Algeria is a nation in flux - and it has become an information battleground. In February this year, thousands came out onto the streets to protest against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to run for a fifth term in office. He eventually resigned, but the demonstrators have continued to press for change. Protesters have been using social media to keep up the momentum, but a campaign of disinformation threatens to stop them in their tracks. A flurry of fake news stories has been spreading...
Sep 13, 2019•24 min
Some believe red mercury is a mystical elixir with magical healing powers that has survived from the time of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt. Others fear that it is a dangerous nuclear material, which in the wrong hands could bring about the apocalypse. However, red mercury doesn’t actually exist. So why is it being offered for sale on social media? We go in search of the many amazing lives of this mysterious mythical material. Presenter: Mike Wendling Reporter: Sarah Myles Producer: Ed Main (Phot...
Sep 06, 2019•23 min
How do Chinese social media users navigate government censorship? Months of unrest in Hong Kong have caused concern in mainland China, where news about the pro-democracy protests has been carefully filtered out of social media. It’s common for social media companies in China to remove content that is perceived to be threatening to social stability or the ruling Communist Party. Beijing-based journalist and writer Karoline Kan delves into a world of forbidden words and state-sanctioned influencer...
Aug 30, 2019•25 min
When it became clear Samantha couldn’t give birth to her own children, she and her husband decided to look on social media for pregnant women who wanted to give their babies up for adoption. They got a message from a young woman, who said she was heavily pregnant and wanted them to adopt her child. The couple couldn’t believe their luck. But what followed was more than a month of emotional turmoil. They had fallen prey to a scammer who had promised babies to lots of couples she found on Instagra...
Aug 23, 2019•23 min
War-torn countries are having their cultural heritage destroyed with antiquities being looted and sold to generate money. In some cases, the plunder may constitute a war crime. Instability in countries like Syria means some people are taking desperate measures to survive, but some looters have connections to criminal gangs, the Syrian government and terrorist organisations. How has this trade moved online and what is being done to prevent the destruction of cultural heritage? We examine the scal...
Aug 16, 2019•23 min
Have you ever wondered what would happen to humanity if we all stopped having babies? The extinction of the human race may be a scary thought to most of us, but not for the “anti-natalists”. They’re a thriving online community based on Facebook and Reddit that firmly believes human life only brings suffering and should therefore come to an end. While some entertain the idea on a purely philosophical level, others say reducing the number of people on Earth is an imperative to combat climate chang...
Aug 09, 2019•23 min
YouTube has been criticised for failing to take responsibility for videos posted on the platform. So can it be trusted to control potentially harmful content? The video-sharing site is just 14, but there's no doubt it has become a giant of global communication. According to the company's own figures, it has more than a billion users around the globe, watching more than a billion hours of videos every day. At the same time as it has grown phenomenally popular, however, YouTube has also been accus...
Aug 02, 2019•26 min
What does the QAnon conspiracy theory tell us about American politics today? It’s a sprawling set of allegations which has a number of branches and offshoots –but if one thing unites its believers, it’s that they all support President Trump. We meet Dylan Wheeler, an influencer with more than 370,000 followers on Twitter, as he speaks at a gathering of Trump supporters. Although the people in the crowd aren’t all conspiracy theorists, some of them aren’t exactly opposed to such ideas. We hear fr...
Jul 19, 2019•24 min
Many people who believe the Earth is not round first heard the idea on YouTube. While it’s hard to accurately say how many flat Earthers there are worldwide, it is undeniable that their community has grown in recent years. Flat Earth meet-ups and conventions have popped up in a number of countries, while online searches for the topic have reached unprecedented levels. YouTube hosts thousands of flat Earth videos, some with millions of views. And when you ask flat Earth conspiracy theorists how t...
Jul 12, 2019•24 min
Growing up, Dina – not her real name – would browse social media and imagine a life far from the one she was living. She felt shackled by the rules imposed on her by her parents, religion and the culture of the United Arab Emirates. So one day she escaped, using social media to navigate through networks of people and ex-Muslim communities, to get to the West. Several recent high-profile cases of Emirati women leaving the country have been in the news recently. But Dina’s story is more ordinary a...
Jul 05, 2019•22 min
After a Sudanese protester was killed, there was a wave of sympathy on social media – but scammers took advantage. In early June, 26-year-old activist Mohamed Mattar was shot and killed in Khartoum. He was one of 100 protesters who died in a government crackdown on a sit-in. Blue was his favourite colour, and at the time of his death, the avatar on his social media pages displayed a deep shade similar to the colour of the ocean. Some of Mohamed’s friends and family changed their avatars to the s...
Jun 28, 2019•24 min
It was a moment that defined online activism. When tens of thousands of people came out to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the end of the rule of Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, they weren’t responding to a political party or a leafleting campaign – but instead to a Facebook page. It was called “We are all Khaled Said” - in honour of a 28-year-old man who was tortured to death by Egyptian police. It was the moment when the world woke up to the true political power of social media. Wael Ghonim was...
Jun 21, 2019•24 min
Online debate is broken – full of angry shouting and mindless agreement. And that’s even before you get to the trolls, lies, misinformation, and fake news. This week we visit Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland, to meet a man with a plan to fix this problem. Six years ago, when he was a curious, guitar-playing student, Kal Turnbull started a subreddit – a section of the website Reddit - called Change My View. He encouraged people to post their opinions and invite other users to politely argu...
Jun 14, 2019•24 min
Nina spends three hours a day on Facebook – not sharing selfies or catching up on news, but trying to make the network a nicer place. She’s a German member of a large and growing international movement called #IAmHere. Started in Sweden in 2016, tens of thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen countries organise in closed Facebook groups. They target popular posts, often from mainstream news organisations, which get overrun by extremism, violent threats and hate speech. Their goal is to inje...
Jun 07, 2019•22 min
They were meant to be private, and the people posting them considered them “jokes”. But when female students at the University of Warwick found out about hundreds of violent and obscene messages – some of them directly naming themselves and their friends - they were horrified and scared. We heard from the women who were named in the group chat, and who alleged that a later university investigation fell short of their expectations. The messages came from closed social media groups – and it was a ...
May 31, 2019•24 min
Why are there so many conspiracy videos on YouTube? The company has clamped down on extremist and dangerous content, but conspiracies, outright fakes, and hoaxes are still very easy to find. Sometimes they’re only watched by a few people, but often these videos go viral. The reason why they so often pop up on your screen, says former Google employee Guillaume Chaslot, is YouTube’s algorithm. Chaslot was one of the engineers who helped shape the YouTube recommendation engine, the mechanism that d...
May 24, 2019•23 min
Officials in Brussels are worried. With the elections for the European Parliament rapidly approaching, they say Russia is using disinformation and fake news to sow discord and to undermine people's trust in the European Union. Moscow flatly denies such accusations. But EU officials say Russian disinformation could help anti-EU parties and movements. And, if you were to believe the polls, populist and Eurosceptic parties are indeed likely to increase their number of seats. While the EU talks of a...
May 17, 2019•24 min
It’s a dangerous cosmetic surgical procedure that’s all over social media. About one in every 3,000 women who undergo a Brazilian Butt Lift - or BBL - will die, but the stark statistics haven’t stopped its popularity. In the United States, for instance, the number of BBLs has doubled in just a few years. Fuelling the trend are social media photos and influencers who show off their hourglass shapes – including big breasts, tiny waists, and a big bottom. It’s a particularly prized body type in som...
May 10, 2019•23 min
Where did it all go wrong? The liberating promise of the internet and social media has recently been swamped by worries about privacy, misinformation and online radicalisation. Now that doubts about our digital technologies are all over the news, what should we do about it? Author and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff wants a new fight against “anti-human” technologies. He says that many recent technological developments – including the rise of social media – have alienated and isolated us. Rushkoff is...
May 03, 2019•23 min
There’s a new wave of political activism in South Africa. Young activists with social media savvy have shaken up the system and could be a decisive factor in next month’s general election. We’ve been to Johannesburg to meet Sankara. His day job is selling eggs, and he’s a staunch supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) – the political movement that has been in power ever since Nelson Mandela was elected president 25 years ago. But this time around the ANC’s majority is not looking so ce...
Apr 26, 2019•23 min
Trending investigates claims that innocent men were framed to try to discredit demonstrations against Sudan’s former leader Omar al-Bashir. After mass street protests, the military stepped in to end President Bashir’s 30-year rule earlier this month. But the BBC has uncovered evidence that the regime organised a fake news campaign to try to portray peaceful protesters as violent rebels. Students were allegedly tortured to make false confessions that were filmed and distributed online. However, s...
Apr 19, 2019•22 min
How did an ambitious musician fool thousands of people using social media? Jered Threatin successfully managed to fake an entire existence as a rock star. He persuaded people he was an award-winning musician who had played to sold-out venues. And as a result of his seemingly popular social media accounts and faked web pages, he orchestrated a European tour, got his eponymous band booked in venues across six countries. The BBC’s Jessica Lussenhop got an exclusive interview with Jered Threatin, an...
Apr 12, 2019•23 min
The video-sharing app TikTok has taken the teenage world by storm. But where there are kids, there are also predators. We found dozens of adults using TikTok to post sexual comments on videos uploaded by teenagers and children. TikTok, which has 500 million users worldwide, says it is working hard to protect its users from inappropriate approaches. But a BBC Trending investigation exposed some worrying shortcomings in the way it deals with the problem. Presenter: Mike Wendling Reporter: Marco Si...
Apr 05, 2019•24 min
Roger McNamee was a Facebook fan and an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. Now he says he’s sad about the way the company is being run and the impact that it’s having on the world. Zuckerberg first sought out his advice, McNamee says, in 2006, shortly after Yahoo was making a $1bn bid to buy the social media company. McNamee, a veteran Silicon Valley investor, says he saw Facebook’s potential and urged the young entrepreneur to stay independent. But a decade later, he saw hyper-partisan posts poisoning...
Mar 29, 2019•23 min
Where does the extremist culture that inspired the Christchurch killer come from? A graphic live-streamed video and a rambling document included clues as to how the Christchurch shooter was radicalised. He used the message board 8chan to announce his attacks, which killed 50 people in the New Zealand city. And throughout his online postings are clues to how connected he was with the online culture of 8chan and a related website, 4chan. We break down the online networks used by far-right extremis...
Mar 22, 2019•23 min
Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a disturbing wave of street violence across America. The epicentre is Portland, Oregon, a place better known for its chilled out hipster lifestyle – but which has been the scene of dozens of far-right marches and rallies. Those events often result in arrests and violence. BBC Trending went there to meet two activists who have been on opposite sides of the fighting. Anti-fascist activist Luis Enrique Marquez and Rob Cantrall, member of the far-righ...
Mar 15, 2019•23 min
There is a disturbing new wave of political street violence in America. Groups on the far right and the far left have clashed in New York, Berkeley, California, and Charlottesville, Virginia. But one liberal enclave is the main battleground: Portland, Oregon - a progressive city in the Pacific north-west. BBC Trending has visited Portland to meet two activists who have traded insults and threats online, as well as confronting each other in the streets. What drives anti-fascist Luis Enrique Marqu...
Mar 08, 2019•23 min
After she got a death threat, Ginger Gorman dove headfirst into the world of trolls. It all started when she wrote a light feature about a gay couple who had adopted a child. Years later, the couple were arrested on child sexual abuse charges, and although she had no knowledge of their crimes, internet trolls swarmed to attack her – even sending her and her family death threats. Where some would run away and hide, Ginger became fascinated with the world of online trolling and spent five years re...
Mar 01, 2019•24 min
Recently, printers around the world started spewing out pages without any direction from their owners. Then a mysterious video showed up on smart TVs. Both hacks were designed to promote PewDiePie, the most popular vlogger on YouTube, in his battle to maintain subscriber supremacy against popular Indian channel T-Series. The hackers say they did it to expose the flaws and dangers in some connected devices, but they also got the attention of the YouTube star – as well as the authorities, and trol...
Feb 22, 2019•23 min
There is no independent media in Eritrea, a country that ranks near the very bottom of press freedom indexes. But one man is trying to change his country’s repressive system. “J” is the editor of Eritrean Press, a Facebook page which is a mix of political reporting, satire, sport, and light features. It’s an almost unique development aimed at Eritrean readers both inside the country – where only around 1% of the population is able to access the internet – and the wider diaspora around the world....
Feb 15, 2019•23 min
