 Hello, I'm Paul Mason. With the Czech spying allegations, sections of the British media crossed the line from right-wing propaganda to outright fake news. What happened next has big implications not only for politics here in Britain, but for the way the American media handles Donald Trump and the right going forward. So we at Navarra Media have put together this guide to how the fake news ecosystem works. It always starts with an outrageous claim against a political target, like for example the idea that President Obama was not an American citizen or that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza restaurant. Then it moves to the alt-right social media. The websites, the Twitter feeds, they take it up and they say, wow, look at this, but their main aim is to get it into the mainstream media because here is where it can do the damage. So if the mainstream media refused to take it up what then happens is conspiracy theories begin about censorship. The fake news industry then asks why isn't the mainstream media taking up the story? Is it a case of self-censorship? Are their bosses clamping down on them? Are they under pressure from dark and sinister forces? But if the mainstream media do take it up what they often then say is well maybe the claim can't be verified but it speaks to a wider issue and of course then their op-ed and opinion writers get to work attacking the target on the wider agenda of their opposition to whatever the target stands for. Hillary Clinton, Obama and in this case Corbyn. Meanwhile you've got the whole social media, the conspiracy theory websites, websites and web TV channels which in America make a lot of money about simply spinning around and around the fake claims always saying the target has questions to answer even if the claim is not completely verifiable. And finally what happens is this, if you make an outrageous claim against somebody who has political power it will often trigger someone just an ordinary person watching it all their mind dominated by this bullshit to do something. And that something can be right to their MP, right to their congressperson, compile a dossier on the target but it can as in this case of Petergate with Hillary Clinton trigger somebody into actual violence and so fake news is not just about a false claim it's about how an ecosystem weaponizes this false claim to take down a political target and sometimes leads to violence. Now what happened with Jeremy Corbyn? The claim came from a spy who said that Corbyn was taking money to spy for the eastern bloc against the West in the 1980s. No documentation to prove it, one single claim and the story changed over a period of several days. The website Guido Forks which is rapidly becoming the go-to alt-right website in Britain then took the claim and they fired it into the mainstream media. The Sun, the Telegraph and the Mail all took up various forms of this story but then something happened in Britain that doesn't happen in America. Our mainstream media includes big publicly funded and publicly regulated TV stations which are not allowed to retail lies. They got their expert reporters many of whom have very expert sources among the intelligence services to find out if the story was true and it was bullshit so they said so and what happened next was that some very senior journalists at the BBC took down the story and they didn't just take down the story they started to take down the politicians who've been repeating the essential allegation saying well maybe it's not completely true but the guy has questions to answer. Finally another circuit breaker kicked in because in Britain we have the libel law and when a politician from the Conservative Party repeated the claim that Corbyn was a paid spy of the Soviet Union the libel law very quickly led to the claim being withdrawn. So what can we learn from this? Well the two things that disrupted the fake news cycle in the Corbyn case are two things Rupert Murdoch and the other right-wing press barons want to get rid of that is publicly funded and regulated TV news and the libel laws or people's access to those libel laws because of course they're expensive. Why does it matter? Well there are three reasons. The first is this is just a foretaste of what's going to happen if in Britain we get a Labour government. The right-wing press will weaponise disinformation to try and destabilise a government led by Jeremy Corbyn. The second problem is when you do fake news you're just undermining democracy. You are creating the conditions as in the 1930s but people to say I'm just tired I'm tired I can't work out what's true or false anymore and then they say please somebody save me please President Trump or Erdogan in Turkey or Putin in Russia you take control of society because democracy is too tiring it's too much effort to work out what is true and what is not and that brings us to the third big problem with fake news. What you're doing if you start this stuff is to open your democracy to all the bad actors in the world to play in. Whether it's the Russian Secret Service, your own Secret Service, the Secret Service of another country that doesn't like the target or simply these armies of paid private trolls who can be hired by Putin one day and by somebody else the next. You are effectively opening up the core democratic process of the West to manipulation that's what happened in America that's partly what gave us Trump and it is partly what the people who've begun to do this want to happen here in Britain and I think by knowing what they're doing they can be stopped.