24/09/2016 Click

minister saying the programme was for self defence. That is it for me.

We will be back at two o'clock. Now it is time for the Click.

Donald Trump's ideas aren't just different, they are a series

She's been taking plenty of money out for herself.

It's most expensive playground fight in history.

In Donald Trump's America, people are put back to work.

Let's remember what happened on 9/11, these were not refugees.

This Monday sees the first US presidential debates,

and although voters will probably be reminded of what the nominees stand

for, I can't help thinking that they'll be at least a little bit

The last big presidential battle was all about YouTubeing

the candidates into peoples homes, but now Facebook and Twitter

are the main online battlegrounds, and that's not just in the US.

There's no doubt about it, some of the big platforms

You've got national parties who want to get their

political messages out, and they have to pay for that -

that's bought advertising, in the old sense.

If they don't do that, they don't get their message

to voters, and that's where Facebook have got us all on lockdown.

The Tories were ahead of the game at the last general election,

the other parties are going to catch up by the next general

But social media is about more than paid for advertising.

Politicians can engage with voters, their messages can go viral.

Supporter groups can rally and massively big up

We even judge how important that message is based on the number

So it's probably quite important to know that not all of these

They are fake followers, run by political campaigns

to amplify certain topics, follows certain people,

These are the political Twitter bots.

The bots will take a message and repeat it an hour

later, or maybe two hours and three hours later.

They'll send it off to their own networks of followers, tens, 20,000

times beyond what the politician can initially reach with

Phil Howard is a professor of political science

at the Oxford Internet Institute, whose research has revealed that

political campaigns are now routinely using bots

Including deflecting Donald Trump's comments about Mexican-Americans.

They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,

He made a claim that Mexican-American voters

would support him, would be voting for him in a big way.

And shortly after making this big claim, there was a community

of Latino Twitter bots, so folks with Mexican sounding names,

who were US citizens and using Twitter to voice

A little bit of research showed that these were all new users,

they weren't actually users, they were bots, tweeting the same

message, sometimes exactly the same message,

And so he was able to say, Mexican-Americans will vote for me

and point to a community that was actually just

There are very strict rules governing what the media can report

To your knowledge, are there rules to cover social media like Twitter?

I think there should be more public policy oversight,

over social networks, social media networks during elections.

In a US context, the elections, the Federal Elections Commission

there has decided that electronic communications are not part

For example, they'll be following many more accounts

They might have blank or irrelevant profile pictures and names,

and they may be tweeting at an inhumanly fast rate.

High-quality bots, however, will look a lot more human.

In fact they may even be connected to a real human, who can give

There's actually a market in these false accounts.

So you buy 1,000 users who look good, they'll join five

or ten at a time, over the course of a month or two.

By the time you're into the campaign season, three weeks before,

This is a great question, and it's part of the research

The people designing political bots often work for the political

campaign teams that a candidate will hire when they want Office.

Hiring somebody to write bots, to amplify your message,

is now a normal part of political campaigning in advanced democracies.

But then there are the bots that, so far, haven't done anything...

This bot is an example of a bot that has joined relatively recently.

It's following 108 people, but nobody is following it.

We think of this as a sleeper, a sleeper bot, it's

My great fear is that large networks of these bots may be activated

Someone will activate bot networks to either bring up the vote,

There's enough bot networks out there, and we've seen them used

in sensitive political moments, that I'm pretty sure they'll play

an active part of political communication in the US election.

For all the big budget deception that may be happening,

social media does give each one of us a voice,

and an immediate channel through which we can

Those are tiny acts of the participation,

which in an earlier era would have just been too small.

Politics was much lumpier, you would have had to join

a political party, you would have had to go to a very long meeting,

That fact, that you can do very small bits of politics,

I think is drawing people into politics that wouldn't have

So maybe we're lucky to be living in an age where a tiny click

on an online petition can bring about real change.

That is assuming that we can find the right issues,

and the right candidates to bring about that change.

Kate Russell has been to the US to meet the start ups who are trying

to connect voters to candidates, and candidates to money.

I can think of nowhere that I would rather have this victory!

There's declining faith in government, declining trust

It's a very, very small number of people, with a lot of money,

Locked into a two party system and playing out a presidential race

costing hundreds of millions of dollars, some people think

One of the biggest problems with politics here

The way that rich people, big companies and also on the other

side of the fence, the unions, use money to literally buy

the outcomes they want from the political system.

Former strategy adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron,

Steve Hilton is now on a mission in San Francisco to unbind US

politics from big-money donors, by letting candidates

We want to take the power out of the hands of the insiders

and the deal-makers and the people who for so long have controlled

everything in politics, and put the power directly

Just as technology has done in so many other parts of our lives.

It has the potential to help independent candidates run

for election without having to sign up to one of the major parties.

That is really off-putting for a lot of people, because they think that

to get the money that they need, they have to sign up to a bunch

of policies or ideas that they don't really agree with.

As well as helping politicians drum up support, Crowdpac wants to help

voters find the right candidate in the many smaller elections held

They've collected hundreds of millions of public records

from US elections, going back to 1980.

We've been able to take all the information and boil it down

to a simple objective score, if you like, which is a very basic,

ideological score, left-right system, that tells you who is more

In July when the presidential candidates were chosen,

US Facebook has generated more than 1 billion likes, comments

Assuming they were real people not bots, 25-34 year-olds

Facebook is the place in which people go and kind

of interact and talk about their social life

LinkedIn's kind of taken over owning your professional identity,

and yet there isn't really a platform which allows you to act

out in the persona of a voter and actually use technology

to interact with the political system.

Brigade is a new social network that wants to take those conversations

out of the town square of America's Facebook feeds,

What we're trying to do is figure out how to use existing technology

that has already had a big impact on other spaces,

from dating to social networking, and apply those new tools

Conversations begin with a simple agree or disagree interaction,

and then users can debate the issue with other voters in their district.

Post-election, Brigade wants to become the go-to place

for citizens to hold officials to task for their actions,

On the flip side, it would be a great place for politicians

to engage with influential groups and constituents,

rather than just relying on campaign funds to win an election.

I think that it's probably impractical that we're

It's really important, on the other side,

that the principle of one person, one vote is the overriding,

dominant form of power in the political system,

and that representatives are held to account for the views

Both the Silicon Valley start-ups are driven by a desire to reconnect

Americans with the political system from a grassroots perspective.

Make them care, by giving them transparency and more control.

The American electorate is getting younger, too.

Yet history maps a declining youth turnout at the presidential ballot

I think as our democracy has scaled, as our democracy has got bigger

and more complex and people's lives have gotten busier, it's become

really hard for people to stay plugged into the political process.

So we need to figure out how to make that an easier thing for people

to understand and participate in, if we're going to renew people's

That's a big ask, but the long-term prize is a more engaged electorate,

participating in a process that looks a lot more like the dictionary

Hello and welcome to The Week In Tech.

It was the week that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife

Priscilla Chan pledged ?2.3 billion to fund medical research

The ultimate aim of their Chan-Zuckerberg initiative?

Curing, preventing and managing all diseases by the end

On a rather smaller scale, it was also the week that Google

joined the messaging game again, by launching its new chat app, Allo.

Privacy campaigners have criticised the app, though,

after it was revealed that rather than temporarily storing users'

conversations and data, Google will now hold onto it

And from cat videos to the catwalk, as London Fashion Week played host

Instead of a runway, designer Martine Jarlgaard showed

off her wares with the help of the Microsoft Hololens,

which let visitors get up close to 3D models of the models.

And finally, the head of a bull, the body of a robot -

a terrifying beast that scares the likes of anyone

The legs of the bot are hooked up to special motors that mean

the Minitaur can effectively feel and respond to

It also means it can do a number of tricks,

like backflips, cartwheels, climbing the stairs and...

Next up, we're going to take a look at some new tricks you can do

Burner numbers for Tinder, no roaming charges, a stealth mode

Dan Simmons looks at the revolution happening in mobile,

and he's met one company boss who's taking no prisoners.

I only rang you like a hundred times today.

Just stop calling me, erase my contact.

No! Hello?

According to this man there is an easy and hard way

to control who has your digits, and that was the hard way.

Our phone numbers, our mobile numbers is the things that's

When someone doesn't want to give his phone

number, he's telling you, I give you my e-mail,

add me on Facebook, etc, etc, but the phone number

Taig used to be a stuntman, oh, and he's also a double

But now he's reinventing himself as the boss of one of several

new phone companies that is starting to shake

up the mobile space, as you do.

His onoff service is changing the rules in France, and now the UK,

We are bringing like virtual operating system that provides

multiple phone numbers, but not only that.

For example, you can send SMS at a delayed time.

You can put the call on voicemail, but leave the SMS on.

You cannot do that with any phone in the world.

It gives you so much flexibility in your hands,

to give maybe a different phone number for your business,

for your friends, for one night, or whatever.

Users can go into stealth mode, to hide the numbers they're

using for certain things from prying eyes, or adopt a number that's local

Using apps to make Internet calls isn't new, but both caller

and receiver often have to have the app installed,

As well as data, it uses the GSM network to connect to the handset,

so you can do SMS messages, get wider coverage,

and just one person - even if that's the receiver -

There's another benefit that we've all been seeing with these

new messengers and that's cheap, or apparently free, calls.

You may say, well that's all very well, but I still need to pay

for a mobile contract to get a connection to use

FreedomPop, for example, wants to give you a free SIM

with free calls and free data, and this month, for the first

time, unlimited use of the Whatsapp messenger.

FreedomPop right now provides a basic free service.

Where were trying to get to is a point where we can

take that free service, double it up and double it up again.

And ultimately we'd like to get to a point where your voice,

In London, uSwitch hands out awards for utilities

They help consumers switch providers to get the best deal,

and they're warning that these services may not be for everyone.

A lot of the services that you would normally expect

on a traditional mobile network, whether it be voicemail,

whether it be rolling over data that was unused into

the following month, even alerts when you're coming close

to your limits, aren't actually free on these services.

They're all litte additional fees that you might pay

In the case of apps like onoff, multiple numbers come

The old telecoms networks are starting to respond to these

Next month Deutsche Telekom launches its new Immmr

app that merges SMS, calls and offers multiple numbers.

While others can't wait to create their own,

and will partner with onoff in around 40 countries

In the race for cheap thrills, it seems nobody wants to be

One of the big trends of the last few years has been strapping

on a little video camera and filming yourself doing all kinds of crazy

action stuff - climbing, skydiving and, yes,

It's how GoPro made its name, but recently the company hasn't

However, Richard Taylor has been to Lake Tahoe in the US,

to witness an attempt to make GoPro soar once more.

Better late than never, the long-awaited GoPro drone

sees the light of day, and its first foray into the skies

is certainly portable, with an impressive low-profile

design and stabilisation through its Gimball,

which can be detached and used to achieve silky smooth shots

on the included grip, and, uniquely, on GoPro's vast

So, time to give this ?720 quadcopter a whirl.

It's semi-autonomous modes make it straightforward,

even for a complete novice like me, to pilot it safely and get

And, well, to be frank, GoPro needs it to be a hit.

Two years ago when GoPro went public it was flying high with its suite

of technologically advanced action-cams, but since then,

Rivals have caught up technologically, and there's a lot

more competition, not just in cameras, but also in drones.

In particular the drone pioneered DJI has a new craft

It too will also be ultraportable and support other features

Not exactly auspicious for GoPro and its tumbling share price.

You certainly look very excited this morning,

but I'm just wondering, obviously with your stock price

being as it has been, are you feeling the pressure, a bit?

Yes, but not because of the stock price.

Because we are transparent about what our vision is.

It's to help the world share better stories,

and we understand that's not just about building a great camera,

it's about building great software that make it easy for people

to edit fantastic stories and share them, and then,

As if to prove the point, Woodman and Co have also

The Hero5 Black - GoPro's first new flagship model in two years.

Amongst its features, a better 4K sensor, it's

waterproof out of the box, voice control, GPS, stereo sound,

and electronic image stabilisation, which, as you can see when I ride

this bike, actually works pretty well.

There's a even Cloud sharing straight from the device.

This is all starting to sound like a high end

Smartphones capture fantastic quality content, but they're very

difficult to use during activities where any motion is involved, or,

frankly, where you want to focus on your activity and not

Filming, me filming you, here as I have my broken phone,

because I did just that, and dropped it and broke it!

GoPro is really about you being able to self-capture an experience

A smartphone really gets in between you and what you're

trying to enjoy, and that's a pain point that exists, and it's

an opportunity for GoPro to solve for people.

But is that opportunity big enough to send GoPro soaring once again?

Well, one thing's for sure, there's nothing like a super

new hero and a dose of good karma to get the faithful believing

We live @BBCClick on Twitter, if you'd like to peek

behind the scenes, and we will see you next week.