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this is [Music] [Music] this is [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh oh um so oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yes very cool [Music] do [Music] ah ah my so [Music] [Music] do [Music] do you ever get the feeling television isn't what it used to be so no brexit brexit we had to take a compulsory course a whole combat propaganda boris johnson once declared that his life's ambition was to be king of the world does he have gunny lebedev have any connection with the russian spy machine well yes offenses where is the evidence they find it offensive the fundamental problem with facebook is that it is accountable to no one governor was advised to invest money in the nhs that the government aren't listening to the evidence kind of world i want to bring my child into [Music] welcome to friday night live with byline tv i'm peter dukes and i'm hardy matharu now it's live and anything can happen and we're a little bit delayed because of sound issues but we've got an amazing show for you tonight um we'll be covering things from big tech to english nationalism and scottish independence and on byline times i'm the executive editor and hardeep is the editor the boss we like to cover what the papers don't say and on byline tv what you don't see on tv but this week's headline our friday night headline on our digital edition is something that other papers have covered and that's the final reckoning the terrible tragic reckoning of coronavirus deaths in the uk now unlike other papers we will not be displaying pictures of boris johnson hanging his head and seemingly saying sorry but not saying what is done wrong we like to investigate a bit more than that and before we go to one of our regular writers for the last year dr john ashton a former head of public health we want to um look at some other subjects too but we need your help because i am not andrew neal i mean maybe i'm looking more like him as the years go by we do not have and neither my peers morgan neither is hardeep samantha reed she's not the role of eyes because she's susannah that's why i wouldn't get a job on morning good morning tv we don't have advertisers funding us we don't have hedge fund billionaires funding us you fund us as a special treat if you can subscribe to patreon you can keep us going and after the show we'll have some q a that sort of stuff we can't talk about on live tv but first let's go back to that story our main story hardeep and a hundred thousand deaths more than a hundred thousand deaths it seems inappropriate to call it's a milestone really i mean it is just utterly devastating that a country like britain has now reached the highest death rate in the world when you adjust for population you know we're up there with the us with india with brazil and mexico i think is the only other one that's passed 100 000 that's absolute death tolls well i was looking yesterday we have double the death toll 18 per million compared with america under trump which is 809 but we should talk to the expert the person who can tell us and provided our front page headline that is dr john ashton as i said he is byline times chief medical officer and just to introduce john a bit he was one of the first to say how the government get the correct advice response wrong we're not locked down early enough weren't doing track and trace and isolate on question time i think back in february wasn't and he was roundly berated and trolled by people like guido fawkes and so he's obviously a good guy honey what do you want to ask john i mean 100 000 deaths i mean it's very difficult not to point the finger straight at the government and yet you know there has been discussion by others you know including the bbc that we need to be looking at underlying questions of poor public health in britain the fact that it's an international travel hub that has very ethnically diverse communities densely populated communities i mean john john where do you stand on this you know where does the blame lie well hardeep we are very proud of our public health tradition in this country but we've neglected it particularly over the last 10 years and we saw coming into this pandemic how our local public health departments have been denuded of resources and downgraded in their status within local governments and you know the uh exercising the regular exercising for public health emergencies had gone by the buy and they exercise in 2016 which revealed all the weaknesses was not acted on but the real issue came down to the leadership of the prime minister um you know his distraction by brexit and by his latest romantic fling um and two weeks holiday with his mistress during february when he missed five meetings of cobra when he could have begun to get a grip with things when you talk about the numbers yes um you know germany which is bigger than we are but has had half the number of deaths um finland norway which have had a fraction of the deaths in new zealand and so on these are culturally not that dissimilar but we we neglected all of this and um one of the most disturbing things and one of the reasons why i'm so pleased to work with byline times is that even our national broadcaster has been unwilling to provide criticism when the only way you learn from your mistakes is by getting to grips with them and you know since my appearance on um question time last year i've been banned from the national bbc i've not been invited on national bbc since that time and this is a measure of the censorship that we now have in this country um absolutely i mean we've had scientists saying doctors saying other public health officials saying that really what we needed to pursue from the very beginning was a zero covid policy you know eliminate eliminate eliminate i mean there's lots of talk of the vaccine now which no doubt is a very very positive development but again in all these briefings we don't hear much at all now about contact tracing isolation it just doesn't seem that we were able to ever properly establish that infrastructure i mean do you have any hope now that we can eliminate the virus or do you just see us going from one sort of lockdown to another well no that has to be our primary goal and the way to do that is with traditional public health measures that gave us the reputation for 200 years for dealing with epidemics well before we had vaccines it's also interesting you know to note that in the great pandemic of 1918-19 the deaths in this country accounted for under one percent of the global deaths at the moment as we stand here on the 29th of january coming up to the anniversary of the pandemic in the uk uh the proportion that british deaths account for of the global deaths is approaching three percent and the world population outside the uk is much bigger now so if that under states how badly we've done in an age when we're so proud of our science but we've neglected the basics of local public health teams identifying where the infection is going and rooting it out isolating and quarantine and the testing is fundamental to that so we have to keep up with that and we don't know what's coming down the track with the vaccine there's a lot of rgb about the supply chain now the manufacturing base may not be as strong as we thought there may be mutants that get rounded and as the who keeps saying now nobody's safe until everybody's safe and we have to take on board the solidarity with poor countries not just because we're being philanthropic and uh you know good about it but because it's enlightened self-interest otherwise the mutations will happen more and more in poor countries and then they'll come here and challenge whatever vaccines we've got that's amazing line it's not safe till everybody's saved can i just ask you coming back to the british government uh john do you believe that it is incompetence largely uh as they say [ __ ] up by the conspiracy or do you think there's a split in the government and some people actually were following a kind of herd immunity policy let it run wild for younger people they'll be fine if you lose a few old people who doesn't care what's your thinking about the government's but driving it if anything at all rather than just reaction i think it's all of those things you know i mean it's the the weakness of the leadership the narcissism and laziness of the prime minister and his extreme libertarian instincts which don't recognize that in a crisis a government needs to take decisive and firm action whilst respecting the democracy that it lives in and yes we've got extreme right-wing economic interests not by no means representative of the chambers of commerce across the country but who really play down these awful deaths that we've had families grieving a hundred thousand and more grieving and hundreds of thousands of relatives and friends and colleagues grieving tonight on a friday night in january and people prepared to you know let this be a price to pay for keeping the economy going and what we know is that the countries that were decisive initially whether they're totalitarian countries like china or liberal democracies like new zealand and australia and the scandinavian countries except for sweden have come out of this and their economies are bouncing back so getting the public health right is getting the economy right and that the subtitle of my book blinded by corona is how the pandemic ruined britain's health and wealth these two things hang together john thank you so much health and wealth hang together just makes complete sense as you have done for us thankfully thank you on byline times for the last year i would urge people to go to the front page read your most recent piece commemorating those more than 100 000 deaths and i think you have a new piece coming out next week about the mental health implications so thank you john for talking to us and we look forward to having you back on byline tv well thank you and it's so nice and you know satisfying to be part of such an important media initiative when we so need it for our democracy john thank you so much so we talk about the problems with johnson's administration when it comes to the coronavirus excuse me when i remove my mic but there are other what else has been happening this week uh heidi because one thing that kicked off the week before we got to this terrible milestone and honestly let's say this is an underestimate with excess deaths there's more hundred thousand people there was scotland and boris johnson's other if you like creaky management in this case not of a crown of arts crisis but a potential constitutional crisis what do you make about what nicola sturgeon said earlier this week and what does this tell us about the state of britain yes i mean it's been coming down the tracks for a while hasn't it you saw the rumblings of it even before brexit 2014 was the first independence referendum in scotland and in scotland voted to stay in the union um obviously we've had brexit scottish majority to remain in the eu and obviously we've had the continuing leadership of boris johnson he's not all that popular in scotland and his etonian english public boy sort of um you know um bonhommey and then on that i did look at a some polls just to just reaffirm what you're saying big support for independence pushing it beyond 50 was when boris johnson became prime minister brexit it goes up then it kind of fades away but come 1918 1919 when johnson particularly 1919 it zooms up sorry yeah yeah no and so boris johnson is an issue and then we've had the coronavirus pandemic and health is an evolved issue so in scotland nicholas sturgeon the first minister uh her administration have been handling it and i think on balance people living in scotland look to england and think crikey you know glad that that's not sort of how we're being governed anyway this culminated in this week nicola sturgeon saying that if in the may elections to the scottish parliament the scottish national party win a majority of the seats then they will move to hold another independence referendum regardless of whether the westminster government because constitutional arrangements between different nations within the union is a matter that westminster can have the final say on she is saying well we will press ahead and hold a referendum so boris johnson got himself up to glasgow he was visiting a testing lab but really it was a way of trying to contain this talk of another referendum and he is kind of very ironic comments where i don't think this is a priority for people in scotland because you know all this talk of holding a referendum but there's no there's no understanding of what the constitutional arrangements would be after a referendum we either go on and on and we're not really being told why it's happening and i thought that was extremely ironic coming from the vote leave leader who definitely couldn't tell us anything but lies during the referendum campaign on the eu what the arrangements would look like afterwards but yeah it's all sort of creaking i mean there's a point he's making there isn't there that uh just as for for me anyway the problem was lee was not particularly won the vote it was what lee was there romaine you knew what the maine was status quo with a few changes by cameron when you got people to define leave and leading brexiteers say stay in the single market customs union everything there seemed to be 17.4 million versions of leave i mean it was worth something with turn two when you talk about scottish independence what would that look like are they being held to account because that could be messy too so there's a kind of valid point there but it is ironic it's the man who didn't seem to took three years to work out four years what leave meant for uk and europe is suddenly talking about constitutional problems but it's very interesting issue we had an article written about it just this week on byline times in many ways some people see the vote for brexit as a sort of a revolution of english nationalism so it was primarily england and wales that voted for leaving the eu and some commentators have said well it's sort of the expression of a repressed englishness that people living in england weren't recognized but others are saying well that may be so but one it's like a taboo that no one ever talks about but the other issue is johnson and the government and the people in the cabinets are actually um kind of english elites are not in favor of englishness they very much want the union and britishness which is the remnants of empire in a way well let's talk about that after a bit more after seeing a short film actually a film we made film last year and released earlier this year we were going to scotland to follow it up but we went to dublin and belfast and what we did there with filmmaker sheridan flynn who works with us here was find out what people in dublin and belfast thought about brexit and to a person where they were unionists deputy former leader of the dup whether they were republicans in the south south or north what they saw brexit was resurgent english nationalism let's have a look at this film a little britain without scotland governed in perpetuity by itonian pratt's or do i want to be part of the european union i think feast with that option i want to be inside the european union i'll feel safer and more culturally at home inside the european union but is there a way to bring me back into the uk and feel more at home there i mean there is i mean one obvious fact is that london is the most beautiful cosmopolitan city in the world and who could not feel at home in london and london go to dramedian you know so i mean if we are realistic about what britain is and revive our vision and and a bit more honesty even with ourselves about how wonderful britain is and how indigenous we are to it despite ourselves then i think there is a there is a possible future where where we are where we are british and content in that but uh but it's hard to see that until we're through this brexit hurdle for decades unionists have looked over our shoulders at irish nationalists as the threat and then a few years ago it became scottish nationalists but actually the real threat was english nationalism and these are probably the same people who allowed their sons to come over here and lay down their lives to fight the ira and protect the union and now i think they are ready to let go you look at those who are in favor of brexit and you see a class-driven class written occupation of what it is to be british they have no notion of what it is to be working class and cardiff no notion of what it is to be destitute and personal or no notion of what the extremes of financial deprivation have um they are peddling a mess and a dangerousness and dangerous myths have caused untold damage to my country and it's going to cause untold damage to britain now peter i remember once somebody called you the quintessential englishman and you didn't quite like that did you what do you how do you think of yourself english british neither well the person who did this i will blame this person is james doleman who is our scottish um court reporter and it was during the indie ref we were both in the phone hacking trial and he said uh i said look i understand why scottish people might want to vote for independence but don't leave me behind in a rump uk because i'd be stuck with all these english people and he said but peter you are english well i'm not english and after brexit has got me to think because yes my grandfather's armenian i think two welsh grandmothers uh adopted kid brother who was half beijing half scottish but actually culturally if you put englishness as a culture you hear in my accent mix of north london then state school by the way and then uh cambridge that i am english aren't i aren't you but you don't like being called english either well i just i don't identify with it really i identify with being british and i think that's because my parents are immigrants so they come from colonial countries india and kenya and so it was a very strong sense of being british growing up and yeah i think of myself as british i don't think of myself as english it's just not an identity that i've ever really thought about but but if suddenly scotland was to say we're leaving tomorrow um yeah it would it would actually make me think about what is my english identity because obviously i live in the region in england within the union so i've always got around it by the way saying i'm not english i'm a londoner it's because london you know 50 percent of people in london have a non-english i think the english uh parent you speak 57 had it normally his grandparent that's even and that it's very different from the rest of england but yeah i think that's the argument john denham has written a piece hasn't he far some byline times about this is if you leave englishness to the skinheads if you look at it that way as we scrape beneath the surface they're probably irish scandinavian or whatever their ethnic englishness doesn't go that deep but they occupy the space of englishness then people like us don't you know leave it to them we don't colonize and as you know i've written this essay we must reclaim englishness hmm yeah i mean you talk about sort of your mother being again very quintessentially english and you talk about your brother i mean what you're really striving at in that article is that there is a greater form of englishness that we could all embrace which is built on values that um are not you know are not about exclusivity or you know the exclusion of others what are those values do you think well the england before it was britain but you know britain england was a very welcoming place for strangers it is a very diverse genetic nation because it's constantly invaded you know stephen colgrave who's sitting over there our co-founder is the most english person i know who can trace his lineage all the way back to guess who the normans who were invaders who were vikings who ended up in normandy so there's that element that truth is incredibly diverse and also clearly closely related to other europeans but our culture our culture is very regional the seven kingdoms you see in game of thrones is very much based on dark ages britain or you know before it became england for unified and you think of people like shakespeare shakespeare you know wrote play set in italy he he's sort of polyglot you know he was the words he picked up from other vocabularies loved around the world he's everyone and no one he said look at the beatles up great import what do they do they sing american rhythm and blues in hamburg for three years and then sell it back to liverpool that our heterogeneity our openness does make us english by culture and and that's the english this is culture is not an ethnicity and do you think we can reclaim the civic nationalism we've talked before about scotland having a great sense of their values and it's very multicultural and to a large extent they've managed to create an ethos where they're very proud of their roots but also uh they're they're proud of being a hub for difference and they've managed to really navigate that do you think england could do something similar and also how do we just start talking about it more you know englishness being english in a good way well i'm going to reverse the question so your parents consider themselves they come via india don't they and to kenya through nairobi and they we can say you've written about it's no shame here they voted for brexit because they felt an affiliation not with europe but with britain but i mixed one it was like you owe us guys the amritsar massacre you know the europeans we have no love-hate relationship we have no hate relationship at all so could you reclaim englishness as somebody from let's admit it brought up in welling which is well into england i'd say it's not even london really i think we could and i really want us to you know i want i do think there needs to be an expression of englishness i don't know why it is still a taboo um i i think we could do it but i think the values that drive it um would would inspire quite a debate i don't think it would be i don't know i i think it'd be quite contentious an issue still to if we were to go out and ask people what is englishness i think there might still be a lot of divergence between what that means and the problem is politically that if scotland left we would become not only a rump trump trumpocracy as i called it but a tory hegemony wouldn't be because they had so many more seeds maybe that would change if they couldn't keep on using englishness and britishness they could have played one against the other i'm always surprised actually you know when you watch you know i don't know any sort of american film or even like modern sitcoms you know everyone always refers to as like the queen of england or in england you have the royal family or you drink tea in england it's really interesting because obviously we're the united kingdom but you know certainly in america and faced around the world it's still this this quaint englishness that sticks out to people and you know i and i would really love to have a debate about um in this country is is the union the remnants of a mini empire ruled over by westminster and i do think the scottish calls for another independence referendum are going to start those dynamics being explored i really do yes i think it's anthony barnett who also writes a byline time made the point why the uk hate always didn't get on with the eu because the uk is its own super state yeah it is a super state and can't bide other ones it's not a nation-state it's four nation-states well i think this will we'll get back to that and hopefully we'll do that film in scotland at some time soon but underlying all these issues rising nationalism or as we talked about coronavis and coronavirus disinformation one thing's changed since the 17th century or or you know since the last time the white house was almost torched in 1816 and that is big tech and the internet so our studio guest today is going to be matthew guy there before we talk to him he's just around that he's here then why is it going to run away we're going to show you a short film which we made previously with kyle taylor who is a big activist on digital rights and digital accountability about the rise of facebook um we have to remember that since the 2016 election and the brexit referendum and the follow-on around cambridge the cambridge analytica scandal and other data scandals there's been almost no change to regulation in either the uk or u.s law or really in any country around the world and facebook has twice as many monthly active users as the population of china so their ability to influence and their ability to reach an extreme number of people is is quite unprecedented um and because they're so big they're almost at this point too big to fix and governments don't seem to even have the knowledge base to equip them to even be able to approach facebook as a corporate entity instead of what it's being treated as now which is a sort of extra judicial super state um that is fundamentally changing the way that we live on this planet the real like the fundamental problem with facebook is that it is accountable to no one and it wields more power than possibly definitely any media type entity that's ever existed and the the pace at which information can travel on facebook means that it actually exceeds the human capacity to comprehend so we're actually now living with something that is too extreme too fast too big for us to cope with as a species and when you think about it through that lens you really have to start ask the question you know okay if this is going to exist then how should it exist um you know never before have we seen a platform as they call themselves they're far more than a platform of course but where where people can come together around ideas that actually you know used to perhaps be seen as you know no harm done for example the flat earth society which is rampant on facebook to a place where they're actually having you know real impacts on human life and it's that connection of the online to offline that we can't forget is essential facebook is used as a tool to act offline in the real world that creates actual harm to people's lives from facilitating a genocide to allowing the transfer of information about that false information around covid the pandemic that has led to you know for example the 5g conspiracy that suggested that um 5g towers were causing and spreading the virus over 70 5g towers in the uk were then damaged or burned down as a result of this conspiracy theory q anon which has become a global conspiracy theory now around this sort of narrative that there's some secret liberal satanic uh deep state that's actually running the world that leads again to offline violence you know facebook was complicit in a genocide in myanmar and we can't forget well i just say you can watch the whole clip on youtube and on our patreon channel another great film made by byline tv now to talk about some of the more economic issues out of facebook's dominance and the rise of big tech is matthew guy that former editor of management today and a business writer for the times and many other things and of course for byline time absolutely the real times yeah the real times piece now people always we talked a lot about and that clip does a bit about the harm the political and social harm social media can do but can you take us a little bit more to the economics of it because one thing i just one thing everybody says to me who's unaware of the power of tech platforms what's wrong with facebook what could be wrong with it it's free how many people my friends i do not go on facebook by the way since i was hacked by cambridge analytica very very rarely but so what could be wrong with matthew it's free it's not taking our money well i think it's a very interesting point because if you talk to the average man or woman in the street about whether they think issues surrounding big tech are a big problem they would say probably not i don't think it's front of mind for them at the moment but in terms of their sort of economic bulk what you have to remember as i said in the piece for you in byline times the u.s tech said sector is now today worth more than all of the stock markets of the 27 eu members combined so you are talking about the most enormous economic leviathan now and they if they don't control our lives but they play an enormous part in the everyday lives of all of us even this week we've seen this business in the united states with with gamestop where we've had a movement against private equity sorry no not hedge funds rather than private equity um through day traders it's been a kind of a revolution to get back at the money guys for what happened in 2008 none of that would have been possible without the the digital world in the old days if you or i had wanted to buy stocks and shares we'd have to phone somebody up and someone would have you know waved a piece of paper across the stock exchange for somebody else nowadays it can be done you know in the twinkling of an eye so that's the convenience we all get the convenience like i might you know daughter can have a birthday make videos whatever what what is this secret downside that we're not seeing beyond the obvious political stuff what's economically happening with that gravitational power big tech well i think what you have to remember is that something like facebook the subject of your film has only been around for just over a decade it started in zuckerberg's dorm in his university about whether girls were fanciable or not and that's that and suddenly it's become something worth tens hundreds of billions of dollars and inevitably it's come to the attention of regulators both in europe and in the united states and probably the areas that people are thinking about for regulation now are four-fold firstly you have competition what the americans call anti-trust because they are so dominant within their markets and very frequently if they see competitors small [ __ ] companies arising they take them out by buying they've got so much cash or instagram you know there are hundreds and hundreds of them if anything looks as it might be a threat they take it out that way so there is i think now an increasingly strong argument that you'll see with the biden administration that antitrust is a way to have a go at them because they are like big oil was back in the late 19th century the u.s banks and justifiably government moved against them there just don't stop you on that on the trust stuff i mean the thing about the standard oil and the trust busting was they had upstream they had the railroads and the oil right they did they did um and don't we just point this out as a publisher on facebook facebook can just make or destroy a newspaper or television channel or an app can't it but i read your stuff on facebook i enjoy looking at it on facebook and you know i share pictures of the kids and the parties and all the rest of it it's free it's there but the other side of all this the second point for regulation has to be tax governments particularly after covid are short of cash all over the world and now you're looking at these enormous largely u.s corporations earning hundreds of millions of pounds and paying minuscule amounts of corporation tax in the uk so i think that that's something that governments on certainly in europe and in this country the french have already moved towards a digital team they'd have to work together wouldn't they matthew because they just moved to lichtenstein hq to ireland it's a big problem peter and you've had margaret verstagger who is the eu commissioner for this been banging away largely unlistened to in recent years about about big tech and what to do about it and she's now proposing introducing a digital markets act and a digital services act across europe um the stick that she's using to beat big tech is look you you know it's coming down towards you now if you play ball at least you'll have something that's uniform across the 27 nations if you don't you're going to have to spend tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars contending with countries on an individual country basis point three online harms right which you've written a lot about and by line times not only at the personal level the influence on children and the way in which their lives seemed particularly during the pandemic to be absolutely fixed to their screens whether it be their laptops or their phones but also the one of political interference and i think political interference is possibly a niche thing many people don't aren't aware of it or not that concerned about it but as you know there's now enormous evidence that a malevolent mover like the russians can just use it and run rings around a lot of these these these companies whether it be twitter facebook or whatever i'm more close to home i suppose then we've seen overseas in america the insurrection being planned online acts of violence kidnapping but we see it through our work and disinformation about covered vaccine conservation now in the old days of business you know if you were running a pipeline and you spilled a lot of that oil into a river you had to pay it's called an externality yeah you're making all this money but you cause a harm so is there not a can you not legislate for the on our data because just to make it clear to your audience they we are their products but they make money from our data don't they if the product is free you are the product and facebook is very rich because it takes five days takes your photographs and sells it on to other people how do you put a kind of a monetary cost on interference in an election how would you kind of work out what what the fine should be on something like that but what about it somebody approaching a hospital or somebody dying through following all these scam adamic groups but it's a really really difficult area and because it's moving so quickly the one fear that i would have is that any regulation that does occur is is almost too slow to keep up with the pace at which things are moving at the moment and you know these are very clever people they are people who spend tens of millions of dollars in washington they're the largest lobby groups in washington now they are they are not going to take this who is their their public spokesman on these on my house poor old nick clegg i thought he wishes he was he was back being told what to do i'm sure he's uh well no i would imagine it's the worst life he has at the moment trying to cope you don't think there's a case for busting up i mean the what we always promise with tech is oh if they get it wrong a new tech will come along like parlor will come replace uh twitter but actually once you've established the market dominance of facebook how did you get off it well my photographs look these people are really smart what you've got to remember about these people like the two who founded google is that they they believe in this thing that techy people call the singularity they believe that tech has got the answer for all the world's ills something wrong with politics we can sort it out something wrong with health tech can sort it out something wrong with education will fix that so they have this enormous sense of self-confidence that they you know that they're like hal in 2001 that didn't know they know it didn't end well so i mean look at something like google google is into wind farms mapping autonomous cars phones delivery drones smart contact lenses hot air balloons robotic cheetahs heard about that one ai genome storage disrupting of course media and the tv industry and even curing death and when i interviewed it for management today a couple of years ago matt britton who runs google in emea he said larry being larry one of the founders of google larry is restless about the numbers of problems that if the insufficient numbers of people working on them and what people like larry at google think maybe less so zuckerberg but people like google think that if you give them a problem that their smarts will enable them to overcome it and sort it out now with that degree of power comes responsibility right and i think to try and be fair to them they it's only just dawned on them in the last few years that actually the the amount of power they wield now exceeds that of many governments and they're moving more rapidly than governments are able to and it's a big problem for them they are aware of that now and they are going to they'll have to make compromises you know facebook may have to lose some of these other things like instagram but but they're driven let's be clear by shareholders they absolutely are so ultimately whatever they feel my great line about google was was their original line was do no evil and by the time they got these drones it was killer robots that's a big shift you cannot rely on their morals can you you have to hold them to count by governance and the bottom line i mean with something like facebook will use its algorithms to you know as it says to join everybody together to and so what what you'll do is you'll get those silos where you're fed stuff that pushes your buttons and you that and you really like and that is one thing as a journalist and as you as a journalist as well must regret i think because what's happened in the last 15 20 years is that we were expected in the old days you know to read a national newspaper watch the news and see the whole panoply of news at home and abroad sport the rest of it but now you you get fed what you want you get fed the kind of stuff that reinforces your beliefs about the world and that ability to you know to filter and be objective and consider maybe even change your minds about things i think is lessened by well they have an algorithm to counter the algorithm but my problem is you know these algorithms can be racist they certainly are about attracting attention youtube so you get more you start off watching a movie i don't know a thing about true new guitar then health and next you're you're down the rabbit hole and you know following tommy robinson or whatever um but the difference is when i go to a supermarket i have choice right i can go buy what the xyz but there is packaging there's contents it is telling me that this is real not filled with you know the cider does have apples in it whereas you know on facebook people are sharing completely fake sites yep and you know that is this information that is an online harm that you can't just sell candy floss and say you know this is gonna save your life but my my other caveat would be that we must have more hope for the united states now that we've seen the back of trump and if you think that we have a problem in the west with big tech then look at china and the way in which they're using it artificial intelligence facial recognition there's nothing a chinese regime likes more than data and data about everyone because data means control so that's why i think you know in san francisco for example they wouldn't allow facial recognition technology because of the mistakes it makes and the inbuilt prejudice that is is with a lot of it so clearly we need to think about america but i would hope we can have some degree of optimism but but i certainly wouldn't want to be somebody in hong kong at the moment that was protesting or indeed on in mainland china because you know they know what you are up to and it is really scary total total surveillance well thank you matthew i'm sure there's a lot more to talk about and you get you back in talk about whatever happens with these other tech companies and facebook it's oversight board but just before you go let's watch a film which we made earlier which is by kyle again and this is one of the things we've noticed online i did block you once didn't i because matthew can be a bit of a troll online especially to me we've known each other years but sometimes you don't know whether you're talking to a human being or an algorithm or bot actually most accounts now are sock puppets they're human but it has been proved that through their network affects automated robots it's like the matrix or or terminator but it all happens in our mind online that bots online have determined the discourse push people that way another in a political debate because you think you're surrounded by a crowd of people on this side it's actually a whole load of clones and just to close this off let's look at carl's film on how to spot a bot all the big problems in tech are structural and we have to you know get governments to move there is a lot that we can do in the interim to protect ourselves and protect each other to sort of just disrupt the misinformation ecosystem so one of the ways to do that is to spot the bots right so it's it's pretty easy nowadays to see if if an account that you're engaging with is actually a bot and you know first they're posting an obscene amount way more than a normal person would post and often the language will be hyper repetitive across different bot accounts the second is their profile is sparse right so they maybe don't have a cover photo their bio is three words long a big red flag the third is their follower to following ratio is way off so they're you know maybe following 500 accounts but only three people are following them that just doesn't work out so likely a lot report the bots facebook is set up it's up to 200 million fake accounts they take down per month that's right 200 million fake accounts are taken down per month by facebook and twitter the numbers are in the millions so report them to the service and make sure that they're taken down um that's one thing you can do right now to create a better social media environment this is hugely important because there's so little action happening in a big way and this is the the frontline defense we have to sort of disrupt these networks and ensure that people who are getting their information from social media are less likely to be misinformed and disinformed by bots and trolls well i'm not a boss i mean you can tell i'm not a bite because i sometimes slip up and we're a bit late showing today so um you can still join us we're about to leave you soon but we have our patreon q a matthew's staying around you want to ask him anything about business hardeep and i'll be there in about 10 minutes on patreon for those who support us because i said we're not gb news we don't have any hedge funds we're not good morning britain we don't have any advertisers we've got you so click on that patreon follow us keep us independent honey what do you think bot or not not not okay for you and do you ever encounter bots online do i encounter bots online i don't know some of them claim to be from youth i think yes no someday i have this thing people i'm quite argumentative on twitter and there's a couple of people block me and other people i put forward the same arguments maybe i do and they think i'm their sock puppets or they're my soft puppets it's all very ridiculous and keeps you up late at night i mean where would we wouldn't be very far without social media you probably found this on social media but it is a bit of a nightmare and back to the real sad nightmare of this week and our continuing coverage of the coronavirus i mean it's very difficult to imagine isn't what a hundred thousand people is like i did and we've known you've had relatives who've died haven't you i stephen i know there's no people who've died of covered it is we all know somebody now but mike goldsworthy who does a regular show for us on thursdays went with the team to try to imagine what a hundred thousand deaths in less than a year was like and so before we see you but those are leaving please watch the rest of this film we'll say goodbye and after that we'll see the rest of you on patreon and see you next week thanks [Applause] 100 000 people now lost to coronavirus in this country how do you how do you visualize that how do you put that in any context it's meaningful about about people about society about life who was the person that should have been sitting here who was number 5231 did they have kids that badly missed them now what were their plans for this summer who should have been sitting here who should have been sitting on all of these seats this stadium can hold 10 000 people well 10 times that we've now lost people who should be here 100 000 people [Music] that otherwise could have been here [Music] enjoying life enjoying local social activities gatherings music festivals football games but they're not here a hundred thousand people lost their pandemic so far so far [Music] you