Africa. In our hyperconnected world social platforms such as Twitter Facebook telegram and whats up have revolutionized the way we communicate under 78 information to society. Its estimated that more than 5000000000 people have mobile devices more than half of these. They have a camera and Internet Connection millions of text images and videos on a daily basis through social media making it difficult to distinguish between real and false content the battle for control of the truth has just begun. Information warfare is a weapon and a very dangerous weapon if i see a piece of content i have an emotional response to it takes less than a 2nd for me to share the consequence of a very very dangerous. Covering. How is fake news created how does that affect society and what impact does it have on states the Mainstream Media social media and governments arent to scrutiny and are being called upon to stem the rising tons of disinformation. Real responsibility now to be very careful very transparent to keep trust with their audience is companies have a strong responsibility in terms of making sure that their part forms arent being used to the so many hits or propaganda the risk of government regulating social media is that they will regulate something that we dont fully understand. These platforms pose challenges but have also created Opportunities Society has been empowered that everyone with a mobile phone can step into the role of citizen journalist and share in real time what is happening anywhere on the planet through social media. Social media appearing in our lives we realize that thats a media enabled us to gather in the streets and make revolutions we saw how twitter came rolling passive on yet in communicating to the world what was happening during the elections and the Police Brutality that we saw. Bus was a big city of europe we are very Brutal Society with a democrat the book i have a lot of visitors every year so we are an open minded society and for the 1st time in many years on october the 1st of 2017. Government asked the people to walton a referendum just to say if the citizens want to be going deaf and then from spain or not it was like yes or not hes confronted with a party of spain. That all that that referendum was illegal. The courts gave the order to the spanish believe is on the civil war to avoid barbara friend they have to the gulf and old boxers on the beepers that courts say that they have to avoid the referendum but without bias but it wasnt. The 1st october i was here in london i was intrigued to see what was going to happen but i did not expect. That it would be a Big International news event until suddenly at some point that morning someone sends me a message by whats on and says turn on the t. V. And youll be amazed at what is happening in catalonia i went to this program this is like a big schooling barcelona when i arrived there d there was about 200 people more or less many of us did know each other by we had to organize through words up and i remember that the people called we are people of thieves we are people of peace. It would have been very very difficult to organize. The voting that took place. Without. Social media and without instant means of Mass Communication between people works the internet provides social networks are facilitating the logistics that are necessary to organize collective action not only because they make their diffusion of information cheaper and easier but also because they facilitate coordination when protests take place on the streets. They were sitting on the floor peacefully trying to avoid confiscating the ballot boxes. Suddenly the Police Arrived and we could not believe what was happening. Whats that there was no cameras or official government i mean is there ill take myself on ill just start to report. In countries where citizens lag fundamental democratic freedoms like iran or china social media play a fundamental role. That these Networks Information that would ensue kill aid through more traditional means like Mainstream Media to flow in reach people that wouldnt have been exposed to that information in the absence of those networks the social media platforms are. Nowadays so the opportunities especially a platform. Brought us are mainly to find that they have given boris to all those silenced people and then have them boys before and im not the only one talking about regimes where people through social media they kind of spread information but im also talking about. Democratic systems how people can organize collective action especially at platforms when the police entered to the school the violence was extreme im sure that the without that be got no one could believe that whats happening in that school so thats why i decided to recall that big deal. Its as if the Spanish Government went into this study and all the government all the Spanish Police the civil guard just unaware of the times in which we live that forgotten but every person with a mobile phone with a camera on it is a potential journalist. You know were not living in an age when theres just half a dozen t. V. Cameras. Oh maybe in the same place but everywhere well it was voting going on good people watching after that they went out of the school and i just decide to spread that b. The o. And i just send it to all my contacts like groups on whatsapp friends all the people who were here in that school and it was amazing because after about 10 minutes that the same be the 0 came back to me in about 6 different sources so Friends Family and different people just gave give that video back to me it was like whoa thats pretty great fast. Social networks were it enabled citizens to communicate what was happening in real time and half of the world the whole world was able to follow bands of october 1st and catalonia almost as they were happening and this was something that in catalonia hadnt happened at this scale before i shared a video on twitter and after 10 minutes julian aside we can leaks we tweet that b. T. O. So it was amazing. It was about 4005006000 extension 0 reads weaves in about one hour or 2 hours spanish not. Least in fact the same days the free media like a disease the b. B. C. Or c. N. N. Use it to explain what was happening for the last year. Just to pull out my hands i think. It was for sale it looked to me. Media i wouldnt say social media are the new weapon the weapon really is the message and. The target for social change social media ira weapon to the extent that they help those in their cities be visible and they help peoples self organize and coordinate and and in a lot of action that will make demands more visible in the public spotlight. Sandra gonzalez by lawn teaches at the prestigious Annenberg School for communication in philadelphia her Research Topics include how social Networks Facilitate political mobilization and communication among citizens the closest discussing recent examples for these video that im showing you on the screen is an example of content that is published in social media that goes vita very quickly this footage which was sticking with a phone was taken over by big Media Outlets and it was shown internationally a lot of people and it allowed the message that the referendum was trying to convey to go global. Trying to. Press release. On the streets but sometimes people just stop the protests because its a social media i think well firstly because im doing Little Research but that is the role of the syrians or. So citizen journalism is kind of happening by in wages and most socially it is a complicated history and favor the crowd pleaser though its often used to show injury of the war that reporters cant get but still like. The subject to a lot of issues that were in she has whether its propaganda or whether its a show that is happening in the us and so its interesting how socially allows people to sort of sell for port or. What we saw was that the people now. Well. Powerful tools at their disposal that war for the 1st time not controlled by the governments and that they could use these tools not only to you know organize themselves among the population but then also to disseminate this news in images and video to the rest of the world the arab spring was really one of the most is really one of the most prominent examples of social media amplifying a message that would have otherwise have remained very local and constrain. And facilitated by scaling up the projects on an International Scale and treating these phenomena and page and even though again contagion here is just a metaphor of anything spiers adult and not a political context to arise partly because these movements emulated the use of Digital Technologies to amplify a political message. To. Get the indra friend to place in 2017. 100 percent of the people were connected to the internet with cell phones and access to broadband whats up in a direction that is huge in catalonia and everybody was well aware of how Important Technology and the technological infrastructures were for the referendum whereas it in the arab spring. But attrition some days were of the 15 percent and some down just as libya were 5 percent i recall and not all the people were connected so these 2 examples of the arab spring in the cutter referendum are very different in many different ways. There are many such illogical differences in the context from where these movements arise but they obviously share in common a lot of things as well and in particular they have in common the use of Digital Networks and Digital Technologies to spread their message. I wouldnt say that there is a direct relationship between social movements and this information what happens is that one social media here in our lives it enable people to gather in the streets and make revolutions throughout the whole world but it also empowered people to make this information that this trucks democracy. On the one hand the internet has been used to hold very powerful interests accountable to rally the citizens through the Public Square in order to demand their rights to film and disseminate clear abuses of power by governments and on the other hand its been used by more malevolent actors in order to subvert the democratic process by manipulating online discussions by smearing journalists. Silencing prominent opposition voices on social media in the last 10 years there would be nice huge societal shifts weve had the Global Financial crisis that we still havent understood the implications were seeing Climate Change weve seen a huge migration trends we see people losing their jobs because of automation people are thinking much more vulnerable than ever before and so when people are feeling vulnerable they become tribal and when people become tribal its about them and office and thats what misinformation takes advantage of. You not going to give you a question you are fake do you speak. As strict as strict. The term has become weaponized is being used by politicians around the world 4 as a way of undermining a free press which is critical to any democracy we never make reference the fake news on we talk about this information for several weeks of the 1st of all its because these this information that were consuming has never meant to be news and therefore we shouldnt call it that the 2nd reason is because were not so sure what it means. So we that leads to some confusion and its actually being weaponized somehow by politicians and the 3rd reason is because when we talk about news we imagine a specific format and when we talk about this information we need to include images videos mimis already us to understand the whole problem experts focus that by 2022 more fake news will be read on the internet than real news organizations such as 1st draft in the United States which is headed by Claire Wardle provide journalists and citizens with methods to detect this information and fight against it. So as humans we have an emotional relationship to information academics and journalists we like to pretend that people have a rational relationship to information but thats not true the types of information that we share on social media are the types of informations that make us happy or sad or cry or make us feel connected to others the visual content plays a crucial role in treating this kind of channel reaction. That we call contagion it triggers a very visceral emotional response certain images certain videos make it more likely that people would share news and information because their emotional response to that content is stronger and there is a correlation between the emotional response to content and then your decision to participate in the Chain Reaction or joined by a companion or or simply to transmit that information. If people isp reading information and that scaling up it is possible that theyre spreading misinformation and thats scaling up in ways that it wouldnt have done before so weve always had misinformation its not something new we are beginning to understand some things about misinformation wish i were you know i mean if people are exposed to misinformation and even after theyre told it you know misinformation they are. More likely to carry on believing it than if and see then the university of oxford is home to the prestigious Reuters Institute for the study of journalism this is was a model of a skin is research is how social media can serve as a science of social empowerment while also on the mining Accurate Information being disseminated by traditional media social media platforms can be your store in queens the and that one is. In the public debate social media platforms can be used to spread this information information that has. To make harm right and social media that hands can also be yours to. Highlight devices they show us in the public a sphere. We needed to build an independent nonprofit platform after the elections in 2017 because we realize that this information has arrived in spain as much us in the u. K. Or in the us we realize that we need to dedicate much more effort some we needed to be very for the citizenship to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is false false news and rumors online have led to the rise of the trick is many of which are nongovernment organizations they keep close contact with the media and Internet Users to monitor and lies and verify information weve basically have established 3 reasons for which this information is created the 1st one is basically because theres bad people in the world that actually want to make this information to see how far they can get how many people they can fool with such this information the 2nd one is for economic reasons people that makes this information so that you get into their web pages and see their advertisement they get money for it and theres a 3rd reason which i think its the most dangerous reason which is disinformation creative for a your logical reasons this is someone is money believing your take or your feelings are a specific issue so that you decide in one way and not in another that might be in favor of their a view ology and those who are creating dissin from ation who deliberately want us to share they know what theyre doing they walk share highly emotional content now journalists can share highly emotional content is their journalists and they have to work with truth and facts. They have to be rational and so generous in content its much less likely to be shared so thats why we have that discrepancy. For me social media is a listening device it enables me to stay tuned in to all sorts of conversations that non journalists are talking about. So social media is a listening tour to be in touch with what audiences are engaged on what stories they care about and its a reporting tool in order to find sources and verify sources and communicate with sources their basic responsibility traditional media have in this information landscape is the fact that they dont have a Good Business model and theyre currently not putting enough resources or enough time in Fact Checking the information that they publish they have to publish a lot and sometimes not of good quality and that makes them sometimes publish this information 20 years ago journalist in have to worry about false information journalism is all about the truth so if they had a rumor and i dismissed it the problem now is that woody and his want to help in navigating the information that theyre seeing on facebook and twitter and instagram and the social web and so now jennings have to actually help what he says but there are challenges about how you report on this information if you repeat the rumor in the headline theres a possibility here actually encouraging more people to believe that. The times has a set of standards and processes and verification methods that are largely institutional theres a standards guide here and every reporter has to adhere to. These standards and they exist for very good reason and theyre often reevaluated as the industry and as Technology Changes these enable us to sort of stay committed to things like verification and Fact Checking and there are built to prevent us from being susceptible to things that we think in danger of free press in other countries such as bribes such as gifts and such as being compromised by people with a political agenda or a monetary agenda technology has afforded us the freedom to communicate with people in video and audio in text who would be inaccessible decades ago or even 56 years ago so were now able to look at an attack in yemen and get User Generated Content or eyewitness video and with a lot of technological listening to also we can verify the geo location of that video we can even strip it down off the internet and figure out what kind of phone or a camera was used to record it and there are all sorts of tools out there that help us verify this information in the same way that we used to verify information in the Old School Way with public documents when we just use parchment paper. John condon is an officer green rice and journalist his work to Media Outlets such as the Financial Times the New York Times b. B. C. And that will street journal hes based in london and barcelona and these pieces analyze the Global Political system i think we need professional journalists possibly one or urgent leaves on ever before to make some sense out of the bay bill. Of voices of shrieking and sheltering. Were here. To try to distinguish what is true from what is false and then of course there is fake news which has been hijacked for political purposes by so many people including President Trump its a fake question your c. N. N. Your fake hes making policy and then tweeting it and weve never had that before weve never had a president unpredictable and say im willing to be constrained by institutional kind of rules no ones and his movies at all because of social media and he can get instant visibility and in some control hes our institutionalized completely on institutionalized and i agree thats a problem but i dont think its. What hes saying to his 55000000 followers lets the end date provide and that has always been a prominent tools. For government and and other political actors to interfere with the political process Freedom House is an independent Watchdog Organization dedicated to Political Liberties and human rights its annual freedom on the net report analyzes the relationship between government institutions and the internet weve seen that the number of countries that display some type of dissent from ation and fake news and propaganda has only risen every year that we have covered this so now we are at a situation where in 32. 00 countries these progovernment commentators are paid by the states in order to go online and manipulate conversations away from sensitive issues and towards the governments narrative around everything is going ok in the country and making sure that people are not criticizing Public Officials online. Usually when we talk about this information we refer to platforms such as twitter or facebook but we need to take into account that the problem is much bigger for example there are some countries where consumption of news through whats up is huge were talking about spain but also brazil or argentina our nigeria or india in those places whats up on this information whats up is a huge problem were not addressing yet social media is definitely why doing divisions between people its contributing to this Global Dialogue of the dearth polaroids a shroom that you see inside come for is between Different Countries because what social media does it gives more weight a move value to the people who shout loudest and who are the more extreme views the most effective misinformation is that which divides so theres a reason that populist candidates are emerging in places like brazil and the u. S. And were going to see other places around the world because our countries are being divided and so the role of mace and disinflation dividing countries is what we need to take seriously we should be teaching people if you see something on social media that makes you angry then be more critical so i think one of the most useful things people can think whenever they see a piece of content is why is this being shared and who created it when it comes to content sourced on the social web the most important check is provenance who was the fast person that created this piece of content because then you have some idea of motivation. The question is can Technology Help solve the fake news issues im sure it can how or what is the best at something for the industry to the site. Figure out and what is the bit more effective way to help solve this problem facebook hack can do that google can do that and we had solutions for similar problems like spam in email and theyre still spam by that its much less of a problem that it was before companies have a strong responsibility in terms of making sure that their platforms arent being used to disseminate hate or propaganda. One of the ways around this is you know i think when there are when there is information that is posted on places like facebook or twitter or you tube that contributes to radicalization towards extremist views or the dissemination of fake news that that constant is removed because it violates the terms of service of these platforms. I think that platforms like facebook and google have more power than some State Government if they decide to complain for a candidate or to throw government i think they have that all the information they need because we gave them all this information all these years facebook and all these companies have more information and more Fresh Information and more relevant information that any government has and this is probably one of the in the long term these Companies Know about their citizens about the infrastructure of their governments about the infrastructure of cities and lives of people that are allow them to understand better than anyone what are the needs of cities governments people so i think governments need to think with a lot more rigor about regulating social Media Companies so its not just a free for all because if weve learned anything in the past few years its that social Media Companies are not incentivized to implement real reform on their own theyre going to need the government. To rope them in because their financial incentives benefit tremendously from a good distance from ations story so i think we as a society are going to solve this problem through many different sectors of society but i think it begins with the government. Who the nuclear people really put. Them to use that report. To get a good. Deal done in the. From a government perspective i think that the main thing is to resist the temptation to pass new laws that make of the government the arbiter between what is true and false online unfortunately weve seen a lot of governments go the opposite way and when governments are the ones that are determining what can and cant be said online that presents an opportunity for abuse and also for making sure that the ruling party stays in power and can criminalize what the opposition is saying is actually kind of the real problem here is. The social media yes. That anything now in politics good and bad is going to base but it was actually media what we can do is try and restrict the kind of the pathologies the hate speech the misinformation. Part of this excessive trying to the new brazilian president. I think it was about 2 days after that big deal that the foreign minister of spain france with us this appears in as several media and he was just talking about everything was fake news there was no real injuries i think by now. Many of those pictures have been proven to be fake pictures really i couldnt believe that the former Prime Minister of spain was telling the world that it was fake names i just couldnt believe. January 2018 the European Commission made public calls so that different experts on this information would present themselves for a High Level Group on base information on fake news but the High Level Group has succeeded in formulating concrete steps to provide european citizens with trust 40 information and to make them better equipped to never gauge in the online environment when the e. U. Commission set up this expert group the idea was to bring many people from many parts of europe from many different disciplines to kind of have a really honest conversation about what could potentially move the needle of misinformation so we had people from the platforms we had forecast and its print journalists academics Fact Checkers of all of it. Said to make a new film it dont do dont. They didnt we didnt secure last year we ended up doing a report that has i think 2 very important things that we need to take into account the 1st one is it said that were not prepared to make a legislation against this information because weve done no phenomenon enough we need to study it much more and theres a very thin line between censorship and law and we need to be sure when we make it that we are on the last side and not on the censorship side the 2nd important thing that that report said is that we need to invest much more on education and the Media Literacy how and where should that regulation take place within in a context of International Information sharing across social networks where regulation is inherently domestic and based in particular countries so i think theres a range of battles that we dealing with whether its between those social networks and users and the government trying to censor. All whether were talking about the right to privacy and the way in which social networks use and share our information in ways that we may or may not agree with and bigger questions about then how do we regulate that in an International Global setting so social networks i think raise numerous problems and concerns around censorship prissie control access. Board now 8 consecutive years Freedom House has found that there has been a decline in Global Internet freedom essentially what that means is that governments are finding new ways in order to control the internet to remain in power to smear smear domestic opponents and also to monitor what their citizens are saying and doing online the country that receives the worst ranking in our freedom of the net report is china followed by iran syria cuba and you know. More solar social media that these days people are using their own award is blocking your own including treater face for you to win hearts and rouhani was elected president of iran he promised to improve civil rights in the country including grace a freedom of expression online mass according to a mirror cd of the new york based since if we human rights in iran not only have violations of civil rights increased but freedom of expression and freedom of the press have practically disappeared in iran. We dont have exact number how many people got terrorists there but i think its fair to say dozens of people get earth said because of a speaking of their mind on line on twitter or facebook some of them are not dont get you know they some of them and they you know were using into me day shannon techniques likes that in order to keep them silent and keep them it way from the social media even some jobs they they they issue a suntan says which is like you dont have rights to have access to the internet for like 2 years we still theres no way you can you know how this kind of charge and shape if these guys act of being on the internet or not but i mean the use these men told and take me in order to in. People to keep them silent during certain crucial movements like around elections or protests many governments around the world will actually cut off access to the internets in order to make sure that information cannot be disseminated oftentimes information that they dont agree with or that could lead to them losing power you could say that there is a battle between governments and social networks particularly in the context of protest movements where you say twitter being used as a means of communication between protests as opposed to publicize the fact of a processed and to organize a protest social media is revolutionizing communication the flow of information and also how social protest is organized it poses a challenge to government institutions media platforms and to society itself which is still seeking a solution to the problems associated with the rise of the social media age so there is evidence in the last 10 years where weve taught more young people how to be good consumers of information that in fact they now they dont trust anything they dont trust wikipedia they dont trust the b. B. C. They dont trust the new times and instead they just trust those people who are closest to them and thats a real concern how can we give people skills and tell them to be skeptical but not too skeptical and thats a real challenge. Theres no way we can go back theres no way we can just disconnect and get off the great and so we would have to renegotiate how we interact with these platforms will have to demand from this platform that they define their role in democracies in a different way and we will have to work with a particular areas and policy makers to ensure that our rights are protected. May. The future of social networks is to disappear. An unwritten law of technology. Is doesnt mean that we will have means of must communication or personal communications brolly much more efficient than the social networks right now. Definitely encroaching on the to writing for digital media. You know the whole point of. Television be it radio going to newspapers be it amounted to standing in a call and giving a speech is to have a political influence on people which means to persuade people to win their hearts to win their minds and social networks have the power to do that to reach huge numbers of people instantly and so the political impact which means emotional impact which means persuasive employment is enormous. I think what we need to worry about that misinformation fake news people dismissed it as being frivolous its not i think its the biggest crisis that we face as humankind because its dividing us and as we divide did were going to get to a point where democracy is no longer functioning and we turned against one another and that i think is the worry that were not taking seriously enough now. Though when its really powerful its like a very potent weapon its just a form but you can show what happening everywhere in the world. And you can speed it just twitter or who or whats up its the people who is but were full its not the media its the people. Kick off. The big Midterm Review hard to. This time the interview the record holders and their selfproclaimed challengers. Fire munich and dortmund. Their team has lived up to their expectations what are they doing wrong and whats left for these 2 giants of the bundesliga. Kick off in 90 minutes w. Every 2 seconds a person is forced to flee their homes nearly 71000000 people have been forcibly displaced the consequences of the disastrous our documentary series displaced depicts traumatic humanitarian crises from around the world you know. What a good thing we dont need and i didnt go to university to kill people. Or to have my boss come to me and tell me to kill someone and he got mad if i dont theyll kill me. He can feel for their lives and their future so they seek refuge abroad but what will become of our son chris stay behind its a. Battle my husband went to peru because of the crisis that the wanted that if he hadnt gone there we would have died of hunger the anonymous. The Baptist Church germany 15. This is it every news lifer. Mass evacuation the philippines braces for a potentially devastating volcanic eruption experts say it could happen in 18 minutes or weeks from now and thats leaving thousands of people in limbo uncertain of their future as they flee their homes also coming up a setback for the closest sea in libya after Army Commander hollyhock down with fuses to sign a cease fire agreement at talks in moscow turkey reacts with fury and she has come