Transcripts For ALJAZ Maria Ressa And Christopher Wylie 20240713

Solidarity is not only required by the values of the union but its also in the common interest more of whats happening in spain now with months ahead or in madrid. People are blaming the government because they didnt take action before hand because everybody knew what was going on we had the example of china we had eternally and they knew they didnt. They didnt prevent all of all of this coming so regional regional governments are responsible of all those that protective equipment for for Health Care Workers and for poor Family Police officers test kits and everything and theyre being delayed to come to to a country so we dont know we dont really know whats going to happen next people are concerned this last weekend we had many people taking their cars and going out for the cook to the cold storage going to the 2nd homes but these wiccan yesterday there was so on the television the restrictions on the police have reported that there were less people going out or taking the cars so i get i guess people with these figures that have been released today are who is saying it 10832 more. People have died in the past 24 hours people are more concerned and more concerned so i see people not moving around so much madrid being the epicenter or the ground 0 of the whole pandemic cannot cope anymore with the corpse of all that all of that bodies all the people have died that have died and the municipal funeral Funeral Company had to had to open an ice rink to to take their all the people that have died but the kind of hope there are any more and they have a range to set that set up everything in in in madrid scored so this situation is quite critical right now. New figures out of iran show the death toll rising past 2 and a half 1000 more than 3000 new infections as well bringing the total number of cases up to around 35000 irans president has been reassuring people the crisis will end soon and that the health care and Health System is ready to handle the strain of the outbreak. The us president signed a 2. 00 trillion dollars aid package to help people and businesses cope with the effects of the pandemic america does have the highest number of cases worldwide with more than 100000. 00 people infected interestingly chinas began easing its restrictions on the 11000000 people in holland where the outbreak was 1st reported back in december people are now allowed to enter the city thats been under lockdown for more than 2 months and. First of all it makes me very happy to see my family like my mother said we wanted to hurt but know its a special period so we cant hope to make any actions like although the epidemic situation in china has taken a turn for the better has not been completely destroyed from the route police in south africa have been struggling to enforce a 21 day nationwide lockdown which came into force friday midnight people are only allowed out of their homes to buy groceries or for Health Emergencies but large crowds have been gathering in the poor townships with social distancing is almost impossible because of the cramped Living Conditions. Some other news for you voters in guinea have overwhelmingly back to new constitution which paves the way for president alpha conde to stay in power for another 12 years opposition leaders boycotted sudans referendum that was delayed after observers raised concerns about the impartiality referendum led to months of violent protests in the killing of at least 32 people on polling day and dozens of people have been killed in fighting between rival forces near the libyan city of sirte the internationally recognized government of National Accord says at least 45 is loyal to the ward cleaver hafter and 23 of its own soldiers have died in violence resumed this week after a recent. The go youre up to date with the headlines on aljazeera studio b. Unscripted from london hes next. Thank. You why are journalists under attack because democracy is under attack and i realized i was working for something that was evil and i had been a part of actually creating it when Mark Zuckerberg essentially said that it is ok for politicians to lie that spells doom. My name is maria ressa and im a journalist and also the message that the government is sending is very clear be silent or your next i have received thousands of Death Threats on line. Thank you im Christopher Wiley im a Data Scientist but most people know me as the Cambridge Analytical whistleblower thanks but knew about Cambridge Analytical scheme since 2015 before the story broke facebook threatened to sue the guardian and then banned me for whistleblowing are revealed hard data is being manipulated to political gain without our consent thanks since rappler started reporting the president protect us that he drugged her i believe that she did leave charged and arrested if it makes you feel vulnerable but i think its quite right. Im inspired by how maria continues to stand up for the truth in the face of real danger. Chrysis revelations led to the largest danger Crime Investigation in history if we allow cheating in our democratic her thighs and we allow this amount what about next time what about the time after that we know firsthand what happens when social media is weaponize and the danger it now poses to our democracy. These around the world this is an existential moment and its time for us all to. Thank you so good to talk to you you figured out and then you created a system you taught yourself how to code you learned the data and then you built this whole system that was very efficient at modify behavior and then you decided to take it down when did you decide it was wrong when i 1st joined the company that later became Cambridge Analytic a c l group i joined a company that at the time was working on projects that were geared towards countered stream is an encounter radicalisation looking at how extremism spreads online and we got discovered by a guy by the name of steve bannon who won 3 short got a billionaire to acquire the company and what i saw was that. I had worked on a system that got essentially inverted to radicalize young men in the United States and you know witnessing the inception of an insurgency the campaign and so when i started seeing videos of people in focus groups who were so angry with things that were frankly untrue you know i realized i was working for something that was evil and i had you know been a part of actually creating it and i couldnt keep doing that its interesting when you said you were looking at it for a counter radicalisation at 1st i just. I came to it because. I was looking at how social Network Analysis spread the ideology of terrorism and we created rappler because if you can convince people to blow themselves up with this radical ideology why couldnt you have some things that are for good right thats why we created rappler but then when you started seeing the negative parts its hard to pull yourself out how to be a whistleblower what gave you the courage to do that yeah i think it was for me. You know growing up kind of as an outsider i was partly in a wheelchair when i was growing up because of a invisible disability and then i live on top of that sort of being queer i came out as a with the war but ive been coming out for my entire life and you know for me its that sense of otherness that and comfortable with being uncomfortable yeah that i think gave me a little bit of a notch to help me become become a whistleblower. But with setting up rappler and you know being on the outside i think youre going out there every single day pissing off a lot of people trying to. Do you find that you know your lifes journey sort of influences that oh gosh so i was born in the philippines and then moved to the United States when martial law is declared in 1972 but when i was with americans i never felt completely american and when im filled with for the peanos i dont feel completely filipino either so i guess its that its that otherness part of it right and that thats good training for journalists. Or whistle blowing or whistle blowing but i mean i do find that theres a bit of an overlap because not that i would ever call myself a journalist. But in some senses i feel similar theres something similar about that you know shoving uncomfortable information into peoples faces and annoying you have to Pay Attention to this and then. Feeling the consequences of that so i was going say thats the mission of journalism right you speak truth to power and youll know power doesnt like that. In your and i think you been speaking truth i mean theres a cost to yourself but you also seem to learn something more from each instance that youve done that has this been a good experience or a bad experience its a mixed bag i guess i mean i think its been on the whole a good experience for i have learned a lot. So how you know. You know after watching 2016 happen. And knowing so many things about what was going on. You know i learned i do feel compelled to speak uncomfortable truths. But at the same time you know. You know getting called to testify our congress you know as a 20 something game or living in london its not something that you really expects to be part of your life journey that was pretty intimidating is pretty intimidating to have you know the department of justice and f. B. I. Sitting behind me and giving me a subpoena after that. But i think i think on the whole its been a good experience because if you think back before 28 seen the idea of privacy or Data Protection you know the internet would be a mainstream political issue in the 2020 election and the primary ways would kind of be laughable so i feel like at least in that sense exposing wrongdoing and exposing the structures that facilitate and support that wrongdoing with Companies Like facebook yet have at least opened up an awareness into a conversation in our mainstream political discourse that i think is. Productive how easy is it to manipulate mass and im asking you i get frustrated a lot by the current sort of discussion about the election manipulation because it so focuses on the United States and to a slightly lesser extent britain. Because britain and the United States and im sure coming from the philippines you know this full well have been manipulating elections and democracy around the world for hundreds of years britain was a empire a speck in the eyes or you know the reason why you know the national drink in britain is tea and you know National Animal is a lion and you know these are not natural things here. And so i think the reason why people are so upset in the United States or in britain or other parts of europe is an American Voter now understands what it feels like to be an african voter because you know living in a country where youve got a gradually eroding. Information system where lies are everywhere where you dont know what to trust youve got Foreign Countries left right and center trying to manipulate you trick you deceive you and corruption rife in the administration looking at the philippines and something that id be interested in hearing your thoughts on coming from an x. U. S. Colony where you had a large country dictating the terms of how Government Works if you know to becoming independent and now having a large American Corporation run by a bunch of. Straight white dudes in america starting to influence at least what information is allowed or not allowed to exist or what gets amplified and promoted or what does thing in the philippines do you do you feel like there is a sort of. Neocolonialism happening online so youre the 1st person i heard say the colonialism never died it just moved on line right and i think in we talked about facebook as a 1st level which i mean frankly the collapse that roshan of our institutions began on facebook. What the description of the philippines Stanley Karnow wrote in our image and he described the philippines as a country that spent 450 years in a convent and 50 years in hollywood we were colonized by spain and then the United States and i think its ironic that the country that gave democracy is also the the place where Silicon Valley then has given someone like to tear down a bull scenario hes types of authoritarian. Leaders who work who are killing democracy the power to do it to manipulate people but i think we all know that the our countries in the global south bear the brunt of all the tech this issue and that have been made right i mean how do we get power how weve never really had a seat at the table in these things and we bear the worst do you think you should get a c. Or theobald sure thats part i mean part of the reason i can speak about it is because i can articulate it in a way that the west can understand you currently are. You know challenging. And allegedly and arguably corrupt regime what does it mean for you to say give us a seat at the table do you give a corrupt regime. A theater table to talk about now so i think one of the things this time show us is exactly how Human Behavior is universal regardless of culture in many ways because of very same things that manipulate americans and europeans are the very same things that manipulate us in the global south we just dont have the institutions to fight back and look how weak your institutions have gotten here. Behavioral modification system how do we fix it i think ive been a journalist for this is almost 35 years its never been as hard to work as a journalist as it is today i have to post bail 8 times my government filed 11 cases and invested 11 cases and investigations that year and then began arresting me and 21001st arrests was valentines day those over the valentine 00 and my government seems to work very well in february this february you know theyve theyve gone and filed a similar case against the largest broadcaster in the philippines what would you say. You know to to your critics in the philippines about the charges that you know the government has lodged against you did you break the law oh my lord. No i am challenging power right we continue to do our jobs and we will continue the line i always use this we are going to hold the line because the philippine constitution like the United States constitution has a bill of rights where patterned after the United States constitution and then let me ask you this what the cambridge talladega do d in the philippines the Company Operated in many places around the world this is something that also i learned spending time there but you know its really profitable to go in corrupt governments because governments have like really monetised that youve got sovereignty its something thats really hard for you for a company to replicate and you know with you karen you can dictate you know mineral rights resource rights passports all kinds of things in the philippines you know they are not as there are you know the story of the philippines you guys kind of got trumped before everybody else. Ok yes. But. Youre facing prison in quite serious charges least 80 years why do you care so much. Because then when it be easier to just. Go somewhere else i mean i could toss in question at you why you became a whistleblower right because this is the time that matters because if i didnt stand up for the standards and ethics the mission of journalism when it matters then Everything Else i did beforehand doesnt matter and then im not who i am defining who you are. I hate this time period. I hate that the baton was passed to me now but. Thats why it matters how do we get Civic Engagement when people dont know the facts. I dont think we can its kind of like what were doing right now were sitting on a stage were having a discussion there is an audience they know that were talking and if i Say Something thats not true or somebody can call it or a journalist can call it what we have now is a situation where i can become invisible and i can go and whisper in so everybodys ear and they all hear Something Different and i can do that now with the benefit of having followed everybody in the audience around for years and years and years reading through their Text Messages listening to their phones looking at everything that they look at even when they dont realize that theyre being watched and i dont think that we can have a functioning democracy when there is no longer Public Discourse because everything has become privatized and oftentimes people cant dont even know if theyre receiving something that is targeted or not which again goes back to if you get rid of transparency you get rid of accountability you get rid of democracy we can take questions from the audience maria Julie Posetti from the International Center for journalists ive spent time with you and with your News Organization and i know that you have learned a lot as a result of. The orchestrated disinflation campaigns the deliberate targeting of journalists and rappler in particular. Given that were talking particularly about what kristof has referred to as pushing if these problems you know from the global south to the west can you tell us sitting here in london what journalists in particular dealing with these problems now. Can do to prepare themselves for. So if i think this is an excess tensional moment for democracy globally journalism the death of journalism i want to say the death of journalist but the death of journalism is only the 1st signal for the death of democracy our dystopian president is your dystopian future if we dont do anything right now and of course with the elections coming up in the United States its a huge problem but what are the danger signals. The fact that we dont know the facts on the fact that you dont know whom to trust because in the philippines the 1st targets of attacks and these are exponential attacks right i was getting an average of 9890 hate messages per hour in the philippines in 2016 our data showed that women were attacked at least 10 times more than men so myside ginny sexists im. The kind of gender sexualized gendered attacks on women. Whats the end goal you pound someone to silence so that a whole narrative collapses and then the voice with the loudest megaphone is amplified bottom up and then top down our president for example the attacks against me and rappler we were attacked for a year on facebook on social media and then after that a year later president to tear to said the same exact thing which is like astroturfing it is it lays the groundwork for what the government does. You are all living through something similar is just our institutions crumbled within 6 months your institutions are a little bit stronger than ours but human beings behave the same way and the lack of trust. Is ushering in a whole new. 1930940 s. Right all of a sudden were looking at fascism and i guess this is why i am so scared and i want Silicon Valley i want the west who have stronger institutions to do something worry about it because if we dont instead of a year or 2 years of this were going to look at decades of fascism my question to you christopher i am from kenya you work for Cambridge Analytical you know robi over 70 people died maybe directly or indirectly related to the role of cambridge and on the ticker my question then is is it legal or moral for british or american firms to work in countries like what they take advantage of local regulations and yet continue to operate. This is something that i found most shocking when youve got a a company. In country a what they if in britain. Engaging with multiple firms and contractors each in their own jurisdiction. Creating this information or a propaganda that were entirely in britain would be wholly illegal. And then. Disseminating that in another country because youve got so many different players involved and so many different components of wrongdoing its actually really difficult to figure out where technically did a crime occur in in tax law were just starting to you know create principles and rules that prevent people from just hopping from one jurisdiction to another but with data and the internet we are what we know where tax law was in 1950 not realizing that the internet is global that data is global that this information can be global we lack you know not only the actual institutions to to police but we actually lack like principles in saw a lawmaker start to understand actually how the internet works i dont mean that sarcastically as in that it is actually global and that we need to create principles that that him embrace that global ness lots of wrongdoing can happen. Maria you have been christened and yet continue your fight and more recently from turkey and. Living in scantron for the last 20 years in my country many journalists are in jail now. And many others are free to go for writing speaking and so what do you see in journalism and sheer weve never been as vulnerable as we are today. Because power in countries like yours and mine has taken what the internet what social media what Companies Like Cambridge Analytical and it is it isnt only thing which analytical we now have filipino Companies Like Cambridge Analytical right. They are the ones taking advantage of it why is it that the bad guys are the ones who are taking these to these tools of manipulation and using them against us for us for someone like chandan dar for example he had to flee his country and he made the decision to do that for fear of his life others are dying we see this and every single report that comes out about journalism why are journalists under attack because democracy is under attack because you attack the Truth Tellers because the integrity of facts is. Gone right were not agreeing on the facts and the internet the way social media is set up this one concept of growing it by having you choose friends of friends to grow has polarized our societies so we have far more polarized societies and then we have no understanding of what the facts are and then you attack institutions and when you have someone like your leader and my leader they become stronger in this environment they hijack and this is why democracy has dying in our areas of influence we need to protect the facts because if you dont have the facts you cant have integrity of elections you cant have integrity of markets how can we have a working society if we dont have a a public sphere where we agree on what the facts are. Weve always had the devil and the angel on our shoulders right but the way social media platforms have been formulated pants the devil in your ear why is that that youre allowed to experiment on societies and when real people like get killed there are no actual consequences. In response to Global Warming germany is gradually shutting down its coal industry but is it happening fast enough we dont have any time to waste anymore we cant wait so were taking direct action to call for the immediate phase out of culture as Climate Change activists challenge communities reliance on the industry for jobs people in power who will win the cold war on aljazeera. The christian priest you are a friend of the palestinians hes a true. Champion of the palestinian cause. And activist who is willing to sacrifice his freedom. For his beliefs. Aljazeera world tells the extraordinary story of the archbishop and the p. L. O. Back to studio b. Unscripted in a moment but 1st a check of the headlines and in spain more than 800 people have died from corona virus in the past 24 hours the countrys highest number for a single day nearly 5700 people have died in spain since the outbreak began in the number of infected is also jumped its now upwards of 72000 or so the italian president says the e. U. Needs to pull together to weather this storm. In the not be i hope everyone fully understand before it is too late the seriousness of the threat faced by europe solidarity is not only required by the values of the union it was also in the common interest for puerto Marta Herrera has more from madrid madrid being the at the center or the ground 0 of the whole pandemic cannot cope anymore with the corpse of all the oil that bodies of the people have died that have died and im a nice people if you know a Funeral Company had to had to open an ice rink to take their all the people that have died but the kind of call there anymore and they have a range to said set out everything in migrates court so the situation is quite critical right now you figures from iran show the death toll rising past 2 and a half 1000 theres also been more than 3000 new infections bringing the total number of cases to around 35000. 00 irans president when reassuring people are the crisis will end soon and the Health System is ready to handle the strain us president signed a 2. 2 trillion dollars aid package to help people cope with effects of the pandemic america has the highest number of cases worldwide more than 100000 people infected but china has begun easing restrictions on the 11000000 people in the outbreak was 1st reported people are now allowed to enter the city thats been under lockdown for more than 2 months Chinas Health Ministry Says 54 imported cases have been recorded in other parts of the mainland. And police in south africa have been struggling to enforce a 21. 00 day nationwide lockdown which came into force on friday midnight people are only allowed out of their homes to buy groceries or for Health Emergencies alcohol sales have also been banned but large crowds have been gathering in the poor a town ships with social distancing is almost impossible because of the existing cramped Living Conditions but today with all the coronavirus pandemic news the news hour coming up for you from here in doha in about 25 minutes time. Thank you im sure a lot of people in the audience you know have heard bits and pieces about whats going on in the philippines but from your perspective like whats the big deal why should we care about not only way you and your organization are experiencing but whats more broadly happening in the philippines i think that our organization rappler has been fighting impunity on 2 fronts that are relevant to everyone around the world the 1st is these Information Operations the manipulation on facebook on social media because when you say a lie a 1000000 times it becomes the fact and then if you dont have facts you then can create whatever narrative you want including journalists are criminals right the 2nd is still connected to that which is the impunity in the drug war. President detector our president was elected with the power of social media and 2016 may of 2016 actually this was the beginning of the dominoes tumbling down may have 2016 who are before the all right guard corps. But theyre all connected now i think right. I our drug war if you look at the numbers the u. N. Our own commission on human rights says in a little less than 3 years at least 27000 people have died. Place a huge numbers in 21 years of Ferdinand Marcos you youre talking about a death toll of a little over 3200 so impunity in the drug war impunity in Information Operations our institutions collapsed within 6 months because we didnt have facts and journalists light me are under attack and its not just little rappler which is a start up although i guess i could go to jail for 80 some odd years because of the cases that have been filed they are politically motivated i am not doing anything different than i used to do when i was working 20 years ago what is different tech. And i think part of one of the reasons you were fascinating to me is because you came into this you looked at the code you looked at the data and you later realized its impact on society im waiting for Silicon Valley to realize that as well do you think Silicon Valley which is predominantly run by white privileged man. A large large number of whom are american do you know do you think that that plays a role with. Like if more people from the philippines or other countries were in leadership roles in tact do you think that that would make a difference id like to say if journalists were the ones making some of the tech decisions it would be a little bit easier it would be better so. When Mark Zuckerberg essentially said that it is ok for politicians to lie. That spells doom in this tech in the bold world right that spells the end of democracy because you cannot tell fact from fiction the old before you can create a marketplace you have to have rules of a marketplace and the rules that we have in social media dont work you also talked about values what are the values what are the values of tech. Optimization monetise a sure thank you. I think are surely one of the things that lots of journalists even celebrated by phone tech was cool or was you know the mantra facebook move fast and break things you know. Not really thinking about you know what you could be doing is breaking democracy and not just in your own country but around the world and even with the evidence theyre right so its interesting that you know you bring up the death toll of the current regime in the philippines i think to you know myanmar where facebook was actually warned by you know journalists the United Nations about what was happening where you know facebooks systems were being deliberately exploited to propagate hate messaging which contribution and this is not me saying its the United Nations saying contribution to you know Ethnic Violence and ethnic cleansing you know i would would have thought that would be quite a big deal for any c. E. O. To sort of be told by when you look at facebooks response about that where well the worlds complicated will try harder meanwhile thousands of people get murdered do you think that there are parallels between what happened in myanmar and what either is happening or could even progress to happen in the philippines its in every country. The Ethnic Violence is still continuing in myanmar the Information Operations thats led by the military is still continuing in myanmar on facebook. The guy who led that u. N. That u. N. Fact finding was virtually there were some moneys and indonesian who used to head the commission on human rights that report is damning facebook has a tone independent report and they say the same things im shocked not a thing yet is moving and thats part of the reason so here we go like what do we do i mean im not completely against facebook d other right now i am i am and we were you know were Fact Checking part years here against bad behavior. Im against impunity right if you look at it every Time Facebook trice do the right thing that the market incentives actually punishes that you know i provided a lot of information to american regulators facebook received the largest find that a Technology Company had received in history you know 5000000000 from the f. T. C. And 100000000 from the f. C. C. And the share value went on were in a weird situation now where you can be at the helm of a company that has received the largest financial penalty of a company in your industry in all of history and shareholders go great lets buy more stock because the worst that can happen is that much money you know when you do something really bad sure is going to take a day off of this years profit margin but hey ho thats there what do you think. You know can be done or should be done using the regulatory action can even work if one country has this regulation another country doesnt i think some of the states in the u. S. Are now talking about data portability i think thats a potential solution so if you own your own data you can take your data out of facebook and put it into another social media platform do you think that people would actually move or do you think it would start to create potentially a 2 tiered system where truth and privacy become what. In a marketplace sting interesting that could be but ill tell you the behavior of filipinos given the the police and thats been injected into facebook right if you think of license poison. For the from the time rappler was set up in 2012 all the way until 2016 facebook was number one in alexa ranking right this is a ranking of all your websites now its back to like number 7 we know something is wrong but theres no other option i dont think data or information are moral morally wrong or morally good i think that theres sort of these rules that yeah you know i think about it in a kind of like electricity you can you know power a studio we can sit comfortably in a warm environment with lots of light even though its night time you can also electric you can kill someone you know i remember when my when i was little my grandmother would always freak out if there was cutlery anywhere near the toaster because you could die making toast. So yes electricity is dangerous but would you want to live without electricity yeah and the way i sort of think about it is well what do we do about electricity to try to amplify the good things that it does and minimize the bad things that it does if and we have Safety Standards weve got building codes wiring code like this part in your book yeah imagine a facebook. Was a building right you know where the building has been designed deliberately to make it really hard to leave the building the maze and you know the building powers itself every time you open a door so theres lots of doors that go nowhere and you cant really leave and at the front of that building there are some terms and conditions in a book you know 20000 words you know a short novella exciting read outside and then the door size by the way you agree that youve read this like work outside and that you agree to everything that. You know and we wouldnt tolerate by right and we also wouldnt say that the onus should be on people to avoid the weird and wonky and perhaps dangerous building we would be going why are these buildings being designed the same way and why arent there rules to prevent people from designing these buildings in the 1st place for me when i find so frustrating about Silicon Valley is that they will continue to win as long as they keep up the narrative that the onus and burden of safety in our democracy is on regular people rather than the people who Design Systems this is the 1st thing i said because i was like when i was getting attacked i was they kept saying you know youre a public figure and you know really we cant do anything about it then i just thought you know. Hello im protected by the constitution of the journalist youve taken away that protection and why is it the users fault if you design it this way and who gets to let you choose what is allowable and knowledgeable on this pot form this is the thing that i find you know really scary is that you know we we have kind of relegated our democracy to Mark Zuckerberg. And i find that very terrifying but. Medium long term and of course my in in vested interests is in the short term because i could go to jail if we dont find the right solutions right yeah i mean i. Unfortunately i dont i dont think theres a solution because we have its a its an infrastructure yeah yeah yeah imagine if you had a Pharmaceutical Company regulated like a tech company where you dont actually have to do any kind of trials you dont have to prove safety of your systems you can just like experiment and when something goes wrong you can say oh sorry like farmers pharmaceutical business is complicated you know biology is complicated or an airline going you know sorrier plane crashed its hard to make things fly that are like really having something. Happen but when it when you look at it like the reaction that facebook has you know whether it was in me jamar in the philippines in new zealand. But the list goes on the internet during a press release is like a proforma standard the world is really complicated weve got it wrong this time were going to work to do better and i question why is that that youre allowed to experiment on societies and when real people get killed there are no actual consequences and you know i feel safe mostly when i go onto a plane or take a drug from the octobers so i you know i think that people should feel safe going on online as well yes agree. The gotten away with impunity so far also because old power looked away they abdicated responsibility to the young guys who know what theyre doing do you think that Mark Zuckerberg is in his about the the new editor a new publisher are they not publishing right and are they not allowing it its like they invited people to their house and they gave everyone guns and said its the wild wild west so yes i think the. Wow i cant believe as they do you think that information is a weapon or. Isnt it isnt the weaponization of information isnt that whats mean i thought i think if you look at donald trump he has eroded the american constitution has you know gotten away with impeachment and is at the same time you know putting children in cages at the american border and undermining you know civic cohesion in the United States and i look at by and i just think that there is destruction that is happening and it is the product of information or rather descend from a sharon absolute and that is dangerous and so in that sense i i think that information can be a weapon but at the same time you know journalists also use information you know for goods the gate keeper in this public sphere the Worlds Largest distributor of news is facebook you tube comes in a very close 2nd right in terms of and the designs of both of these platforms are optimized to manipulate to sell us and our data at our weakest possible moment to the person or company that will pay for an intended result its like these are platforms now that are designed there behavioral modification systems and we are pavlovs dogs going in there oh well no not no i know not perhaps lets open it up to pavlovs dogs. For some questions a lot of these challenges were confronting. Right now. Like for example epidemics weve had a terrible measles epidemic in the philippines go coronavirus right now which is being significantly complicated by misinformation. Do you see any hope that those kind of real world costs are going to start being recognized by even some of the more authoritarian activists so in the philippines ill say yes the government has now talked about how theyre going to run after the the fake news thats being said about the coronavirus right but then again the governments own machinery is the one pumping out news because it is pumping out lies because if it takes the attention it refocuses attention from things going wrong i guess im curious why the west always calls it misinformation its disinformation it is meant to manipulate you the dissent from aishah networks go bottom up from each of our countries in the global south and connect to this kind of nervous system that in my country now is combining russia and china it is scary as all heck but this is how information is weaponized for power and who can control this right now Silicon Valley that needed solution. This is to christopher so in 2013 while youre still with s. C. L. Group you had set up a Similar Company called us and according to boast if you do you had told an acquaintance of yours that you wanted to build the n. S. A. As a wet dream and you also claimed that evil pays more so thats not true one of the things that ive learned is that. You know when you go up against a company that specializes in this information and it also uses that. And creates narratives about people who criticize so i do i dont take your assertion as valid and its this simply its not true i did not set up that company i do not remember and i have not seen any actual state of evidence to. Substantiate this this flippant comment ok well it seems to me that you helped create these tools which you admitted to building and you know eventually these tools were misappropriated and you know day we used to hijack elections and undermine democracy so do you understand why some people would question your motives today of course owners than that and i think its healthy for people to you know have skepticism of anybody who talks about anything. You know i understand i was involved in creating a company that you know ended up doing some really terrible things not just in the United States but in many countries around the world when i joined a c. R. I was you know 2324 i recognize that i did not know enough about what i was doing. And you know i have learned a lot in that process and if there were regulations in place the. The time when i 1st started that for example required me as a Data Scientist or as an engineer to make a proper assessment of risk. Where there would be consequences if that did not happen not to say that came later or other countries like it would never have existed or not exist in the future but it would have made a lot of people think about what theyre doing considering. Just the shell and the political situation in the philippines what advice would you do a potential. Filipino weasel blower. Chris 1st. Bear. Ill say one thing lawyers lawyers lawyers lawyers talk to lawyers its boyers have saved my life in so many occasions. Thats thats all i would say whistle blowers in the philippines have a horrendous track record. And part of the reason we have so few and the reason why fear now works is precisely because it is the whistleblower who suffers versus who ever they blow the whistle against ive submitted myself to the men and women inside the judiciary who i hope will abide by the spirit of the constitution but i am very cognizant that they have families to protect they have reputations and ambitions and this makes our Justice System extremely flawed but i submit myself to that this is the christopher youve recently been banned from facebook and theres been a study to show that when people deactivate their Facebook Accounts they generally become happy so i was wondering if this is affected your major school. So yeah im banned on facebook im also banned on instagram because its on my facebook so my life no longer has well curated pictures of a lot of terrorists and 1st try. My happier without using facebook. Not. Really and heres why. Its really hard to stay in touch with people. Without using the 2 main systems that everybody else uses facebook didnt just sort of deactivate my account and sort of a normal way i got like completely or a stuff of Facebook Like i dont exist anymore and my photos you know my memories my friend groups all went away and when you look at other examples in history of where the sort of collective memory of a person. Is a race to die in for example the soviet union where if you spoke out against the regime you would be disappeared not just physically but like literally your photos would go away mentions of you would go away and it felt really weird to look at you know 10 years of my life disappearing they didnt just ban me they deleted me. And it felt really weird to be deleted i am more broadly happier i feel lighter it is i sort of gone through this somewhat on the scale in that sense but i do miss being able to be in touch with people i think. For me my final thought is diet weve got a really serious problem. To me it feels like the kinds of excess dental crisis that we have in some ways like Climate Change you dont notice the incremental changes and democracy and tell you no longer have that but i hope that people take that to heart and you know that if if you think thats worrying then you know make your voice heard and be angry about it. The 2 biggest battles and you mention them both is climate because we will die and you cant fix climate if you dont have the information the battle for world the battle for truth these are the 2 battles that is pivotal this year is pivotal if we dont do the right things we will lose both it is death by a 1000 cuts and we must do more i dont think its being a Debbie Downer because obviously we have hope we must have hope with us we have to fix it i think human values havent changed weve always had the devil and the angel on our shoulders right but the way that social media platforms have been formulated fans the devil in your ear and encourages us against them splintering our public sphere part so each of us can take a role we get rid of the lies in our immediate areas of influence we look for what binds us together rather than what pulls us apart we act a little bit like outsiders so that we can understand and analyze a little bit better and i think for the journalists and the audience there is no time that requires the mission of journalism of Truth Tellers. No time like now we need to do this and we need to do it now. The purpose of a tyrant rightists make anything else unimaginable the 1st dictatorship is the dictatorship in your mind theyre almost superheroes the only superhero is going to save us is all shelved its all just the 99 percent the only thing that beats the politics of hate is the politics of solidarity. From me out you can read london group out 10 tacky. Income that they can state the american state that didnt and theyve got people in unprompted uninterrupted all of these these divisions of the working class of working people and they keep us from realizing our collective power money capponi pomade then if you obey the market for 30 years you begin to worship it and believe it has power over you a lot you get beyond the great day to find out if there are. More big downpours into western parts of the basin easy this big area cloud here which lives this way towards that could or pushing into parts of peru as well see some very heavy rain into the northwest of bolivia west of weather stays in place a legacy just how heavy that rain is as we go through saturday added dave on into sunday further south its not so you bad lousy fodder dry but a serious 29 celsius getting into the mid twentys for sound south of the river plate you might catch i would say but the wetter weather definitely the north pushing up across that western hoff of brazil in particular and then not too much wet weather in the forecast across the caribbean lost to clear skies as gorgeous sunshine more that trouble sunshine coming for to us have wanted to shout was just around 80 maybe to 7 posits make a for time on sats day but nothing much to speak of and these will get pushed across into the western side of the caribbean for the 2nd half of the weekend meanwhile into north america more very heavy rain making its way across the plains easing of the race was heavy showers long spells of rice and wintry weather on the Northern Edge of that and that will make its way up to as a moth east for a sunday afternoon. People have come to expect a lot from aljazeera over the years its the reporting the commitment to on the reporter places the commitment to the human story. But its also the idea of challenging does and power if a politician comes on this channel they will be challenged and thats what people expect of us they want the questions answered. That is what weve always done thats what we will continue to do. This is aljazeera. Hello from doha everyone im come all santa maria and this is the news hour from aljazeera no sign of abating another jump in the number of deaths from corona virus in spain 832 new deaths reported in the last 24 hours in india and nationwide lockdowns wreaking havoc on thousands of commuters in new delhi as Transportation Options become limits hits wildlife slow