I'm Marcia Joyner and we are Navigating the Journey and today we are going to Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's where everybody is focused on Tulsa. And this time last year we did a video with Theo Alexander and because for one thing he is the only person I know that is a real live descendant of the people from Tulsa that were involved in the massacre. So Theo, Theo, hi. Hello everybody. How are you doing? All right. So you're all the way in Tulsa. Yes, coming live from the ULSA. How's it going out there? Well, I mean, it's beautiful. You know, it's always good to be here amongst your friends and family that know you, watch you grow up and given this turmoil of the times.  We need a lot of that right now. So tell me, is Tulsa getting ready for the Orange Man in the White House to come? What's it like? I would say yes, but really what Tulsa's preparing for Centennial of the 1921 Race Massacre Riot. So as we approach the date next year, we're planning some things this year along with the Centennial Commission to be able to show people what happened, what has happened since then, and what we're planning. So I don't think the gentleman in the White House has as much, you know, credibility with us as far as what we're planning on doing to show that we're still alive. We're still planning towards rebuilding Tulsa and that's the focus right now. We have a lot of attention on Tulsa, maybe because he's coming, but right now I'm focused on what Black Wall Street is going to do to rebuild. Well, now we're going to run the video that you and I did this time last year, where you talk about the whole what happened because I've read a lot and I like what you said as a descendant and as someone that knows firsthand. So most of the stories are what somebody read and somebody wrote. Anyway, so if you will stay with us and Eric is going to air some part of what we did last year. Okay. Okay. Okay. Stand by. Was the Black Wall Street. So Theo, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you for giving us a firsthand account, you know, that because most of what we read is written by the conqueror, the people that actually created the riot, that we don't get a sense of what the riot was like, the massacre was like, except from people who, well, you're as close to firsthand as we can get, but your ancestors, your family went through this. Now, just to give you a background, this was 1921. May 30. And Tulsa at that time. Was that Greenwood? It was the Greenwood District. It was unbelievably successful. It was a Black neighborhood with doctors and lawyers and dentists and pharmacists and banks and schools, hospitals, libraries, all of these were Black owned. Gorgeous place. And that's why it was called Wall Street, Black Wall Street. And also Little Africa. Little Africa. That was another nickname that was attributed to Black Wall Street. So tell us about the success of this area. Black Wall Street was centered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the districts of the streets, Greenwood, Archer, Pinewood, the streets that, you know, cordoned off the section of Black Wall Street. In the heyday, late 1800s up to 1900s, Oklahoma was started to welcome settlers who were free Black slaves to open territory. This is prior to it being called Oklahoma, settled as a state. It was a place where, it was a place of refuge for a lot of people escaping the South in the tragic slavery situations that was going on, along with the Jim Crow. So they settled in Oklahoma and they established Tulsa there and also developed into what they call a Black Maca. Prior to any other state having any kind of conservable Black wealth being shown as success even during those times of oppression and slavery and things like that and also coming out of World War I. A lot of people in the war effort brought their families there to settle and the fortunate thing was Oklahoma had a large oil reserve also which has one of the best ports, one of the most successful ports. This is what contributed to the wealth also which was Black owned and it was considered the wealthiest place on the planet at that point in time in 1921 with the oil reserves and also with the bankers and success of doctors and lawyers. Many who contributed to first time inventions or first time surgeries things like that. We were very fortunate to have Oklahoma or prior to Oklahoma's territory to have that land below the Mason Dixon line even settled by successful Blacks and we were doing our thing back then. And so your family was in this area in that city or town. Well it was part of the city but it was a district is that correct? Yes it was part of Tulsa, North side of Tulsa. If you look at the city grid of most states in the United States only two only clue cities that are settled by Blacks are set on the North side of the town. North side is usually contributed to Caucasian wealth and things like that so Memphis, Tennessee and Tulsa, Oklahoma was the only two cities that were set up in the North which was the affluent section. Yes my family came up from Northern Texas in the early 1800s. We settled in around the Bristow and Langston area and at the age of five my parents moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is early 70s and so we settled there and we were I wasn't aware of the Tulsa massacre to the age of 13.  I know you talked about the Elaine massacre recently. Yes. You had Rosewood in Florida. You have a series of events happening in the early 1900s until the mid 1900s. I would dare say that we still suffer from some of those things and some of those policies today even as we see innocent Black death being taken by a law enforcement officer in no regard for Black life. So how did this massacre begin? The story goes there was a gentleman by the name of Dick Rowland just an entrepreneur in the area because it was segregated at that point in time. You could only use certain bathrooms at the top of the tower where the incident occurred. There was a restroom that was for color. So you had to take the elevator with an operator up to that where the restroom was on to be able to do that. So Dick Rowland which is one of the young men who entered the elevator cart and back then they had elevator operators as I said. I believe the lady's name was Sarah Page, a young white girl. Well it's told that when Dick got onto the elevator he missed his step because he was off in practice to intimidate or oppress or cause injury to Blacks at any cost. So it was said that the elevator operator stopped the floor prior to it leveling off and when Dick Rowland walked onto the floor he stumbled into her and she let out a scream. At that point in time that occurred when you were a Black man there was something dealing with a white person.  Yes. So when that incident occurred both of them entered the elevator. Dick went one way she went the other way and soon to come a lynch mob formed to come apprehend him for assault or rape that's what they were saying of a young white girl at that point in time and it just transferred you know from a lynch mob to anger as far as the seemed like the whole county also convened on Black Wall Street at that point in time with local law enforcement and collusion with you know the court and off the street after the lynch mob had formed and it was a series of incidents that happened. Black wealth was not to be taken for granted at that point in time we knew the time that people were living in and so we wanted to protect our wealth and at that point in time in the United States it was not illegal you know you didn't get any kind of repercussion for killing Blacks at that point in time. He's still down. Yes it was an average of two Blacks that were lynched a week and even by newspaper and postcard depiction you know that's how we know some of the things that were happening at that point in time but so the people in Tulsa were not going to stand for that so we had a lot of World War I veterans there were a lot of entrepreneurs the pills of the community the the pastors of the church things like that and there was an armed guard that stood guard at the courthouse or the jailhouse where Dick Rowland was being held it was common practice for a lynch mob to come right to the depths of the judicial system or the courthouse and the law enforcement would turn the person over for them to be lynched in the public so a series of lynchings set going on probably that week and Tulsa was not going to stand for it and so they're shot fired we don't know who's fired the shot there's many different stories said but white lynch mob Black mob protecting the life of Dick Rowland and things transferred you know transpired after that it was very drastic. So how long did it take how long did all of this last? It lasted a series of four or five days total the first day being the most devastating because people were seeing the planting that went out the National Guard was called in Marshall Law was called and World War I veterans you know there were white plansmen that were in the area were very very jealous I guess they despised the wealth of Black Wall Street and Tulsa, Oklahoma when some of them were still living you know on dirt mattresses what do you call the hillbillies and so at that point in time you know the Klan was very strong the Klan was reinvigorated as a union group because there was a lot of out of work white male war worked one veterans so they did collaborate they deputized those type of people and they already had their guns from World War I because it was all common practice to bring guns with you no one took them back government didn't want them so you were able to take them which enabled them to you know create a very devastating situation you know by having machine guns some of them pilots they have their crop dusters they drop napalm and fire well not napalm but other means of high flammable flammable fluids on some of the structures they bombed like Wall Street this is why you see the destruction that was so vast oh yes they bombed it but prior to bombing it they went in and looted the wealth a lot of these people were jewelers they were bankers they were not impoverished people so they took that oh boy it's kind of yes it's hard-wrenching but it is it is it was happening across the nation it is my mother was at Fisk University and she says there was a lynching every weekend this is Nashville and she said there was a lynching every weekend just outside of town yes and the mob would come the local folks would come and they would take souvenirs from yes the lynched person like their ears or whatever yes and that was that was what took place the savagery that took place because also with the Native Americans you know in the Indian Wars they did the same they bought scalping and things like that so taking souvenirs was something they intended to do and then the tragedy even is that when they were lynching they would bring their children to watch and some of the postcards depicts the people smiling and having fun as someone was being roasted over a fire while being lynched at the same time so we had a very very savage history in our nation but this is 1921 less than 100 years ago we're coming up on a centennial of that event and Tulsa's planning passed that event Black Wall Street never regained its wealth at this point in time we're still investigating exactly how many people were murdered and even upon the murder of so many even when people went back to reclaim their their own land and to borrow money to rebuild there was ordinances and legislation put into place where insurance was not made available to any of the people who came back to reclaim their own property or to reclaim the property because of the massacre because of the looting because it was being burned down so in in effect that was exactly what they intended to do to just wipe it out yes you know and so this kid was an excuse he was definitely an excuse they used him as a scapegoat and did they kill him no he was apprehended he was also released like Roland I do I do believe he's still if he's not still alive I'm not sure but um yes but it was said that him and Sarah Page were actually a couple she had just filed for divorce in this state she was coming from when she moved to Tulsa she gained a job and she started dating and she was dating a she didn't really understand that how strict it was sure she did well well she never pressed charges on dig they try to get it a press charges she never pressed charges but the mob ensued anyhow using as an excuse of course yes but they actually have children together they they settled in another part of Oklahoma and actually had children I guess they lived their life but um that's an unknown story I can't really verify that but people in Oklahoma we understand that wow wow wow wow that is such a story we um I just want to put in a little caveat you mentioned Native Americans from the day that Christopher Columbus put foot on what is now the Bahamas and then into Cuba and he saw the indigenous people decided that they would make good slaves and took them back to Spain but he also introduced diseases which wiped out all of the pianos that they they don't exist anymore and from that day to this we have had and that includes Hawaii and Guam and every place else we have had white supremacy and it marches and marches and marches across wherever they can go yes and so you know and then what they did to the Indians is just insane just insane so I'm sure I'm sure where you are in Tulsa which was Indian land yes yes I mean it's it's very unfortunate that our our our country has such a devastatingly horrific um history when it comes to encounter with indigenous people these are the people who made the land what it is these are the people who made the land as beautiful as Columbus could imagine when he appeared when he when he came up to the shores and any other the explorers that you know rediscovered whatever they rediscovered but my issue with it is what has been done since then I mean if you think about the chicken pox in the blankets in the trailer tears if you think about what Columbus did with this panel if you think about fairly recent past the um just giggy experiments these are all things that were placed in front of us to run into and with the tragic outcome um like today COVID-19 and I'm saying we're being targeted but if you look at the states that opened up first there were the southern states there were the states with a heavy population of African-American people and let me add this that no one mentions um there are also the states that did not take Medicaid so those people have no medical no no today if you encounter COVID-19 symptoms or anything else that would hospitalize you it's almost a detriment to you to visit the hospital center ER health center in fear of catching COVID-19 or not giving them getting the resources or the services to be able to combat it you know either as a healthy individual or someone who's compromised by their health pre-existing conditions I mean like you said the Obama care or affordable care act policies have been rolled back to the point where we have millions of people back with no health insurance if you don't have a job some even if you have a job you can't afford it so it's unfortunate that with these protests and if you've seen any of the news currently there's an uptick some of the states have doubled their number of new cases per day to also being one of the cities that are being you know discussed about that and with this weekend coming with um you know with 45 coming it's going to be pretty pretty bad I mean we have good very good health resources here hospital systems some of the best in the nation but our health code and providing services to people who are of color or people who are you know foreign citizens and even people who are just in the minority status you know we've never had adequate health care across the nation and people wonder why we are predisposed as far as conditions and we're twice as likely to die of certain things without everything COVID-19 is just another thing on the list you know and the lynching has always been we've always had the cope with the lynching part of but the disease part of it we've kind of escaped you know what I mean so but today I don't know what's going to happen with this I honestly it is amazing to me and then not only is it a deal of not having health care but our people usually have those outside jobs transportation hospital care and nursing homes and all of those things of grocery stores and those people that are essential so they're out there and that's where you know they don't get to go home and close the doors and you know work yeah you know in the the myth of COVID-19 you know as far as african-american population we're bound to battle that because if you remember back in january and as it starts to progress through the nation and the the death rate starts to go up the new cases the diagnosis starts to go up as tests started I mean people were actually saying that and I was one of those people who was under the belief that maybe because melanin or any other advantage we have as far as our DNA and being healthy or healthy race overall but I was under the impression that maybe it wouldn't affect us as much you know but now that we see we're getting diagnosed and dying at almost twice the rate as any other race I'm just at loss of words that people don't really take that serious you know and I enjoy seeing and enjoy being a part of the protest for black life to matter but what are we going to do when we don't get health services when black lives don't matter well and that's a big thing across the country not only for minority people but people in general for those states that denied Medicaid yes that it does not affect just us that affects everybody in the state and those are mostly southern states right you know not to detract from from what the discussion is today you know the focus of Black Wall Street and 45 coming it being Juneteenth you know I just caution everybody to take the safety precautions that's out in the CDC guidelines or the World Health Organization or your state or county health department take it serious mask up love up if you can you know and enjoy Juneteenth by all means but please don't render us any more in jeopardy than what we already have with one side being the lynching than the other side being COVID-19 threatening our populations well I think now of course you know if you've known me long enough to know I would think this way but the fact that they chose Juneteenth to have an event in any city but on that day and it's Tulsa and then they moved the Republican convention to July in Florida in the same town on the same day that they had the axe handle massacre July 27 somebody in his concern or his office or whatever has to know that that can't be a coincidence that has to be more than a dog whistle that has to be we're here you know and calling attention to that that that can't be a coincidence yes I mean there's a lot of strategy goes in the presidential campaigns as we know and he's a very strategic person I mean my first introduction to Donald Trump was reality TV being the king of reality TV and being you know very successful that as far as building his enterprise off the apprentice episodes he had a very you know a stupid group of young people and older people later on in life when he started letting celebrities come on but he had a pretty good poopy poopy people to build his empire on and I think he redid that successful and then he can almost handpick who he wants to speak in the way he wants him to speak and so I can't fault anybody for taking a check or making their living or doing anything but in today's time when black lives do matter when you see a public lynching you got to let that go you got to get on the right side of history at this point and with this rally hopefully a lot of people can see through some of the antics that are being proposed if you look at recent news and what's been happening with his ability to do any kind of foreign affairs successfully we have we're on the brink of a civil war right in 96 a lot of yes oh yes we are and this is before we run out of time give us the address of the centennial that um what am I calling this now it's the um the the black wall street um centennial it's it's actually the Tulsa 1921 race master centennial commission their kind of address is um I would just give the website out um yeah that website yeah so the website is Tulsa1921.org Tulsa to you lsa 1921.org you get all the information of all the things that they're planning in the events and activities oh that's wonderful that's a good address it's easy to remember right yeah well I think we are about out of time but I appreciate you spending this time with us again thank you for having me now Miss Nylons over there yeah well we were doing pretty good with the COVID-19 until everybody insisted on having the tourists come back and now every day the numbers go up every day all right and that's that's I think that's gonna be across the nation that you know I'm looking at the map right now I mean that's a lot to say you're doubling the cases you know saying more so than you had before so well we didn't have we had four or five here five there yes none on Linai one on Molokai but every day now we have I mean it's not like the mainland but anyway as as we open up we're bound to see more people so right yeah thank you for having me um Miss Joyner it's always a pleasure to see you and visit with you especially about issues of history and things that particularly involve us as a people in our climb our steady uh the uh release of oppression I guess you could say right next I'm glad to be alive in these days you know this is it's good to be young black man um to be able to see people realize your life matters well again I thank you so much and you got to come back to Hawaii where you just have to do that you know we miss you leave that I will be there short great all right thank you thank you aloha and we'll see you next time


The top profitable digital product ideas of 2021 and how to sell them. Okay, so digital products can't be smelled, can't be touched, can't be felt, can't be held, and yet everybody seems to consume them. In this video, I'm gonna tell you what the top digital products are and how you can sell them and start making a tremendous amount of money. So at the end of this video, you'll know exactly what to do and you won't have any more questions. But if you do, you can put them in the comments section below. All right, let's get started. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so, hit that subscribe button below. Don't forget to turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do a new video or I go live. Now, many entrepreneurs build their entire business on digital products. They never have to ship anything out. They never have to box anything up. They never have to worry about it. And the cool thing is, they can make a digital product and they could just sell it over and over again to thousands and thousands or millions of people, whatever they want.  Well, a digital product is something you can sell somebody that is in a digital form. It could be an e-book. It could be an audio file. It could be a PDF. It could be videos, anything like that. And the cool thing about it is, once you've made it, you can just keep selling it over and over again, like I just said. Now, what are some of the advantages to digital products? Well, low overhead. I mean, it doesn't really cost you anything to keep digital products around. Maybe a little bit of storage area. The profit margins on them are great because each time you sell another one, it really doesn't cost you a whole lot to sell that product. You don't have much product cost. In addition to that, you have potential to automate. So when somebody does buy your product, you can automatically send them an email with a link to their particular product and you didn't have to do anything. It automatically went to them. In addition to that, there are very flexible products, right? You can do downloads to help build your email list. And once you do, you can send them out emails and offer your other digital products or courses or eBooks or anything else you want. So you can be very flexible about that. And here's the cool thing. We just went through 2020 and eLearning is the future. I mean, that's how people are wanting to learn now. They want to learn online. They don't mind paying for individual courses. As a matter of fact, a lot of people would rather pay $1,000 for your course than to spend $40,000 or $50,000 for a college degree that doesn't guarantee them anything. Now, the downside to digital products is you're gonna compete with free stuff out there. There's a lot of free information out there. So yours is gonna have to be above the fold, okay? It's gonna have to be better than the stuff that's already out there. In addition to that, you're gonna have to deal with piracy and I've dealt with that myself. People will try to steal your courses and go out and sell them. What I found is people that try to steal my stuff, they don't do it right first off, but when they do steal it, they don't really know how to market because they're stealing other people's products. If they were good marketers, they'd be able to market it. And I've seen people try to steal my stuff and sell it for half the price and still can't sell it because they don't know how to market. And there's some restrictions out there too. Facebook and Instagram, they only will allow you to sell physical products so you can't sell digital products there, but there's enough avenues to where that doesn't really matter. Now, I would like to go over each and every one of these digital products so that you know what they are. And the first one is gonna be educational products. You educate people on something. Maybe it's cooking, maybe it's sewing, maybe it's gardening, whatever it is, maybe it's physical fitness, but they're educational type products. The next one is licenses to your digital assets. Whatever that digital asset may be, if it's something they wanna use, that particular thing you can actually sell a membership to. Which brings me to my next one, which is membership sites. Membership sites are awesome because they will pay a monthly fee to get access to the content that is within that particular membership. I've got several myself and they're very profitable. The next one is digital templates or tools where somebody pays you a fee and they can use your template. Maybe it's presets for a camera, or maybe it's templates to build a particular type of sales page or whatever it is that you have, this digital template, people will actually pay for that. You can also sell your art or music on large platforms, photo platforms, music platforms where people actually pay to access this particular platform and then you get a percentage of that fee. And then the last thing of course is services. Any type of services you wanna sell online, digital services you sell online, you can also do that. Now let's take a look at some of these products. We're gonna start off with the educational ones first. Let me run over to my screen here and just kinda show you. This one here is Holiday Baking Hacks ebook. Pretty cool idea right here. Something like this, you can include quizzes, knowledge checks, interactive activities with your courses to help break up the learning content. You can make your e-course more engaging and consider learning and implementing and teaching on a model like Addy. This particular one, How to Cake It sells ebooks as an alternative to physical cookbooks. If you consider yourself an expert on a particular topic, digital products are a great way to package that information and sell it to others to learn. All right, let's check out some digital assets now. We're gonna go over here to City Lights. City Lights is from stock photos to video footage from music to sound effects. There's a global ecosystem of licensable digital assets uploaded by creatives for other creatives to use in their work. Pretty cool site. The next one is Membership Sites. Let's run over to one of those Membership Sites. I've got a bunch of my own, but I wanna show you other peoples real quick. Instead of selling individual digital products, you can bundle them together and lock them behind a paid subscription to generate recurring revenue. Now I've got one called the Inner Circle. I've got another one called the E Business Toolbox and people pay for those Memberships and they get access to training videos, they get access to software, all these things and they just pay a small monthly fee as opposed to having to buy each one of those individual courses. The next one, number four is Digital Templates and Tools. Let's run over and take a look at one of those right now. This is Retro Supply. Digital products can also come in the form of intangible tools that equip professionals to do tasks that either fall outside of their skill set or take up a lot of time. So you could sell digital solutions to the common pain points and needs of a specific audience. So to look at some of these particular products, it may be a resume builder. Maybe somebody needs a resume. They're certainly not going to sit down and want to build a resume every time but if you have a template you could sell them, there's a digital product. You could also design mobile apps for businesses or individuals and sell those as digital products. You can also sell graphic design templates for brochures and business cards and whatever somebody needs in their particular office that they need a template for. Maybe you have some digital marketing templates to help entrepreneurs to market their products. You could actually sell those too. The next area, number five, is music or art. Let's check out one of those now. This one here is Materia Collective. They sell digital sheet music for video game soundtracks.  Now while t-shirts and prints are always an option, there are also plenty of possibilities in digital downloads. The next one is services and this can be any kind of service but let's look at some fitness ones. I'm gonna take you over to a website now. This is Street Parking Packages. It's personal training programs into digital products to sell as a monthly subscription. Services tend to pair well with digital products because services are essentially their opposite, right? With services, your inventory is limited to the number of working hours you can actually accommodate. However, you can record these things and sell them over and over again.  Look for courses that are similar. Look for downloads that are similar. Look for memberships that are similar and then actually check them out and I would actually suggest buying those things and seeing what their sales funnel is, seeing what type of emails they send you and oftentimes you can go to somebody's sales page and start to fill out the information, put your email address in there and not complete the checkout, a little trick, and they're gonna send you an email afterwards and say, hey, you didn't complete your checkout, go back here and we'll give you a 10% discount and we'll give you this as a bonus or whatever and you can actually crack what they're doing and do something similar. Now don't copy what they're doing but you could do something similar. It's a great way to figure out a course in a way somebody's marketing something without you having to spend all the time and all the effort and all the research to figure that particular thing out. Now a lot of people say, well, I don't wanna spend money on somebody else's product, I'd rather waste three or four days of my time trying to figure it out and maybe not figure it out. Well, that doesn't make much sense, does it? Go ahead and just find something that's working out there and do something similar. And the last thing I would say is once you figure out what you wanna do and something similar you wanna do, validate it and find out how many people are searching for that. You can go to the Google AdWords tool and figure out how many searches are made on that particular subject or product or course and see if there's a demand for it. If there's a demand for it, go for it and start doing it. I hope this video helped you out. I hope it gave you a lot of good ideas that you can move forward with. If you have any questions or comments, put it in the comment section below. I love to get your questions, love to get your comments. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so so far. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I upload a new video or I go live. Thank you so much for watching this video and as a gift, below, there's a course. It's a $97 course. You can get absolutely free. All you have to do is click and learn. Simple and easy, but it won't be there for long so you need to grab it now. Thanks so much for watching. Give me a thumbs up if you would and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. 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Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Facebook is in the news again for the wrong reasons. whistleblower Francis Hogan has revealed a large trove of information on how the social media giant was profiting as the hate speech and divisive content was surging on its platform. Today we have with us senior journalist Paranjai Guha Thakuta and our resident tech expert Bappa Sinha. They're here to discuss what's going on. So, Paranjai, first to you, why is this disclosure of information different? We've had them before. You're right. This story is not new. I mean, when Cyril Sam and I wrote a book called The Real Face of Facebook in India in 2019, even at that time it was rather well known. We published a series of articles in NewsClick. Thereafter, Washington Post, Buzzfeed, Time magazine, Aussie.com, Washington Post, New York Times. Everybody's been writing about all the hateful speech that Facebook has been propagating. And the new part of what Francis Hogan, the whistleblower, said is that Facebook knew very well. The management of Facebook, headed by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, knew what was happening but did not do anything about it. They turned a blind eye. So the new part of it is that this whistleblower has given concrete examples and many of them from India and many of them pertaining to people from the ruling party, the Bharti Janta Party, whose accounts and fake accounts and real accounts disseminated huge volumes of hateful, fake, false, incendiary speech. And Facebook did very little to constrain or curb them despite claiming that they had fact checkers.  He said the company would do a within quote deeper and more rigorous analysis of its recommendation systems and do product changes. I mean, everything is a product for them. I mean, the human beings behind the hateful speech, the algorithms, I personally think they've just not done enough.  Do you think, you know, with the millions of users they have in India, their experience of Facebook case has been roughly the same for many years. How do you also get users to think that something needs to change? When Facebook started in India, it opened its office in 2011. It barely 15 million users. Next year it doubled. Then it was 100 million in 2014. After that, it's been an exponential rise. It was 220 million by the end of 2018. And as of now, we understand there are at least 314 million users of Facebook within India. This is only Facebook. Only in India. No. Facebook in India, not WhatsApp or Instagram. Or Instagram. WhatsApp has more users in India. I mean, they claim 400 million somewhere in the region of 450 million. I mean, everybody in India who has a mobile phone with Internet connectivity, I mean, almost all of them are using WhatsApp. The point is, this is the biggest, the largest user base of Facebook, nowhere in the world. They spend 80% or 87% of the budget on fact-checking and tackling misinformation in the US and North America where they have 10% of the users, they spend a miniscule amount of it. They buy their own admission as admitted. They don't have enough people who understand Hindi in Bangla. Because, I mean, you can expect them to do all this artificial intelligence and check by machines what they say, machine learning. But I think you need human intervention. Maybe Bappa knows more about this. Bappa, yes. Can AI actually solve the problems that Facebook is creating? AI, I think, can solve a lot of the problems. But the question is, does Facebook want its AI to solve the problems? I mean, that is the more fundamental question rather than whether AI can do it or not do it. See, what is Facebook's business model? Facebook claims its business model is to connect people. But how does Facebook really make money? Facebook's 98% of Facebook's revenues come from ads. So Facebook is an advertisement company. And it makes tons of money. Just last quarter, it made $30 billion in revenues and roughly $10 billion in profits in one quarter. And all of that, 98% of that is from ads. So Facebook's business is about selling ads. And how does it make money? It makes money when you see an ad and when you click on it. So Facebook's entire technology is driven towards hooking people onto their app and making people spend more and more time on it. How do they ensure that more people will come to their platform? So now there has been, Facebook has done, by the way, there is Facebook's own admission. They have undertaken scientific studies. They have recruited behavioral scientists. They have recruited people who understand human psychology to figure out how people spend more time on that. And in 2018, a group of researchers from MIT, they published a paper where they found that fake news and hate speech goes viral far more than real news. So they did this study and they looked at stories and they found that a real news story would travel six times slower than a fake news. And if you have a tweet stream, most people will have a series of posts linking them and creating a narrative. So if you have a tweet stream of 10 or more, then a fake news or a hate speech tweet stream is likely to travel 20 times more than a fact-based news. So this is from MIT. Now clearly Facebook engineers and Facebook management knows this. So their goal is to get people hooked on.  Maybe I'll just add a point to what Bapa said. You see, he's absolutely right. The entire business model of Facebook, and they are a private organization. They're one of the world's biggest private multinational conglomerates, is predicated on their information going viral. So how does one then regulate a business model like this? The point is, once it goes viral, they don't care whether it's correct or false, whether it's hateful or not, so long as they rake in the advertising box. This is really the point. They have, and this is what the whistleblower Francis Hogan has shown, that even when it is violating their own community standards, they tend to be very, very slow in acting. I mean, what was the reason the former policy head, Akhi Das, you know, she quit ostensibly for personal reasons, but everybody knows that she took her own sweet time, and she actually told her colleagues, don't touch them. They are Bharti Janta Party people. They are well-known. Let's speak, Kapil Mishra, T. Raja Singh, this member of the Legislative Assembly of Telangana. You have to add to a point that... And then we have the opposite example, where some people were censored, who were not spreading. You know, to add to what Bappa was saying, there is a person called Alan Raspiger. He's a journalist, and he's a member of this oversight board which Facebook has set up. They are supposed to include eminent individuals, public figures, including journalists, who are all supposed to be independent, and they can be critical of his. I'm quoting him. What Alan Raspiger has said is that it is well-known that the algorithms reward emotional content that polarizes communities because that makes it more addictive. You know, social media platforms and drug pushers, that the only set of two people or two sets of people who call their consumers users. You know, you see it. Now, this is exactly... Bappa, you were telling me about how the groups form on Facebook, how communities form, because Facebook, I think 2018, decided that they would push friends and family circles, but it backfired. It became more angry. The platform became angrier because of that push. Maybe it backfired publicly, but like I'm saying that the Facebook's business model is what Facebook's business model is. So internally, they very well knew what their algorithms were going to do. They were fully aware of it. It is not a quirk. It is not a bug. It is what the algorithm is supposed to do, which is get people hooked on. And this is not just an India-specific phenomena all over the world. Neonazi groups in Germany, which were banned by the German government, Facebook did not pull down their sites. No, it was in Myanmar, in Sri Lanka, where after New York Times, after the media, after United Nations bodies criticized them, that's when this took action. What happened in New Zealand where, you know, there was a live Facebook broadcast of a person who was shooting down, gunning down people outside a mosque in New Zealand. And, you see, they are knew exactly that their system is abused. They are extremely negligent about taking prior action. Now, they claim they have all these fact-checkers. They have fact-checking partners in English, 11 different languages. They claim they have tens of thousands of people. But the fact is, is that enough? Are they taking action? Because these fact-checkers, even when they point out that this is hateful, do something about it, it's up to Facebook whether they take it down or not. And I'll give you one very interesting quote, which came out in this Francis Hohog and the disclosures. In 2019, a Facebook researcher wrote that, I have seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I have seen in my entire life. This is the kind of stuff that goes viral. Papa, how did this come to be? How did this viewer end up with more ghastly images than ever before? Well, even in this Hogan revelations, right, there is this story about a couple of Facebook researchers who set up a dummy account. They impersonated an Indian 21-year-old female in North India. And they just created the account and then let it be. They didn't interact with that account at all. And what they found was that account, within days, was filled with pro-Modi and anti-Muslim posts. So that just, without any manual intervention, just purely Facebook algorithms working for a new user, you get bombarded with anti-Muslim speech in India. And I'll give you another example. 12 hours of live video was put up on a site that fanned all kinds of conspiracy theories. And they were all of a communal nature about the death, the suicide, the unfortunate suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput. This is the kind of trash that goes viral and they do little or nothing to constrain or check it. And like Sushant Singh Rajput, look at the international connections. Follow the Sushant Singh Rajput conspiracy. They have borrowed heavily from QAnon, which is an American site. Now, the FBI told that QAnon was a terrorist threat. And Facebook still did not pull it down for 13 months. So in Germany, where the German government banned these groups, Facebook still allowed them. In India, where the government actually promotes this kind of hate speech, India is a marriage made in heaven for Facebook and BJP. Can I give you some figures over how huge they are? I had a question. Yes, please go on. Actually, Facebook has claimed that their AI catches 90% of hate speech, others independent people say 5%. How can the number be so different? Clearly, like Mark Zuckerberg is lying. But for example, India, like Paranjava was saying, India is Facebook's biggest market. 340 million Facebook and 450 million WhatsApp. So Facebook did not have AI modules which worked in Hindi and Bengali for detecting violence, calls for violence and hate speech till this year. It's only after all these outrages they have put on these Hindi and Bengali modules. So they simply don't care about curbing. You mean the Delhi riots and the West Bengal election? Yes, it's only after that they put the Hindi and Bengali modules. It has been very well established that the riots of February 2020 in North-Eastern Delhi, the fake news in the run-up to the elections in West Bengal and other parts of the country that they did little or nothing about it. They were extremely negligent. In fact, to use a quote from one of the American publications, they said they're celebrating violence. They're celebrating communal hatred. And you know how important it is? We in India, we have a population of 1.35 billion. And the median age of India is around 27. I mean half your population is below that age roughly. And we know that young people are far, they're far bigger users of the social media than relatively older people. This has been very, very conclusively demonstrated about more than half of this population is today using these social media platforms and their monopolies. And so you can imagine in a country like India, where in most parts of the country there are more sims, that is subscriber identity modules than human beings. I mean there are, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, you have over a billion 1.15 billion SIMs. So it's not just confined anymore to the big metros or the large cities or even the small towns, it's spread across India. That's the unfortunate part. And as Ravish Kumar pointed out, an entire generation of people are growing up hating another community because they are growing up in WhatsApp University. How do you solve this problem? Would there be an independent oversight possible? Would Facebook, would public pressure work on Facebook? What would work? It has to be regulatory. Look, frankly, Facebook should be shut down. But it's not going to be shut down. So Facebook in the US, there is bipartisan support both from the Republicans and Democrats to do something and to basically use anti-monopoly laws to break it up at the very least. So without that kind of action, Facebook left to itself will do what it has been doing for the last decade. Bappa, we want Facebook to be closed down. But it seems as he rightly points out, most unlikely that Facebook will be closed down, where Facebook was set up very recently. I mean, look, it was set up as recently as 2004. So it's what?  Now, it's one of the world's biggest conglomerates. Now, the point he's made, there's pushback from all kinds of lawmakers in the US. There's pushback from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Canada. But here in India, we pretend that we are acting tough. Then WhatsApp, please do something about the originator of the first content. But the fact is Facebook has tied up with Geo platforms, which is a part of India's biggest privately owned corporate conglomerate. They're investing big bucks in Geo. And in my opinion, the government will just keep shouting, but do nothing, unfortunately. For example, with the Free Basics, the regulator did step in and say, no, you can't have that. Would you say that the regulator? See, for Free Basics, there was a coalition of forces from the free software movement from activists who cared about free speech and all, but also from industry groups who did not want to get tied into Facebook's monopoly. With Free Basics, you could have an entire large section of the population whose access to the internet will be through Facebook. I mean, it violated the basic principles of net neutrality. And even the telecom regulatory authority, they lobby. How hard they lobby? The amount of money Facebook spent. They put up hoardings all over. They put advertisements in the front pages of all the newspapers saying, hello, why are you after us? We are giving you something free.  Take it or leave it. Or here is a library. I'll allow you to go into this library. This part of it is free, but that part you have to pay for. I mean, look, in many parts of the world, Facebook is virtually synonymous with the internet. I'm thankful it's not yet happened in India, but they're very, very powerful. But the pushback for net neutrality also came from the industry. And that's why the TAR try did not let it happen. Now, the thing is, in this case, the industry doesn't care.  But in the West, like in the US, in Europe, there is concern about Facebook promoting this kind of very divisive agenda. In the case of Trump. And in Germany and in France promoting the neo-Nazis and the Mary Lipin party and all that. So there is concern there. What may actually bring its downfall is, Facebook has been lying not just about these things, but they've been also lying about their ad numbers. So Facebook actually fudged their reach numbers. So which may actually affect other businesses. That may hurt. Because there was a period, Bappa, if you remember, when some major advertisers pulled their advertising from Facebook. Now that would hurt. So their ability to keep taking Indian audiences or audiences elsewhere for granted and disturbing the social harmony and changing the sort of influencing the political outcomes that would get limited by their business. There is one more thing. The silver lining is that the young generation, my daughter, that generation is not in Facebook and they hate Facebook. And they're not going to get under Facebook. So Facebook will over a generation die a natural death. I wish I was as optimistic as Bappa is. I'm not. Let's understand something. There are some people who actually see Facebook as something very, very useful. Okay, I can put up my family pictures. I'm going on a holiday. I'll put all of our pictures. I remember people's birthdays. So there is a large section of people and I don't want to delude myself into believing that a large section of people who are using Facebook don't use it because they perceive something quote unquote useful and friendly. And they often don't realize how these algorithms work, how they often live in an echo chamber. They're shut out from a whole lot of other information because and how they're trying to influence not just what they buy and the clothes they wear and the food they eat or their favorite music or their favorite actors the way they think, their political preferences, their behavior. And as people like Shoshana Suboff and others have written trying to predict their behavior. How will you predict? And that is really not just predictive behavior but even nudge you in a certain direction. Right. To use your using habits to feed you to the advertisers. Well, to influence your behavior. To get you to buy things which you not otherwise have bought. And influence your political preferences. All these things came out during the Cambridge Analytica stuff. But Cambridge Analytica was just the tip of the iceberg. Cambridge Analytica was a company which was like a partner to Facebook which was doing it. And at that time Facebook kind of protected itself saying that, oh, they are third party. They did bad things. It's not us. But it is Facebook. Like the Facebook business is what Cambridge Analytica we thought only was limited to Cambridge Analytica. But now the extent of information which is out there makes it very clear that something is deeply amiss with this platform and that it is actually changing the course of societies. It is actually reiterating and emphasizing the worst fears that people had about the way it abuses its monopoly position as a social media platform. And seeks to manipulate human behavior, political preferences, and human psychology. And try and predict it. So all of that has been now reiterated and re-emphasized by the Francis Hogan disclosures. It is making an impact. Like for example in the US Facebook's market cap has dropped by 200 billion dollars since these things came out. Right? In the last two months. Just in the last two months. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg born on the 14th of May 1984, age 37, his net worth in Indian rupees is over 11,000 crores. His personal net worth. Okay. Thanks very much for joining us, Bappa and Paranjoy. Thank you for watching NewsClick. Do subscribe to NewsClick and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.


Okay, so hi, I have a story to tell as well, like Jesse, so I'm Priya, and the founder for Design for Social Change. And I'm a cyclist in London, I've cycled in several places, and the story of Changeify basically started when I had a really bad cycle accident outside my house in Camberwell, and I tried to fix the streets. I actually used to fix my street. I also followed up with our Southern Council website. But what really annoyed me was there was no two-way feedback between the council, the system on where exactly the roadworks are, and what exactly is happening to other people's similar kind of reports. So there seemed to be a gap in the city's infrastructure where many cyclists like myself or yourself who can potentially see what's actually gonna be a trending issue or gonna be a potential hazard, cannot actually actively feed into a system in order to self-improve that. So that's why we started Changeify.  And I always wondered who actually runs the cities. It's not just the councils, and it's just not community groups. And I was glad to see Gavin slide earlier, which mentioned SAP, or I was just telling Usman next to myself that SAP has got a huge contract in lots of government contracts. Similarly, the cities are run by the capitals, by the circles, and what becomes very interesting as a developer is how do you interface with those people or actually managing these city services? So what we have done and what we are actually planning to do is we've got this IC Innovate grant now to work with Amy Ferroville, and we're gonna be trialing this pilot in the city of Plymouth, where we are actively working with 200 road users. They could be cyclists, runners, walkers, and another thing, moving back to Yordith's point as well about trying to recruit people using Twitter. We notice that many people might not be using social media, but they are actively using the city. There's older generation, there are other kinds of people. So how do you actually get real citizen participation? So I think this is a big topic because a lot of people talk about smart cities and people talk about how do you engage citizens, but citizens don't owe us as developers to actually come to the party. They're all very busy people. Why should I go and engage and actively give my data in order to do something?  It has to be social. It has to be something where people border up to actually turn up and do something as a group. Because we think about it. You'd rather go down to the pub with your mates and have a pint and binge about the roads than go around with a phone in the dark when it's rainy and start taking photos of potholes. That's not a good time out. So I think as designers, it comes up to us. I know Open Data is the holy grail, but that alone is not gonna get somebody out to come and participate. It has to be fun, social, well-designed. And that's why we're trying this pilot in Plymouth. And if you have friends who are in Plymouth, I'd love to ask them to join us. We'll be starting in the second or third week of November. And there's also a great event happening by the Plymouth Council and the Open Data Groups out there this weekend. So give me a shout, you'll be interested to join. Thank you.