He was arrested for smuggling rhino horns worth over one Million Dollars near the North Eastern border province of knock on porno him its alleged that boche and his family contributed to much of asias illegal trade for more than a decade the thing post is next. You know Mark Zuckerberg announcing my. Church to your church as he left public on my brand new york. Going on air going back to them either on crist for the last two years or what facebook is doing. Hello im richard gives birth in europe the listening post here are some of the stories were tracking this week facebook makes an about turn on news content what the new policy means for media organizations and you the news consumer a legal battle looms in the philippines where the authorities want to take down an online news site defectors from north korea and the treatment their stories get on south Korean Television and spending quality time online more please you need to have a well educated understanding of how bad things will get if youre not on your phone the facebook is taking a big chunk of the news out of its news feed and in so doing retreating from a crucial part of its business having transformed the way billions of people consume and share news online in some cases the way news organizations produce it facebook is junking that approach replacing news with more content from your friends something had to give venturing into the News Business has brought facebook revenues but also a boatload of trouble the platform has been blamed for the spread of fake news misinformation and hateful content online spare a thought though for news publishers many of them have made big changes to their Business Models to max out on facebook as a way to get to audiences theyve been left holding the bag. But the platforms founder Mark Zuckerberg is backing away his critics saying hes doing right by the people who matter most to him is users are starting point this week is facebook Silicon Valley headquarters menlo park california. In the words of Mark Zuckerberg were making a major change to how we build facebook he wrote that the feedback he was getting set the Public Contact including posts from media was crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other that marked the beginning of the reigning in of the news component in facebooks news feed to be replaced by more personal face coming when it did in early january zuckerberg snow read like a lengthy new years resolution someone swearing off some bad habits recently acquired what it really was was a business decision. Look facebook is a business its a publicly traded Company Every announcement that Mark Zuckerberg makes is a business decision another motivating factor is that theyre losing the demographic battle younger people are much less engaged with facebook than ever before so i dont know facebook is going to have been doing a push towards more media content on the news feed them in pushing for video and a lot of different publishers have been creating video thats specifically for facebook someone it sounds like theyre going to change that now my devaluing what publisher is annoying and promoting what and friends are saying well i think facebook is trying to be altruistic i mean on one level you want to say hes trying really hard you know and this is all new to him hes not a news guy the fact that there is this platform that has two billion users is a brand new thing and nobody really knows what youre supposed to do with a. And the good thing about facebook is theyre always been willing to shift and change thats one of the reasons they have lasted for so long we have to be a little cynical about it because were looking at a very very Large Business and a Large Business that is basically under attack at this moment. Lawmakers on both sides of the atlantic have made it clear theyre coming after facebook the u. S. Congress is looking into the sights of fact on the two thousand and sixteen president ial election when it was manipulated not just through posts from russian troll farms but through the placement of political ads from foreign actors that facebook was paid for thats a leave the European Union has passed a law that goes into effect in four months it will restrict the way personal data can be collected stored and used and proposes heavy fines for Companies Like facebook and google should they break the new rule germany has a new law allowing for fines of up to fifty Million Euros if ace book or any other major social media player fails to take down obvious cases of hate speech and fake news quickly francis threatened to find facebook for taking user data from whatsapp which it also owns without user consent the list goes on others have said things theyre facing is this how they handle illegal content like child pornography on their platforms how they handle content that could be damaging to our National Security interests like terrorism videos and expects lawmakers in the u. S. But also in europe to take a heavy look at what antitrust means for these platforms how do we want them to get so big how do we let them grow to the point where theyre eating other businesses and should we be regulating them in a way that sort of clamps down on that dominance facebook and a lot of the other Tech Companies who are called to account by the United States congress among other legislative bodies around the world and in one of those hearings a so. Feinstein from california so the state in which you know facebook resides basically said you have to be the ones to do something about it or we will and so there is you know great incentive on the part of facebook to do something the fact is that Facebook Changes their algorithm all the time but they dont always make an announcement about it so the fact that they made an announcement about it is probably a response to that very challenge the changes to facebooks news feed will have a far greater effect on news producers than consumers consider the lengths that publishers have gone to to make their material work on the platform the instant articles feature launched in two thousand and fifteen forced news outlets to reformat their articles in order to conform to facebooks mobile. All those social videos on the site news outlets telling their stories through text onscreen sparing facebook is the bother of turning up the sound shooting or formatting their videos vertically rather than the more traditional horizontal view those innovations were made because thats what facebooks layout demand the relationship that news organizations have had with facebook has always been complicated now having been given notice of being deemphasized in the news feed they have a right to feel aggrieved jilted and fearful of what the future holds. Well its gone a lot of publishers really freaked out publishers had really gotten to a point where the vast majority of them were getting their traffic from social media people so they get their traffic from social media they really mean facebook with its two billion users versus twitter with. Three hundred million users and too many of them have gone into a habit where theyre creating new stories and just basing their whole Business Model on driving traffic from facebook however it will force a lot of publishers to think more strategically about their business about their consumers and their audience will force them to think about audience instead of traffic i think in the long run it will be easier for publishers to make a business when you think about developing inning audience as opposed to just gaming the facebook traffic it will be a lot easier in some cases for publishers because theyre not going to invest millions of dollars to create the products that works just for facebook fans been changes that algorithm allowed to make smaller players and lose their viewership by twenty percent and it takes them to three months to get back because of how these systems are being changed under the hood and how they have going to respond to them so i think i guess theres a lot to be sent him on the accountability and lack like in the lack of transparency and responsibility around the content. Coming changes to the news feed will be significant but they will not fix facebooks problem with fake news new stories will still be on the site especially if your friends have liked or share them and given what we know about social media ecosystems news bubbles and comfort zones fake news will still find audiences its noteworthy that Mark Zuckerberg post on the changes did not even mention fake news because he knows facebook has no solution to the problem so its just distancing itself from. The things that show up on your news feed are things that the people who youre friends with are. Engaged with it doesnt mean that the things that your friends are engaged with are any truer than they were before anything theyre gets lots of people excited about something is going to shoot up to the top of your news feed so it in fact is reinforcing this notion of viral content so i dont know how it it actually solves the problem of fake news i almost wonder if it gets worse because the way that facebook came to this situation is that there was a financial incentive for people to create hyper partisan hyperbolic news on the platform the more outrageous the content was the more engagement it received the more traffic it would drive back to these content makers websites the more traffic they have the more ad revenue they gained and so if theyre going to focus on getting people to gauge you can imagine that the type of people who create that hyper partisan echo chamber like content are going to take advantage of that. Were discussing other media stories that are on our radar with one of our producers will yong will last a month in me and mark two journalists from reuters were arrested theyre now facing up to fourteen years in prison who are they and what have they been accused thanks richard the journalists in question a while known and who are covering the Burmese Military campaign against range of militants in state theyve been charged with possessing classified documents under myanmars official secrets act which is a law that dates back to nine hundred twenty three when burma was still a british colony the issue at the core of the story seems to be the discovery of a mass grave containing ten dead ranger which was announced by the Burmese Military shortly after the journalists were arrested so what are we looking at here a clumsy attempt on the part of the authorities to control the narrative on the range a story well it was actually Police Officers who handed those classified documents to the journalists immediately prior to their arrest was that the police set up we simply dont know we may learn more on tuesday when there will be a hearing on the case but in the meantime the burmans army has admitted that Security Forces did participate in the mass killing which is a reversal of their original outright denial that is in itself a significant step however the jailing and the charges against these two journalists will no doubt have a Chilling Effect on future reporting youve also been looking into a story in the philippines regarding an independent online news outlet that weve reported on here before at the listening post possible shutdown of this site due to questions over its ownership what is the story with rappler well rappler certainly isnt one of president rhodri go to tertius favorite news sites theyve reported very critically on his socalled war on drugs and theyve investigated also his personal fortune what we now have is a ruling from the philippine securities and Exchange Commission that says rappler brought has. Can Foreign Investment laws and if we think back to last year in his annual address president deter to actually accused rappler of being wrong by americans the truth is that under six percent of raptors investment comes from the group which is set up by even found a pyramid but those are investments that specifically prohibit any say in the running of the company rappler says its the speed and the lack of due process that has convinced them that this case has been politicized but the wrapper site is still up and accessible is it not yes for now they have fifteen days to challenge that decision in the Appeals Court and from what were hearing its likely that this is the beginning of a long legal fight assuming that there is rule of law in this country we will go through the process we will continue to hold our accountable and we will continue to tell the truth no matter what as the editors are rappler put it this is a press freedom case which has constitutional implications so if necessary theyre prepared to take this as high as the Supreme Court ok thanks will. Were turning our lens toward south korea now onto a unique genre of programming one could call defector t. V. Despite sharing the same peninsula South Koreans dont know as much about their northern neighbors as you might think most of what they do know comes from the testimonies of those who have sought asylum in the south the defector t. V. Formula takes a reality t. V. Approach it puts Asylum Seekers on the air explores what their lives were like before defecting and even sets them up with romantic partners from the south the producers say theyre out to improve understanding pave the way towards reunification of countries divided since the end of World War Two but the skeptics arent buying that they say the shows are heavy on misrepresentation sensationalism and sexist stereotyping listening posts Christina Martinez now on defector t. V. In south korea. December two thousand and eleven south koreas channel eight launches the new program. It was a hybrid part talks and it was. Kind of an accident at the. Time and so one of the. Parts beauty contests. The only three requested contestants had to be defectors from north korea. Who tell you that. Theres never been a program about north korea the food north korea was only ever seen through the news which kept talking about Nuclear Issues the north korean army how poor north korea that was it for the first time now my way to meet you showed the real story of how north Korean People live the culture they want to occur know whatever. It has helped break down prejudices i think the program prepares us for unification though maybe one day but. It was the beginning of a trend south korean channels eager to find a different lens through which to present north korea could finally break away from the usual portrayal so funny and human rights abuses. And adds an element of entertainment. The question of whether they break down prejudices or even for some is difficult in fact the matter is they mostly do both simple tenuously they certainly seek to convey information about north korea theres a very famous song a young boy appears on north korean t. V. Singing this. Song and then one of the panelists on one of these shows will sing the song in a way that mimics that north korean boy singing style now. What was. The man who was little or was. In the editing suite or in some of the the ways they are framed they have the tendency to reinforce some prejudices as well. To put the original intention of those programs was to depict the harmonious future of a unified korea by showing how well defectors integrate into south Korean Society that youre in. But they mostly show young women describing their struggle to defect from north korea. I was told she. This gives South Koreans a distorted impression of defectors and it creates prejudices about the country upon them dancing or that the. Seventy percent of north korean defectors are women and the ones that find themselves on t. V. Often end up reinforcing our cultural stereotypes the beautiful north korean women are the best partners for south korean men. Of. Shows like love unification the Young North Korean women are paired with south korean men who proceed to instruct them on the ways of the modern developed country in which they now live in the message and there is less than subtle conforms to the south korea nationalistic narrative that north korea is the weaker female nation. That needs protecting by the strong the must go inside the culvert. The concern is that such a calicut showed him a chore and objectified image of these women is then extended to all north korean defectors and to the north korean population in general. So South Koreans may end up looking down on North Koreans or thinking we can treat them careless when. Were done and pain. Theres another issue that doesnt help with the perception of North Koreans on occasion some defectors testimonies have been sketchy and inconsistent parky on me is a defector who became a celebrity after a run on now on my way to meet you has stories attracted a lot of attention one of almost more about underwood. But as discrepancies script into her accounts skepticism group here and free to see a real. Or thinking one human but its almost impossible to fact check the stories and. Defectors themselves say to report in the truth or dont bother me matter how its that persons problem if they say one thing here another thing there it is hard to say that north Korean People do that or that these programs make them do that their memory may change or they may remember Something Else at another time but i dont think the programs are to blame our homeland this. There are such cases but at the same time poverty in north korea is real and its also true that north korea ignores human rights tenants of house over to go with. It clear on water to the more so we need to see the story it may not be his or her only story they may have heard it from someone else who made it there but even when that happens the story exists. We need to be a little bit empathetic about the way collective memory and individual memory interact with each other a lot of these people left north korea several years ago as many as twenty in some cases quite a lot of them were very young when they left so. In accuracies in their stories should not automatically be put down to malice. Im going. As a younger has expanded so too have the narratives on the publicly owned channel e. T. A. s other good friends brings together the north and south korean teenagers in a more sober settings. Just coming out of the book to try to get out from in the music and on the web some of the younger defectors have begun self publishing on a streaming platform in africa t. V. Which he says sort of south korean you tube i dont quite a pretty good until i searched and couldnt get anyone to click that so i did it heres john i am pleased self broadcasters interact with the viewers directly through the chat boxes that accompany their broadcast was much oh. Im tempted to watch. Oh. Im allowing for a relatively unfiltered. Discussion between South Koreans and North Koreans without any of the production training. And they discover that theyre not so different after all but have these shows actually helped in their stated goal of unifying the two careers you dont. While these programs contribute to making South Koreans interested in north korea the majority still think that its a good state should treat all of. My eye and these programs make people think how is it possible for us to live with them no way and so they end up reinforcing anti unification ideas and see how this kind of. Calls north korea is always described as a poor state its people are starving their human rights are infringed people see it as pathetic and they feel a sense of alienation but over time the image of north korea here is improved a lot people are realizing that they can actually communicate with North Koreans so the shows are having a positive effect and that angle has a thong. In a situation where the stories about north korea remain scarce politicized and controlled defectors are rare source of news that the information they provide gets turned into in for tame and says as much about South Koreans the Television Market and viewing habits as he does about the neighbors to the north. Finally back to facebook when Mark Zuckerberg announced those changes to the news feed last week he acknowledged it might mean that people will spend less time on his social media platform luckily though for facebook an american comedian j. P. Sears has come up with an online guide on how to become more rather than less addicted to your social media platforms and the Mental Health implications that come with that which he insists are all for the good will see you next time youre at the listening post studies show that people check their phones one hundred fifty times per day this is horrible and i think we can do better i envision a world where people have enough Anxious Energy that theyre driven to check their phones at least six hundred times per day. Always being on my phone gives me the thrill of being manically busy while im actually wasting my time and if theres something happening that you dont know about then other people know something useless that you dont know notice that the thoughts and feelings that you dont want to experience are in here so youll want to position your phone here and when you do notice it your eyes are pointed at your phone and that keeps your attention out here which means youre not paying attention to whats going on here which is ideal go ahead. When youre encountering Something Wonderful it cant bring you joy unless you hold your phone between you and to transfer it to your social media theres a whole world inside your phone dont let it pass you by. Got a call ive got to take this. When diplomacy fields and fear sweeps in our borders are wide open wide open to drugs terrorists weve proven the barriers are built to impose division and its ill to sixtys instead of being an obstacle or do a whole wastes into became another obstacle to peace in a four part series al jazeera revisits the reasons for divisions in different parts of the world and the impact they have on both sides walls of shame at this time on aljazeera one of the really special things about working for aljazeera is that even as a camera woman i get to have so much empathy and contribution to a story i feel we cover this region better than anyone else would be for us as you know is that it turns the body but the good because you have a lot of people that are divided on political issues we are we the people we live to tell the real stories are just mended is to do we were indepth enemies and we dont feel inferior to the audience across the globe. And. Where every. Counting the cost why the jurys still out on despite wall streets delight we delve into chinas better than expected growth story and count the cost of negative publicity. Surrounding the cost at this time on aljazeera. Facing realities growing up when to do you realize that you were living in a special place the socalled secret city getting to the heart of the matter the me and more government calls you a gringo the terrorist hear their story on the talk to aljazeera at this time. How the im doing were done here in london our top stories on aljazeera a major hotel in the Afghan Capital kabul is under attack by gunmen not so cord into the into