Of the world, and The Economist calculates that more than 39 of the worlds population lives under authoritarian rule. Well, across this edition of The Media Show, were going to discuss how states are now major sources of disinformation, how technology is changing the threats to freedom of speech, and how major Media Organisations such as the bbc see their role in responding to this. Its a lot to get through, and were going to start by understanding how restrictions on the press affect the information that people are able to access. And well begin with the situation in three countries that have a long history of muzzling the media russia, china and iran. And with us, weve got three experts from bbc monitoring. It, as the name suggests, monitors Media ActivityAround The World. Kia atri follows the iranian media and, kia, just describe first a regular. A normal person, if you can say that in iran. What is their media diet . What sorts of information are they getting and where from . Their first exposure would be the mainstream media, the state media. Now, its a very nuanced picture because, yes, i there is some kind of free debate, i except that there are quite a loti of red lines that the state imposes on the media. I you cannot criticise islam. You cant criticise the founder of the islamic republic, ayatollah khomeini. You cannot criticise the Supreme Leader of iran. Now, obviously, the ordinary citizens have ways of working round that, but. And iran has a very young population, doesnt it . It does have a very. I think 60 under 30 . Thats right. Yes. Are they better at circumvention . They are quite technically savvy. They are very well networked. Quite a lot of them are bilingual, you know, and, you know, |they can access the cyber media, j except that even the cyber media itself is subject to constraints. Lets move from iran to china and speak to kerry allen, whos china media analyst at bbc monitoring. Kerry, lets start with the same question to you. What can and cant people access in china . So, in china, its very, very difficult to get access to independent media. This has long been the case. The internet actually arrived in china in 1989, the same year as the Tiananmen Square protests. And ever since then, there have been restrictions in place on the internet preventing people accessing information about this event, and any other protests that have taken part since. The internet is the main area for users to consume news nowadays, and there are more than one billion people on the internet in china, and its very much the case in china that there are equivalents of all the platforms that we use here in the west. So instead of google, youve got a Chinese Service called baidu. Instead of youtube, for example, youve got Chinese Services that exist the same. And all of these have to answer to the Chinese Government regulator. Um, the environment is completely saturated by state media run or affiliated outlets. And if you want to access independent media. So, for example, youve heard. Youve travelled overseas and youve heard about this platform called facebook. If you try to type in the url, you would get an error message, 404. So thats one way that people cant access independent news. And within that ecosystem in china, are people self censoring because they understand the consequences if they cross the line . Its the case that when people go on chinese Social Media Platforms, so instead of a platform like facebook or x, people would use a platform called weibo. Um, nowadays, if you access a Social Media Platform like facebook or like x, you just type in your email address. But in china, you have to give over your id number, your phone number. You have to give a lot of personal information, and that means that people are aware that they can be held accountable. They can be found, they can be punished, if necessary, if they post content thats seen as critical of the government. And that means that people do actively avoid posting sensitive content. And just quickly, kerry, how much money does china spend on content thats aimed at people outside of china . Absolutely billions. So, back in 2009, the government set, um. It set 8. 9 billion usd this was nearly 20 years ago to actually expand its overseas presence so billions and billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars have been spent doing this since. Kerry, thank you very much. And lets talk about russia now with francis scarr, who follows russia for bbc monitoring. And, francis, kerry was talking about Self Censorship. Is that a similar situation in russia, or is that how the citizens of russia approach things . I think with russia there is a large proportion of the population, unfortunately, that is willing to consume the extremely anti west and anti ukrainian narratives that are being put out by the state media. The polling we have suggests that around two thirds of people still get most of their news from state tv. Just a few days ago. A major propagandist was threatening to Fire Nuclear Weapons at the us and sink the british isles, in his words, if the west were to deploy regular l troops to ukraine. That said, there have been a whole raft of kind of repressive laws which have been introduced overi the last few years, and especially since the invasion of ukraine just over two years ago, to essentially make telling i the truth a crime, especially when it concerns criticising the kremlin or criticising. Russias actions in ukraine. And, of course, against this backdrop, many people are afraid of expressing their views and Self Censorship has definitely increased in that sense. And what were seeing now, l increasingly so, is that almost consumption of this kind i of independent reporting, which is considered illegal, i is becoming a risk for people. And what about social media . I mean, i think for years weve been aware that the russian opposition has been using social media, but is it also something now thats used by the state successfully . Thats definitely true. What weve seen historically is figures in the opposition i and independent media, i who have been essentially |deplatformed from traditional formsj of media, such as tv or newspapers, turning to social media. We saw alexei navalny, for example, using youtube to publish these extremely slick videos accusing various officials of alleged corruption, for example. But especially since the invasion of ukraine, on telegram in particular, one of the Social Media Platforms, a number of so called military bloggers, or these kind of pro war voices who are providing these minute by minute updates of whats happening in ukraine have really proliferated on telegram and garnered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views. And even though, ostensibly, Social Media Platforms such as facebook,| twitter and instagram, are blocked in russia, i you have officials from i the russian government who are using them to put out and amplify these anti western messages. Thanks so much, francis. Kia, francis and kerry, all from bbc monitoring, thank you very much indeed for helping us understand the experience of people in iran, russia and china. And as we understand those restrictions that people in those three countries are living with, lets also understand the consequences of those restrictions. Suzanne raine is from the centre for geopolitics at the university of cambridge. And, suzanne, you also worked in the Foreign Office for over 20 years. In terms of what these three states want to deliver within their countries, how does their generation of disinformation, and also their imposition of censorship, help them pursue those goals . Well, who wouldnt want to rule a country with no opposition . I mean, its a no brainer. If you can get rid of the opposition, you would do. But theres a cost to that. Its costing time and resource to suppress your political opponents. And thats resource which could be spent on governing the country better. Its also doing something really sort of insidious when youre sealing off your country from outside, because it immediately triggers an interventionist response among people in the west who think human rights are being abused. And i think the third observation id make at the very beginning is, its economically very unhealthy because states need foreign investment, generally, its accepted, but if you demonstrate that there isnt a free press, that theres no investigation of financial impropriety, of scandals, it disincentivises anyone to take risks in that country. And if that. Some of the consequences within these countries, what about outside . What about how the restriction of the press within these countries allows these three states to behave in certain ways on the global stage . So i think. Im going to link to the flip side, which some of our commentators were talking about earlier, which is how theyre projecting their own media externally, because the two are linked. So control of state media and projection of state media, and what theyve done very cleverly through state media, which parasitises and mimics kind of Western State media so it has a kind of credibility Around The World. And theyre using that to build, reinforce, repeat a grievance narrative that plays very strongly to large segments of the world who have all sorts of reasons to feel that the west has treated them unjustly. So to develop a common bond, almost . Completely. And that is instrumentalised. So you can see, for example, really concrete examples where the west needs to have a consensus. And the one that was, for me, most telling was in april 22, when the General Assembly voted on whether to suspend russias membership of the human rights council. And the voting, if i remember correctly, was 93 in favour of suspension, 24 against suspension and 58 abstentions. So 58 countries couldnt side with the pro democracy lobby, and those included a large number of countries that we consider to be democracies, who we would think are our friends. So thats where were not really winning the arguments that we think is logical. Well, so far weve considered how media is being restricted in some parts of the world, and weve been hearing about the impact that has on global Power Dynamics more broadly. Next, lets learn about the extensive efforts to bypass some of these controls on media access and on press freedom. This is often referred to as circumvention. This may be individuals seeking their own solutions, but it can also be Media Organisations and Tech Companies who are offering help to individuals to do this to. Just sitting next to me here in the bbc radio studio isjoe tidy, the bbc news cyber correspondent. Hi, joe, thanks very much for being with us. Just give us a bit more detailed definition of circumvention, please. Well, if youre a country and you want to control| the internet, theres lots of different ways you can do that. Lots of different tools in your armoury. After all, the internet. We often think about it as being in a cloud and this magical thing that we get on our phones, but its just wires in the ground and under the sea. And if you can control the wires, you can control the flow of data. So lots of Different CountriesAround The World have different ways. So you can throttle a website or a service to make it so the data going to and from that service is really slow. Or you can ban certain websitesl from entire countries or regions, or you can stop people from having access in those areas. And what can individuals do to get around that . Well, it depends on what type of thing theyre doing. So the ways ijust described, j if you block an entire country from the internet or an entire area from the internet, theres not a lot you can do because you cant get a signal. But if you can get a signal and you want to get on a service that isnt allowed in that country, you can use circumvention methods, for example, vpns, virtual private i networks, or proxies. And these act in a way. I so lets say ive got my computer. Here and i want to access whatsapp in iran or Something Like that. I would go on to a vpn, and the vpn. I would connect to the vpn to get to whatsapp, not i directly to whatsapp. And presumably, i mean, states are finding new ways, arent they, of getting around this. Yeah. So, for example, there are some countries that ban vpns. And the way that you do that is that you would recognise which ip addresses i which is the place that that device is from you would recognise that as a vpn address, and you can ban those. And that is quite effective, for example, in china. So what were saying is, individuals and Media Organisations are trying to get round the restrictions, and we know so are Tech Companies. And i think, joe, yourejust back from interviewing Will Cathcart, whos the boss at whatsapp. Whatsapp, lets remember, is owned by meta. Will cathcart has been telling you how many people are accessing whatsapp despite bans in some countries. Lets just hear a clip of your interview. Youd be surprised how many people still manage to get through. It is a much higher fraction than you might think. What we can most do is look at some of the countries where were blocked and still see, you know, worldwide, Tens Of Millions of people connecting to whatsapp, be it via proxies or vpns or other ways that theyve found ways to get around. Theres a tension here where, you know, i dont want to necessarily point to a specific country and say, oh, look, their block has actually been this ineffective, because you dont really want to tell that country that they should be doing different things, and you dont want to draw too much attention to it. Id rather people just be able to access whatsapp and other services Around The World. What did you make of his remarks, joe . Well, its interesting because of course, whatsapp occupies a sort of strange part of the Silicon Valley world because it is a giant corporation thats part of meta, but it is a bit strange in the sense it doesnt do its business in the same way as those companies. It is a very, very secure Social Network app. Im not just saying that i because we spoke to will. It is end to end encrypted, which means that only i and the receiver can read my messages. I thats partly why the governments Around The World hate it, because its so secure. And we seen bans i in north korea, iran. Intermittent bans in places like syria as well. And in other countries, they throttle it or they make it so you cant do voice calls. But its also a western company. Its from meta. So theres that angle as well. Some countries dont want it because it has this western liberal democracy values that its spreading Around The World. But hes effectively, coyly, saying people are getting round the interventions by their countries. Yes. Ias you can probably imagine, i triedi to push him to get some more detail. He wouldnt give me any more. And thats, as he says, he doesnt want to sort of red rag to a bull to some of these authoritarian regimes. I suppose one of the places might be china. We heard earlier this month that china has ordered apple to remove whatsapp from the chinese version of its app store. Did will have anything to say about that . Yeah. So that was a couple of weeks ago. So the figures that hes talking about, the Tens Of Millions, i wont be counted in that yet. But, yes, he was very. Corporate in his answer. He said its very unfortunate. You surprise me american corporate person being corporate of course. Its very clear to me that theyre very angry with apple taking that decision. It is a decision that apple would have been able to choose. But then again, if youre doing i business in a country like china, china tells you to take that app off the app store, you cant carry on Doing Business if you dont comply with those laws. You can see a longer version ofjoes interview with Will Cathcart of whatsapp on the Bbc World Service youtube channel. Now, in a recent speech, the bbc� s director general, tim davie, turned to the issue of the Bbc World Service. The Bbc World Service provides broadcast and Digital Content in over 40 languages, and its currently funded out of the licence fee that the bbc receives. But tim davie said that it cant carry on like that, adding, and i quote, we will need to discuss a long term Funding Solution for the World Service that comes from Central Government budgets. Joining me on the stage at the bbc Radio Theatre isjonathan munro, bbc newss director of journalism and deputy ceo. So, jonathan, thanks very much indeed forjoining us. The bbc wants the World Service at least to be funded directly from Central Government budgets. Why . First of all, as youve. Been discussing on this edition of The Media Show, i the need for the World Service for impartial, free journalism Around The World has gone up and up and up and mor