Biodun.BBC: March 2019

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Thousands march in Italy against anti-gay, anti-abortion group

Date created : 31/03/2019 - 06:43 GMT/ZULU

Feminists, LGTB rights campaigners and other activists marched to protest what they say are the US movement's ultra-conservative views AFP

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Verona (Italy)

by Elodie Bagnol and Biodun Iginla, France24

Tens of thousands of people marched in the northern Italian city of Verona Saturday to protest a meeting of the anti-gay, anti-abortion US-based World Congress of Families.

But while Italy's far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini addressed the Congress Saturday, coalition partners the Five Star Movement (M5S) denounced the organisation's values.

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A colourful procession of feminists and LGBT activists from several European countries marched through the city centre to state their opposition to the ultra-conservative policies of the movement.

Activists came from as far afield as Britain, Croatia, Germany, Poland and Switzerland to protest.

Many sang "Bella Ciao", an anthem of the Italian resistance during WWII, and banners carried slogans including "Our bodies and our desires, it's we who decide".

Local newspapers estimated the turn-out to be between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Organisers put the figure nearer 100,000.

"Here in Verona, the international lobbies like the World Congress of Families and neoliberal groups want to impose the model by which every man must have a woman," Argentine activist Marta Dillon told us at France24.

"That's why they are fighting for a closed family that is a machine for violence," she added.

Dillon is founder of the feminist "Non una di Meno" (Not one less) movement, which organised a flash mob earlier Saturday near Gran Gardia Palace where the Congress was taking place under tight security.

- Rubber foetuses -

Saturday was the second day of the Congress's three-day meeting. Inside the conference, delegates were handed rubber models intended to resemble a foetus at 10 weeks, carrying the message "Abortion stops a beating heart".

That initiative was denounced as "monstruous" by Laura Boldrini, a former president of Italy's Chamber of Deputies.

The day's proceedings also featured the launch of a committee calling for a referendum on abolishing Italy's abortion laws. Abortion has been legal in Italy since 1978.

Salvini, was the main speaker at Saturday's gathering.

"We are not here to suppress anybody's rights," Salvini, of the far-right League party, told the meeting.

But Salvini's coalition partner Luigi Di Maio, leader of the anti-Establishment Five Star Movement spoke out against the views held by the World Congress of Families.

"The vision defended by this Congress in Verona is a vision of the world that belongs for the most part to the Middle Ages, which considers women as submissive," he said.

Founded in 1997 by the American Brian Brown, the World Congress of Families has held an annual meeting since 2012.

Its credo, as stated on its website, is to "affirm, celebrate, and defend the natural family as the only fundamental and sustainable unit of society".

Previous meetings include one in Hungary, which enjoyed the patronage of the country's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

As well as Salvini, other speakers at this year's event include the President of Moldova Igor Dodon -- a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hungary's ultra-conservative Families Minister Katalin Novak and a senior figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, Dmitri Smirnov, are also listed as speakers.

And two other Italian ministers were due to address the Congress: Lorenzo Fontana, Minister for Families and the Handicapped and Education Minister Marco Busetti.

Mark Zuckerberg asks governments to help control internet content

March 31, 2019 05H:35 GMT/ZULU

by Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, BBC News Technology reporters, San Francisco

Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content.

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook's chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone.

He calls for new laws in four areas: "Harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability."

It comes two weeks after a gunman used the site to livestream his attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Mr Zuckerberg writes, adding that Facebook was "creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions" about what is posted and what is taken down.

He also describes a new set of rules he would like to see enforced on tech companies.

These new regulations should be the same for all websites, he says, so that it's easier to stop "harmful content" from spreading quickly across platforms.

What does Mark Zuckerberg want?

In brief, Mr Zuckerberg calls for the following things:

Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content
All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting
Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors
Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other "divisive political issues", and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods
New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online
More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year
A "common global framework" that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country
Clear rules about who's responsible for protecting people's data when they move it from one service to another

The open letter, which will also be published in some European newspapers, comes as the social network faces questions over its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal around data misuse during election campaigns.

The site has also been criticised for failing to stop the spread of footage of the Christchurch killings, in which 50 Muslims died as they prayed.

The video was livestreamed to the attacker's Facebook page on 15 March, before being copied 1.5 million times.

Mr Zuckerberg's letter did not specifically name these incidents.

Christchurch: Officer stands guard by Al-Noor Mosque — Image captionFacebook has faced criticism for failing to remove the footage live-streamed by the Christchurch attacker

However, the site earlier announced that it was considering introducing restrictions on live-streaming in the wake of the Christchurch attacks. On Thursday, it also said that it would ban white nationalism and separatism from the site.

On Friday it also started labelling political ads appearing on Facebook in EU countries, showing who the advertiser is, how much they paid and who they've targeted.

"I believe Facebook has a responsibility to help address these issues, and I'm looking forward to discussing them with lawmakers around the world," Mr Zuckerberg says.