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Episode details

World Service,21 Feb 2017,26 mins

Fake It or Leave It

Digital Planet

Available for over a year

Both Facebook and Twitter have been in the firing line over fake news and online abuse. The social media platforms have taken action. But is it too little, too late? The scale of the problem is huge. Globally, billions of Facebook comments and hundreds of thousands of tweets are posted every day. Assuming even a small percentage have nefarious intent, eliminating abuse is a bit like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Alison van Diggelen reports from Silicon Valley. A new competition is promoting innovative ways of conducting journalism in the future in Africa. Juliana Rotich joins Click to discuss judging the digital watchdog project that aims to fund projects such as the use of drones to shoot footage for news stories in inaccessible areas. How might your heart rate be used as a password? Click talks to the researchers Zhanpeng Jin and Linke Guo about securing medical data with the biometric password of your heart beat. The Stanford University researcher, Rahim Esfandyarpour, discusses the throwaway lab on a chip that will enable cheap and effective medical diagnosis in poor and remote areas of the globe. (Photo: Myth and reality word cloud © marekuliasz/Thinkstock)

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