site has allowed sexualized imagery of children to be easily searchable and also criticized the company for not launching its contents. And a Statement Bank said we take this matter very seriously and suspended the Advertising Campaign as soon as we became aware of it as always our Digital MarketingAgency Applied filters to prevent our advertising appearing alongside inappropriate content and were now investigating how the situation arose on chocolate make a man is also said we have taken the decision to suspend immediately suspend all our Online Advertising on you tube and google globally until we have confidence that appropriate safeguards are in place we will not advertise on you tube and google well in response the you tube spokesman said there shouldnt be any ads running on this content and we are working to urgently fix this the Times Newspaper spoke to a member of googles volunteer trusted Flagger Program which monitors inappropriate content on the site he said that just three unpaid volunteers were responsible for rooting out child inappropriate content of agate say there are at least fifty thousand active predators on you tube the company is aware of the scale of the problem the trust of laggards told the times that they have reported over Twelve Thousand predators to you tube since organist ok well lets bring in our panel now and joining us in london nishant sastry a senior lecturer in informatics at Kings College in london and reading in u. K. Susan rose a marketing reputation expert to Henley Business School and joining us via skype from malmo sweden are all balkan who describes himself as a cyborg rights activists will very well welcome to all of you are im going to start with you first were just very briefly tell us what is a cyborg activist. Well a cyborg rights activist its basically someone who defends the rights of human beings at digital age our relationship to Technology Today is that a cyborg to its organ so when i use a phone i extend my mind and thereby extend my cell using that phone when i store a thought not just my head but on my phone so it makes perfect sense to include that falling within the boundaries of myself and. By consequence to include to protect it within human rights law so things like surveillance then become an abuse of the cell which i think is a very important point Going Forward if we want to protect personhood in the digital age so thats thats why i call myself a cyborg rights act and its not because i have implants its because i believe that anyone anyone who uses modern Technology Today its a site for ok so if in that context what is your view on this subject saying these ads. Inappropriate content in this particular inappropriate content is scantily clad young girls and boys. Its horrible but we have to understand what the who are problem here is and the core problem is that you tube and google and facebook they would like us to believe that their public spaces they would want us to believe that there are parks but what they really are are shopping malls theyre privately owned their own to controlled by these corporations in the case of you tube Alphabet Incorporated and of course Alphabet Incorporated is responsible for whatever is is displayed in its premises. And so what they want to believe that theyre a public place theyre not its privately owned and this has ramifications for both our human rights because of course their Business Model is based on advertising but not traditional advertising surveillance that based advertising ad. In tracking and profiling everything that you do so this has ramifications for our human rights and it has the ramifications for free speech and democracy what does it mean that we no longer have public space anymore in the digital age that all of our Public Places are privately not ok oh this isnt following on from that and if if is are all says you chip is responsible for whats displays why are we saying these ads a pairing of of these particular video is. Well or im not a technical expert on how that happens in terms of the algorithms and so on but i believe it happens because a platform such as facebook each to google etc havent yet accepted the responsibility that that Business Model gives them we just hope that the Business Model is very different from the traditional advertising model that held prior to the internet survival so prior to that. The brand owner had a lot of control over where their advertising would be placed when how and so on and what we see now are in effect what they call themselves are Tech CompaniesFacebook Google and so on view themselves as Tech Companies but theyre not they are Media Companies theyre media owners and they are placing advertising and taking money so their customer is not you and i who post our pictures on to facebook or in our video on you tube their customers are these Global Brands who are paying lots of money and i think that they havent quite recognized their responsibility as a media owner who provides that platform ok but to what extent susan does the responsibility also lie with these companies which are using these platforms as a great platform for their efforts there is some responsibility on their part as i say from a technical point of view you would have to speak to a Digital Agency or maybe one of our other guests about how technically that happens but in effect they should know where their advertising is being placed they should know that the the web sites it is a period when it pops up as we all know on banners and so on but my understanding is that they dont always have total control i think the big change thats going on with regard to Digital Marketing from traditional marketing is we might call it before the internet arrived is that the measure of control has shifted and maybe shifted away from the brand owner and i think what were seeing at the moment is the brand owners making a big statement that they want to wrestle back that control and be the ones that state where their their their advertising their p. R. Messages are appearing i i believe that the idea that its public versus private is an important one and we all use facebook but its free to us and i think that a lot of consumers individual members of the public dont realize how much what they put up publicly doesnt belong to them after a while it belongs to the Tech Companies who use it as a mechanism with the demo. Graphics that go with it to actually sell space to advertisers so every time you tell facebook or or any of these platforms your date of birth your location whether youre in a relationship or not all of these nuggets of information get used by the large brands through their digital agencies to decide where to place their advertising and i think theres a responsibility on the part of the brands and also on the part of the platform itself to know where those those will appear i dont think actually this is just an issue for big brands i think we should all be horrified that this kind of content is even appearing on these paths absolutely that is the bigger issue here was certainly i what i hope to touch on that is a little later in this discussion i also want to touch on the impact of companies withdrawing their advertising on Companies Like you tube but first of all on this and its been raised a couple of times that were not actually sure about the Technology Behind placing adverts on certain content on you tube but you were able to shed some light on that how the adverts get placed. So this is a very complicated go to them that gets used to decide which advertisement gets placed with which content so essentially what happens is the content has some properties associated with it and you the user who is viewing the content also have some properties such as your age your demographics where you are from and so forth and the advertisers say i want certain kinds of content on which my ad should be placed and perhaps more importantly. Advertisers would like to target certain demographics so certain age groups are certain genders or whatever and based on a combination of these factors and also based on a combination of who which advertiser actually zeal he wants to use or who is viewing the video right now the most so who is willing to pay the most for that particular slot on that particular video and advertiser does get placed and theres actually an Online Auction which happens in many cases in order to decide which advertiser gets the slot so thats. Perhaps one of the most complicated but sophisticated technologies that we have hey i just want to jump in there have some level let me then to understand how for example were looking at Companies LikeDeutsche Bank care how. That would end up perhaps on a video of a preteen age wearing a nice how do those two match up. Yes so if so the efficacy with which this. With which this i would have options runs depends a lot on how accurate the information is now maybe i have told google that i am actually a child who is thirteen year old and then if i am watching child video then. A childs ad might be put in front of me google might also have made inferences based on the sites that i was it and if it so happens that i have a little child and that child is viewing a lot of child like videos maybe cartoons or whatever on my youtube account google might very well think that i am a little child even if i havent told exactly what my age is and when i go off and watch something than a choice me out of appropriate for a child and i imagine they exact opposite thing happening if i and my child are both watching using the same account and then if she goes on my youtube account then she might see an ad thats only should be shown to and i doubt so theres mismatches that can happen because of an act this is information now another thing which could happen is that deitch a bank might just be saying oh i just want someone who is within a particular age range with our necessarily saying i dont want to place ads on a certain class of videos now if thats the case its the set of videos that match their criteria and that their ad will be considered for and it could happen that some of them are highly inappropriate it could be extremists that it could. Child pornography unfortunately our how damaging is this full image. Well its damaging but its not like it hasnt happened before i mean this keeps happening with maybe even increasing frequency and every time it does we see a couple of brands go oh were going to suspend our advertising on this platform and then they go back i mean part of the problem is we dont have alternatives theyre not called platform monopolies for nothing theyre model quality and i think we also have to really take a step back and look at this greater Business Model and ask ourselves whether this is the kind of world we want to live in in the future where we are not citizens but consumers and more than that were like minded talk to before because thats whats happening here you know we have were being tracked across across the web google for example is one of the biggest trackers on the web seventy to eighty percent of web sites when youre browsing them track you google can track you across those websites youre profiled and then youre auctioned off so you know is this is this model what we want for the future because its not the only way to build technology we can build technologies that are owned and controlled by people these are decentralized systems we can build them in a way in which theyre verifiable in which the algorithms are transparent in which the code that actually makes them up its free and open so anyone can look at them so we know how to build ethical technologies where North Building them because of Silicon Valleys Business Model which i call People Farming which is which makes boyces extractive models i think theres a greater conversation to be had here you know about this whole Business Model in general and the kind of effect its having on society ok i mean season like it old not to me it seems that you shave is head to stay huge company is a huge platform and as are all the same just and we did have a situation just some months ago back in march we had next of a days of hate speech and some of those companies that throw up their arms in horror and withdrew and now back seven months later abseiling very happily on you tube again. Yes and i agree with the previous speaker that unfortunately what we have now is is a near monopoly of a very few number of very very large they call themselves Tech Companies i think i think mostly Facebook Google you tube like to think of themselves as Tech Companies and as i said before in actual fact they are monopolizing now the platform for the voice you know the voice of of business but other all the other voices as well noncommercial voices that want to have a say you know it has you know it has been social media has become the panini cation mechanism that we have and the channels need to be they need to be more diverse that they remain as they are at the moment and as we know television itself has had a big reduction in terms of its advertising spend as this shifts over to digital and i agree that until we can somehow change that model i dont think that anybody really intentionally developed the model facebook emerged emerged in a very different form when it first was started by Mark Zuckerberg but it has become now the main the main channel and i think that what is really at stake here is is reputation that is the word that i would use that people are concerned about i dont believe these brands are doing this for any kind of you know commercial reason in terms of p. R. Or anything like that theyre doing it because they know that this is a hugely damaging to their reputation and these days social responsibility or we sometimes call Corporate Social Responsibility is hugely important to big brands its no longer just about selling products or Services Also about how your food by you or your holiday holders not just you know not only you know your shareholder going that are going to say well were going back in march did say that it would review its policies and yet it seems as if nothing has changed and yet the companies are back so really how much do they actually care. Yes. Well i believe that there wont be change until these brands make more of a stance even more of a stance and theyre doing now as you say just pulling out for a short period and then going back on is not going to do it you know there needs to be a really significant i think quite collective response by a large Global Organization to say you know we wont do business with you we will we will have to revert back for a period of time to the more traditional channels and until they actually make a longer term stance against the likes of facebook or sit down with facebook and google and these companies and say were not happy about this this model and were not happy about the the kind of lessening of control that weve got over where our brands appear we need to be able to i think pull back the balance of power this sense of how much as you tube actually care about this i mean that graphic that i read before about the trusted flaggers a group of volunteers who scour the web scour you tube for inappropriate content specifically looking just three of them specifically looking for child abuse or that kind of gray area where children are being abused by the videos that are being put up the whistleblower there said the year chip knows about the scale of this problem that there are some fifty thousand active predators on its site but not doing anything about it. I think they are doing quite a bit about these kind of things so there. Should be teams of people. In particular has something but i know that lots of Tech Companies have large teams of people looking at it and the whole program address to see if i understand it correctly is a volunteer program so if People Volunteer if people feel that this is an important issue for them they can volunteer and help flag content and weve seen this happen when weve seen this happen in a very successful manner with the p. D. F. So we keep it is the largest encyclopedia of humanly known content and its all completely well into the organized and what arent yet on. What i think we need is basically a huge increase in the number selfies just a program. That can consist of concerned members of the public why why you didnt hold volunteers say why why should why wouldnt you choose a huge company that makes an enormous amount of money not regulate itself. Well a i think they should if theyre not and over i think they are but i prefer not to should be having a team of people looking at it but i think in the end what it comes down to is its a its a problem of scale so what are the neighbors people to do is any producer of content anybody who who puts up a view who makes a video can put it up on this platform and this is actually one of the biggest positive things that were missing in this whole debate is that not in this particular debate but in the in the debate around who owns the content and platform of the all of the produce and so forth is that if i see something wrong going on if i see lets say. Somebody being mugged or something in the middle of london i can take a video of it and put it up on line people have been that people have done that with you know things like cyclists being abused by car drivers there are lots of radios up there which show show these kind of interest is happening and now if it were up to the b. B. C. Or aljazeera it might come to come down to an editorial decision on whether or not that particular abuse would fit on a thirty minute timeslot or tower but you tube doesnt have the structure and which just came so yeah shown to you that there is we are going to go video so it cant control what gets uploaded but there is the other point is now that. The times are saying that the videos here the sexualized images of these children are far too easily searchable that the barriers in place and then once you get one video up the algorithms then drop a whole list of more videos where you can see all sorts of things from toddlers naked in the bottom as i mentioned before a preteen in her nightie rolling around on the bed so theres just nothing that stops these videos perpetuating i mean that is a detail of the system that you tube has built and i guess again the bigger question here is what are we asking these large monopolies to do part of it is i think there is a call for more about the china list approach where. We are sheltered from certain things which and i told the agreeing when you when you talk about something is around us as possibly you know. Contents of little children that is inappropriate thats thats very clear we dont want that right but it doesnt end there either what are we asking them to be were asking them to be better sensors were asking them to take a lot many more decisions they already do all these timelines are algorithmic as you said so they decide what we see and what we dont see and if were if we agree that most of our news is coming from these platforms from facebook except for a and you see whats happening with for example google reducing the importance of posts from r. P. Because u. S. Government doesnt agree with r. T. Or think that the Foreign Agent so you know google being a us company reduces their importance in their news speeds what kind of again you know world are we heading towards so if they do their jobs really well and they start becoming really great at censorship as well maybe for content you dont agree with but maybe also for things that the u. S. Government doesnt agree with china maybe you know something that aljazeera is going to put out is going to be deemed inappropriate at some point were asking them to be arbiters of reality arbiters of truth and i think again this is the greater question are we comfortable with a handful of Silicon Valley companies being the arbiters of truth for the world at large im not ok i mean given that its argument phase and do you think that if you think its safer then for companies to withdrawal from advertising on social media old to get the given its unpredictable nature is this is something not a platform where companies should go. Well i think that they have got to the position now where they have to sort of stand up they have to stand up and kind of push back on the the tech digital platforms and start to come to some kind of mutual agreement about what weve just heard the speaker talk about that this is a recent need to responsibility that we all share i dont think we should put the put the onus totally on the digital platforms although they do have a responsibility i think that brands have always had a responsibility social responsibility about the things they say and do and so on but i think also we as individuals who use these platforms you know we as parents and parents should be responsible about how their children are using them we as individuals and what we put on and i think that everybody has to become much more aware that everything you post is is out there now its public and its a statement and it and this i am quite horrified at some of things i sometimes see on social media and i really wonder whether people realize what where thats going to use going to see it and how its going to be used so i think theres a three way responsibility here theres those people that put the content up be they individuals or organizations theres the platforms themselves and i also do think that there is a sort of governmental level of responsibility you know these kind of social platforms started off as a really quite innovative and new way of having a social space a social space for people to communicate and talk and so on and they have become commercialized without a doubt and once we move into a commercial and now political position for these spaces i think its become bigger than just saying you know its easy to blame the rounds and blame them because theyre paying the money but i dont think that its as simple as that weve all got to take i think we all have to leave the discussion that with the thought that responsibility belongs to all of us all of us thank you all very much for joining us in this ancestries susan rose and. And thank you to you for watching you can see the program again any time by a website this aljazeera dot com for further discussion. Facebook page if you. Inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter. A. J. Inside story. And the whole team here. Short films of hope. And inspiration a series of short personal stories that highlight the human triumph against the odds that. Aljazeera selects at this time the nature of news as it breaks the last time senegal qualified for the world cup was in two thousand to fifteen years on and hope to do even better in russia next year with detailed coverage try to imagine that only seven years ago people were living right here farming trained now the city has taken over their land from around the world donald trump is promising a major policy announcement on trade a potential chast to khorat a missed opportunity rot. In syria thousands have disappeared without a trace. 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