It’s not about privacy — it’s about power: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TEDSummit 2019

Three months after her landmark talk, Carole Cadwalladr is back at TED. In conversation with curator Bruno Giussani, Cadwalladr discusses the latest on her reporting on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and what we still don’t know about the transatlantic links between Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election.

“Who has the information, who has the data about you, that is where power now lies,” Cadwalladr says.

Cadwalladr appears in The Great Hack, a documentary by Karim Amer and TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim that explores how Cambridge Analytica has come to symbolize the dark side of social media. The documentary was screened for TEDSummit participants today. Watch it in select theaters and on Netflix starting July 24.

Learn more about how you can support Cadwalladr’s investigation into data, disinformation and democracy.

Weaving Community: Notes from Session 1 of TEDSummit 2019

The stage is set for TEDSummit 2019: A Community Beyond Borders! During the opening session, speakers and performers explored themes of competition, political engagement and longing — and celebrated the TED communities (representing 84 countries) gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland to forge TED’s next chapter.

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 1: Weaving Community, hosted by Bruno Giussani and Helen Walters

When and where: Sunday, July 21, 2019, 5pm BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: Pico Iyer, Jochen Wegner, Hajer Sharief, Mariana Lin, Carole Cadwalladr, Susan Cain with Min Kym

Opening: A warm Scottish welcome from raconteur Mackenzie Dalrymple

Music: Findlay Napier and Gillian Frame performing selections from The Ledger, a series of Scottish folk songs

The talks in brief:

Pico Iyer, novelist and nonfiction author

Big idea: The opposite of winning isn’t losing; it’s failing to see the larger picture.

Why? As a child in England, Iyer believed the point of competition was to win, to vanquish one’s opponent. Now, some 50 years later and a resident of Japan, he’s realized that competition can be “more like an act of love.” A few times a week, he plays ping-pong at his local health club. Games are played as doubles, and partners are changed every five minutes. As a result, nobody ends up winning — or losing — for long. Iyer has found liberation and wisdom in this approach. Just as in a choir, he says, “Your only job is to play your small part perfectly, to hit your notes with feeling and by so doing help to create a beautiful harmony that’s much greater than the sum of its parts.”

Quote of the talk: “Seeming happiness can stand in the way of true joy even more than misery does.”

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Jochen Wegner, journalist and editor of Zeit Online

Big idea: The spectrum of belief is as multifaceted as humanity itself. As social media segments us according to our interests, and as algorithms deliver us increasingly homogenous content that reinforces our beliefs, we become resistant to any ideas — or even facts — that contradict our worldview. The more we sequester ourselves, the more divided we become. How can we learn to bridge our differences?

How? Inspired by research showing that one-on-one conversations are a powerful tool for helping people learn to trust each other, Zeit Online built Germany Talks, a “Tinder for politics” that facilitates “political arguments” and face-to-face meetings between users in an attempt to bridge their points-of-view on issues ranging from immigration to same-sex marriage. With Germany Talks (and now My Country Talks and Europe Talks) Zeit has facilitated conversations between thousands of Europeans from 33 countries.

Quote of the talk: “What matters here is not the numbers, obviously. What matters here is whenever two people meet to talk in person for hours, without anyone else listening, they change — and so do our societies. They change, little by little, discussion by discussion.”

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Hajer Sharief, activist and cofounder of the Together We Build It Foundation

Big Idea: People of all genders, ages, races, beliefs and socioeconomic statuses should participate in politics.

Why? Hajer Sharief’s native Libya is recovering from 40 years of authoritarian rule and civil war. She sheds light on the way politics are involved in every aspect of life: “By not participating in it, you are literally allowing other people to decide what you can eat, wear, if you can have access to healthcare, free education, how much tax you pay, when can you retire, what is your pension,” she says. “Other people are also deciding whether your race is enough to consider you a criminal, or if your religion or nationality are enough to put you on a terrorist list.” When Sharief was growing up, her family held weekly meetings to discuss family issues, abiding by certain rules to ensured everyone was respectful and felt free to voice their thoughts. She recounts a meeting that went badly for her 10-year-old self, resulting in her boycotting them altogether for many years — until an issue came about which forced her to participate again. Rejoining the meetings was a political assertion, and it helped her realize an important lesson: you are never too young to use your voice — but you need to be present for it to work.

Quote of talk: “Politics is not only activism — it’s awareness, it’s keeping ourselves informed, it’s caring for facts. When it’s possible, it is casting a vote. Politics is the tool through which we structure ourselves as groups and societies.”

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Mariana Lin, AI character designer and principal writer for Siri

Big idea: Let’s inject AI personalities with the essence of life: creativity, weirdness, curiosity, fun.

Why? Tech companies are going in two different directions when it comes to creating AI personas: they’re either building systems that are safe, flat, stripped of quirks and humor — or, worse, they’re building ones that are fully customizable, programmed to say just what you want to hear, just how you like to hear it. While this might sound nice at first, we’re losing part of what makes us human in the process: the friction and discomfort of relating with others, the hard work of building trusting relationships. Mariana Lin calls for tech companies to try harder to truly bring AI to life — in all its messy, complicated, uncomfortable glory. For starters, she says, companies can hire a diverse range of writers, creatives, artists and social thinkers to work on AI teams. If the people creating these personalities are as diverse as the people using it — from poets and philosophers to bankers and beekeepers — then the future of AI looks bright.

Quote of the talk: “If we do away with the discomfort of relating with others not exactly like us, with views not exactly like ours — we do away with what makes us human.”

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Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, interviewed by TED curator Bruno Giussani

Big idea: Companies that collect and hoard our information, like Facebook, have become unthinkably powerful global players — perhaps more powerful than governments. It’s time for the public hold them accountable.

How? Tech companies with offices in different countries must obey the laws of those nations. It’s up to leaders to make sure those laws are enforced — and it’s up to citizens to pressure lawmakers to further tighten protections. Despite legal and personal threats from her adversaries, Carole Cadwalladr continues to explore the ways in which corporations and politicians manipulate data to consolidate their power.

Quote to remember: “In Britain, Brexit is this thing which is reported on as this British phenomenon, that’s all about what’s happening in Westminster. The fact that actually we are part of something which is happening globally — this rise of populism and authoritarianism — that’s just completely overlooked. These transatlantic links between what is going on in Trump’s America are very, very closely linked to what is going on in Britain.”

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Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary, with violinist Min Kym

Big idea: Life is steeped in sublime magic that you can tap into, opening a whole world filled with passion and delight.

How? By forgoing constant positivity for a state of mind more exquisite and fleeting — a place where light (joy) and darkness (sorrow) meet, known to us all as longing. Susan Cain weaves her journey in search for the sublime with the splendid sounds of Min Kym on violin, sharing how the feeling of yearning connects us to each other and helps us to better understand what moves us deep down.

Quote of the talk: “Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go, and may it carry you straight to the beating heart of the perfect and beautiful world.”

A first glimpse at the TEDSummit 2019 speaker lineup

With TEDSummit 2019 just two months away, it’s time to unveil the first group of speakers that will take to the stage in Edinburgh, Scotland, from July 21-25.

Three years ago, more than 1,000 members of the TED global community convened in Banff, Canada, for the first-ever TEDSummit. We talked about the fracturing state of the world, the impact of technology and the accelerating urgency of climate change. And we drew wisdom and inspiration from the speakers — and from each other.

These themes are equally pressing today, and we’ll bring them to the stage in novel, more developed ways in Edinburgh. We’ll also address a wide range of additional topics that demand attention — looking not only for analysis but also antidotes and solutions. To catalyze this process, half of the TEDSummit conference program will take place outside the theatre, as experts host an array of Discovery Sessions in the form of hands-on workshops, activities, debates and conversations.

Check out a glimpse of the lineup of speakers who will share their future-focused ideas below. Some are past TED speakers returning to give new talks; others will step onto the red circle for the first time. All will help us understand the world we currently live in.

Here we go! (More will be added in the coming weeks):

Anna Piperal, digital country expert

Bob Langert, corporate changemaker

Carl Honoré, author

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist

Diego Prilusky, immersive media technologist

Eli Pariser, organizer and author

Fay Bound Alberti, historian

George Monbiot, thinker and author

Hajer Sharief, youth inclusion activist

Howard Taylor, children safety advocate

Jochen Wegner, editor and dialogue creator

Kelly Wanser, geoengineering expert

Ma Yansong, architect

Marco Tempest, technology magician

Margaret Heffernan, business thinker

María Neira, global public health official

Mariana Lin, AI personalities writer

Mariana Mazzucato, economist

Marwa Al-Sabouni, architect

Nick Hanauer, capitalism redesigner

Nicola Jones, science writer

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Omid Djalili, comedian

Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist

Pico Iyer, global author

Poet Ali, Philosopher, poet

Rachel Kleinfeld, violence scholar

Raghuram Rajan, former central banker

Rose Mutiso, energy for Africa activist

Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist

Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Sheperd Doeleman, black hole scientist

Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary

Tim Flannery, carbon-negative tech scholar

Tshering Tobgay, former Prime Minister of Bhutan

 

With them, a number of artists will also join us at TEDSummit, including:

Djazia Satour, singer

ELEW, pianist and DJ

KT Tunstall, singer and songwriter

Min Kym, virtuoso violinist

Radio Science Orchestra, space-music orchestra

Yilian Cañizares, singer and songwriter

 

Registration for TEDSummit is open for active members of our various communities: TED conference members, Fellows, past TED speakers, TEDx organizers, Educators, Partners, Translators and more. If you’re part of one of these communities and would like to attend, please visit the TEDSummit website.

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from TED2019

If we learned anything at TED2019, it’s that life doesn’t fit into simple narratives, and that there are no simple answers to the big problems we’re facing. But we can use those problems, our discomfort and even our anger to find the energy to make change.

Twelve mainstage sessions, two rocking sessions of talks from TED Fellows, a special session of TED Unplugged, a live podcast recording and much more amounted to an unforgettable week. Any attempt to summarize it all will be woefully incomplete, but here’s a try.

What happened to the internet? Once a place of so much promise, now a source of so much division. Journalist Carole Cadwalldr opened the conference with an electrifying talk on Facebook’s role in Brexit — and how the same players were involved in 2016 US presidential election. She traced the contours of the growing threat social media poses to democracy and calls out the “gods of Silicon Valley,” naming names — one of whom, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, sat down to talk with TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers the following day. Dorsey acknowledged problems with harassment on the platform and explained some of the work his team is doing to make it better.

Hannah Gadsby broke comedy. Her words, and she makes a compelling case in one of the most talked-about moments of the conference. Look for her talk release on April 29.

Humanity strikes back! Eight huge Audacious Project–supported ideas launched at TED this year. From a groundbreaking project at the Center for Policing Equity to work with police and communities and to collect data on police behavior and set goals to make it more fair … to a new effort to sequester carbon in soil … and more, you can help support these projects and change the world for good.

10 years of TED Fellows. Celebrating a decade of the program in two sessions of exuberant talks, the TED Fellows showed some wow moments, including Brandon Clifford‘s discovery of how to make multi-ton stones “dance,” Arnav Kapur‘s wearable device that allows for silent speech and Skylar Tibbits‘s giant canvas bladders that might save sinking islands. At the same time, they reminded us some of the pain that can exist behind breakthroughs, with Brandon Anderson speaking poignantly about the loss of his life partner during a routine traffic stop — which inspired him to develop a first-of-its-kind platform to report police conduct — and Erika Hamden opening up about her team’s failures in building FIREBall, a UV telescope that can observe extremely faint light from huge clouds of hydrogen gas in and around galaxies.

Connection is a superpower. If you haven’t heard of the blockbuster megahit Crazy Rich Asians, then, well, it’s possible you’re living under a large rock. Whether or not you saw it, the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, has a TED Talk about connection — to his family, his culture, to film and technology — that goes far beyond the movie. The theme of connection rang throughout the conference: from Priya Parker’s three easy steps to turn our everyday get-togethers into meaningful and transformative gatherings to Barbara J. King’s heartbreaking examples of grief in the animal kingdom to Sarah Kay’s epic opening poem about the universe — and our place in it.

Meet DigiDoug. TED takes tech seriously, and Doug Roble took us up on it, debuting his team’s breakthrough motion capture tech, which renders a 3D likeness (known as Digital Doug) in real time — down to Roble’s facial expressions, pores and wrinkles. The demo felt like one of those shifts, where you see what the future’s going to look like. Outside the theater, attendees got a chance to interact with DigiDoug in VR, talking on a virtual TED stage with Roble (who is actually in another room close by, responding to the “digital you” in real time).

New hope for political leadership. There was no shortage of calls to fix the broken, leaderless systems at the top of world governments throughout the conference. The optimists in the room won out during Michael Tubbs’s epic talk about building new civic structures. The mayor of Stockton, California (and the youngest ever of a city with more than 100,000 people), Tubbs shared his vision for governing strategies that recognize systems that place people in compromised situations — and that view impoverished and violent communities with compassion. “When we see someone different from us, they should not reflect our fears, our anxieties, our insecurities, the prejudices we have been taught, our biases. We should see ourselves. We should see our common humanity.”

Exploring the final frontier. A surprise appearance from Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope — whose work produced the historic, first-ever image of a black hole that made waves last week — sent the conference deep into space, and it never really came back. Astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier, head of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, shared her work mapping the observable universe — a feat, she says, that we’ll complete in just 40 years.  “Think about it. We’ve gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity in a few thousand years,” she says. “If we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies.” And in the Fellows talks, Moriba Jah, a space environmentalist and inventor of the orbital garbage monitoring software AstriaGraph, showed how space has a garbage problem. Around half a million objects, some as small as a speck of paint, orbit the Earth — and there’s no consensus on what’s in orbit or where.

Go to sleep. A lack of sleep can lead to more than drowsiness and irritability. Matt Walker shared how it can be deadly as well, leading to an increased risk of Parkinson’s, cancer, heart attacks and more. “Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health,” he says, “It’s not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system, and it is mother nature’s best effort yet at immortality.”

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from day 1 of TED2019

The theme of TED2019 is “Bigger than us,” and day 1 did not disappoint. Even though it had just three sessions, they were chock full of compelling ideas and calls for action. Here are seven takeaways: 

We’re shining light into some really dark places. Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, takes us inside the new (and iconic) black hole image and the epic effort involved in making it. The petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million GB) of data that were used to construct the image came from a network of telescopes operated by 200 people in 60 countries who, he says, “effortlessly sidestepped the issues that divide us.” (Here’s a thought: Let’s get competing political candidates to work on science projects … together!) And two TED Fellows showed documentary projects that exposed hidden truths: Taghi Amirani shares footage from his just-finished Coup 53, which reveals the British and American conspiracy that overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and shaped the country’s fate (and his family’s), while Nanfu Wang speaks about One Child Nation, her film about the traumas caused by China’s one-child policy.

And some places still need illumination. British journalist Carole Cadwalladr describes her investigation into the Facebook ads that targeted people with lies prior to the 2016 Brexit vote, but most of the evidence of what occurred remains locked in the “black boxes” of Facebook, Google and Twitter. She urges them to release their data, saying: “It’s a crime scene, and you have the evidence.” Writer Baratunde Thurston shares examples of people in the US who had the police called on them because they were “living while black” — when they went to a swimming pool, donated food to the homeless or played golf, “concerned” observers phoned 911 to report them. Systemic racism underlies these 911 calls, and even though changing it may sound impossible, Thurston has hope. He believes that if we can see the humanity of people targeted by racism, we can change our actions; when we change our actions, we change the story; and when we change the story, we can change the system.

The words we use matter. We’re living in polarizing times, and many fractures occur during our conversations. By tweaking what we say, political pollster Frank Luntz shows how to keep our discussions open and respectful. One standout from his suggestions: instead of saying the passive “I’m listening,” try the active, empathic “I get it.”

Businesses need to look beyond balance sheets and focus on their people. TED Fellow Jess Kutch created coworker.org, a platform that helps employees organize. While it tends to scare executives, Kutch says corporate leaders should view organizing as a positive — it’s what she calls “productive conflict,” offering “an opportunity to build a better workplace, a stronger business and an economy that works for all of us.” (Besides, she notes, the people most passionate about changing their workplace tend to be the people who love their workplace the most.) … Creating a company that puts employees first is part of what Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya calls his “anti-CEO playbook.” Other actions in his playbook: Asking communities what they need instead of demanding tax breaks and concessions from them; being accountable to one’s customers rather than one’s shareholders; and taking sides on political issues — because, he says, businesses should use their power to make a difference.

Ethics shouldn’t be an afterthought. While Cadwalladr calls out the tech giants and Ulukaya calls for humanity in business, a slew of TED Fellows echo the theme of responsibility. MIT researcher Arnav Kapur demos a technology that can communicate a person’s thoughts — but he stressed it’s not mind reading. It picks up only “deliberate speech” while “control resides with the user.” … Cofounder and executive director of The Good Food Institute Bruce Friedrich says humans have a responsibility to the earth not to tax it with the consequences of meat consumption. He’s championing research and investment into plant-based and cell-based meat. … Finally, astrodynamicist Moriba Jah speaks about our planet’s responsibility to, well, the rest of the universe. There are more than 500,000 objects in space put there by humans — “most of us what we launch never comes back,” he says. The world’s nations should pool their efforts and data to track the trash.  

Music can be used to teach history and biology. Teachers might want to take a lesson from these TED Fellows. Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin shares a rousing excerpt from her in-progress musical At Buffalo, which examines black identity through the events of the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. And biologist Danielle N. Lee led the crowd in a version of Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.” to illustrate the concept of “extra-pair copulation.” (Trust us — it was amazing.)  

Fishing cats are the cutest cat you’ve never heard of. Oh yes, they are.

That concludes this highly abbreviated rundown of the day’s doings, which also included walking Easter Island statues, innovative ways of creating new medications, a Kenyan music festival with the winning name of “Blankets and Wine” (sign us up!), an astrophysicist who is taking how she studies stellar explosions and applying them to city lights and the criminal justice system, restoring the Maldives with canvas “bladders,” spoken word from the sublime Sarah Kay and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and much more.

Truth: Notes from Session 1 of TED2019

The world feels fragile these days, a bit wobbly. How do we figure out a way forward? At TED2019, we’re taking a painfully honest look at what’s going on, laying out shared values, exploring a common purpose — and seeing how we can build something meaningful together: an idea, vision, ambition that’s bigger than us.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 1: Truth, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson and Helen Walters.

When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 5pm, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

Speakers: Sarah Kay, Sheperd Doeleman, Carole Cadwalladr, Frank Luntz, Baratunde Thurston and Hamdi Ulukaya.

Music: Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit, performing three original songs: “King of the World,” “Nothing Has to Be True” and “My Silver Lining.”

The talks in brief:

Sarah Kay, poet and educator

• Big idea: What does it mean to embrace the beauty of life around us?
• How? In a thoughtful and stirring spoken-word piece, Sarah Kay encourages us to welcome the beauty of the universe, however it may appear. From starlings bursting into flight to the enormous heart of a blue whale, the poetry of life is within our reach.
• Quote of the talk: “Maybe it’s not my job to invent something new. Maybe, instead, it’s my job to listen to what the universe is showing me.”

Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope project

• Big idea: We have the first image of a black hole … and that’s awesome!
• How? 100 years ago, Einstein predicted we would see a circle of bright light around a black hole, should we ever image one. Last week, Doeleman’s global team of 200 researchers across 60 countries announced just that. Using an international array of telescopes synced with atomic clocks, the Event Horizon Telescope imaged the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of a galaxy 55 million light years away. The ring of light we see in the image is the orbit of photons (particles of light) around the black hole. The dark region in the center is the event horizon, and our entire solar system would fit inside it. Doeleman discusses his team’s findings with TED’s Chris Anderson. (You can learn more about how this image was created from Katie Bouman, who created an algorithm central to the project’s success.)
• Quote of the talk: “Black holes really are the central mystery of our age because that’s where the quantum world and the gravitational world come together.”

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist for the Guardian and Observer and Pulitzer Prize finalist

• Big idea: Online platforms need to be accountable for their potential to influence voters.
• How? Targeted Facebook ads played a decisive role in the Brexit referendum. But when Cadwalladr and her colleagues wanted to see what British voters saw in the leadup to the 2016 referendum, they found that while some people mentioned seeing “quite scary stuff about immigration” on Facebook, it was difficult to know what ads they had been shown, or how they had been targeted. Cadwalladr uncovered that a company called Cambridge Analytica used data illegally harvested from Facebook to target these ads at voters deemed most susceptible to influence. As she says: “It was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years.” Cadwalladr calls for Mark Zuckerberg and other social media leaders to stand accountable for how their platforms can be used to influence democracy. Read a full recap of her talk here.
• Quote of the talk: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands … I don’t think it is.”

Frank Luntz, communications advisor, pollster and wordsmith whose work coining terms like “climate change” and the “death tax” helped to define contemporary American politics

• Big idea: It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. To effectively communicate, we need to change the words we use that alienate people we disagree with.
• How? Luntz provides a list of words to lose and words to use — for those on both the left and right. For example, instead of saying “tolerance,” which implies mere acceptance without embracing, we should be talking about “mutual respect,” which says that you have something to learn from everyone. And instead of “human capital,” which communicates that people are just a profit center, we should be talking about “human talent,” which respects individuals. Luntz also calls on American presidential candidates in 2020 to commit to no-negativity campaigns, and he urges each of us listen, learn and use language to lead.
• Quote of the talk: “Populism is a great way to get elected, and it is a horrible way to govern.”

Baratunde Thurston, humorist, activist and writer of the New York Times bestseller How to Be Black

• Big idea: White supremacy isn’t confined to those who consciously believe it. It’s implicit in the structure of our society — from the police to white people who call the cops on people of color merely because they make them feel uncomfortable. But we can change that structure — by changing our narratives.
• How? By making a game out of analyzing all-too-familiar headlines — e.g., “White Woman Calls Police on Eight-Year-Old Black Girl Selling Water” or “White Woman Calls Cops on Black Woman Waiting for Uber” — Thurston shows how African Americans are being punished for their mere existence. And by rewriting the headlines, we can imagine new outcomes for those narratives, change our behavior accordingly and, perhaps, begin to dismantle white supremacy.
• Quote of the talk: “Systems are just collective stories we all buy into. When we change them, we write a better reality for us all to be a part of. I am asking us to use our power to choose.”

Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani

• Big idea: The CEO playbook that has powered corporate America for decades is broken. We need a new playbook — an “anti-CEO playbook” — that benefits employees and local communities, instead of making shareholders rich. And consumers can use their power to help create it.
• How? There are four key values of the anti-CEO playbook: community, responsibility, gratitude and accountability. Companies can — and should — help build up struggling communities, instead of simply seeking out areas with tax breaks or incentives. That’s why Ulukaya built his second yogurt factory in a rural town in Idaho. Anti-CEOs should also hold themselves accountable to their consumers. After all, Ulukaya says, consumers have the buying power to support brands that treat their employees well. Taken together, when consumers refuse to buy from companies that put profit in front of people — and when CEOs follow the new playbook — we can create a better way of doing business.
• Quote of the talk: “Today’s playbook says: business exists only to maximize profit and make shareholders rich. I think that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. The truth is: business should take care of employees first.”

Social media is a threat to democracy: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TED2019

The day after the Brexit referendum, British journalist (and recently announced Pulitzer Prize finalist) Carole Cadwalladr went to her home region of South Wales to investigate why so many voters had elected to leave the European Union.

She asked residents of the traditionally left-wing town of Ebbw Vale, a place newly rejuvenated by EU investment, why they had voted to leave. They talked about wanting to take back control — a Vote Leave campaign slogan — and being fed up with immigrants and refugees.

Cadwalladr was taken aback. “Walking around, I didn’t meet any immigrants or refugees,” she says. “I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town. When I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country. So I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn’t really understand where people were getting their information from.”

A reader from the area got in touch with her after her story ran, to explain that she had seen things on Facebook, which she described to Cadwalladr as “quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.” This was misinformation that Cadwalladr was familiar with — the lie that Turkey was going to join the EU, accompanied by the suggestion that its population of 76 million people would promptly emigrate to current member states.

She describes trying to find evidence of this content on Facebook: “There’s no archive of ads that people see, or what had been pushed into their news feeds. No trace of anything … This entire referendum took place in darkness because it took place on Facebook.” And Mark Zuckerburg has refused multiple requests from the British parliament to come and answer questions about these ad campaigns and the data used to create them, she says.

“What I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum, and they took place on Facebook,” Cadwalladr says.

The amount of money you can spend on an election is limited by law in Britain, to prevent “buying” votes. It has been found that the Vote Leave campaign laundered £750,000 shortly before the referendum, which they spent on these online disinformation campaigns.

“This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for a hundred years, in a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged on just 1 percent of the electorate,” Cadwalladr says.

Cadwalladr embarked on a complex and painstaking investigation into the ad campaigns used in the referendum. After spending months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wylie, she found that a company called Cambridge Analytica “had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads, and it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.”

Despite legal threats from both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Cadwalladr and her colleagues went public with their findings, publishing them in the Observer.

“Facebook: you were on the wrong side of history in that,” Cadwalladr says. “And you are on the wrong side of history in this. In refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly. The gods of Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too … We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology … What the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it.”

Cadwalladr offers a challenge to tech companies: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands, I don’t think it is. And so my question to you is: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.”

And for everyone else, Cadwalladr has a call to action: “Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable. And we have to fight. And we have to win. And we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It’s up to us: you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control.”