{"id":14795,"date":"2019-04-16T05:59:20","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T05:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/journalist-carole-cadwalladr-says-the-gods-of-silicon-valley-have-broken-democracy.html"},"modified":"2019-04-16T05:59:20","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T05:59:20","slug":"journalist-carole-cadwalladr-says-the-gods-of-silicon-valley-have-broken-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/journalist-carole-cadwalladr-says-the-gods-of-silicon-valley-have-broken-democracy.html","title":{"rendered":"Journalist Carole Cadwalladr says \u2018the gods of Silicon Valley\u2019 have broken democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the same day that she became a Pulitzer Prize finalist<\/a> for her work bringing the Cambridge Analytica scandal to light, journalist Carole Cadwalladr took the stage at TED to \u201caddress you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cadwalladr began her talk by recounting a trip she took after the Brexit referendum, back to her hometown in South Wales.<\/p>\n

She recalled feeling \u201ca weird sense of unreality\u201d walking around a town filled with new infrastructure funded by the European Union, while being told by residents that the EU had done nothing for them. Similarly, she said they told her about the dangers of immigration, even though they lived in a town with \u201cone of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cadwalladr said she began to understand where those sentiments were coming from after her story ran, and someone contacted her about seeing scary, misleading ads about Turkey and Turkish immigration on Facebook <\/a>. Cadwalladr, however, couldn\u2019t see those ads, because she wasn\u2019t targeted, and Facebook offered no general archive of all ads that had run on the platform.<\/p>\n

Eventually,\u00a0Facebook began\u00a0building that archive<\/a>\u00a0of ads. And the pro-Brexit campaign was\u00a0found guilty of breaking British election laws <\/a>by breaching campaign spending limits to fund campaigns on Facebook.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Cadwalladr said her interest in these issues\u00a0led her to Christopher Wylie<\/a>, whose whistleblowing about Cambridge Analytica\u2019s use of Facebook user data helped prompt broader scrutiny of the social network\u2019s privacy practices.<\/p>\n

Cadwalladr described Wylie as \u201cextraordinarily brave,\u201d particularly since Cambridge Analytica repeatedly threatened them with legal action. The final threat, she said, came a day before publication, and it came from Facebook itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt said that if we published, they would sue us,\u201d Cadwalladr said. \u201cWe did it anyway. Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history on that, and you are on the wrong side of history in this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cthis\u201d in question is what she characterized as a failure by the social media platforms to fully reckon with the extent to which they\u2019ve become tools for the spread of lies and misinformation. For example, she pointed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s refusal thus far to appear before parliaments around the world that have asked him to testify<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Calling out executives like Facebook\u2019s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet\/Google\u2019s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Twitter\u2019s Jack Dorsey (who\u2019s scheduled to take the stage tomorrow morning), Cadwalladr insisted that the stakes could not be higher.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis technology you have invented has been amazing, but now it\u2019s a crime scene, and you have the evidence,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is not enough to say that you will do better in the future, because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

She went on to declare that the Brexit vote demonstrates that \u201cliberal democracy is broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not democracy,\u201d Cadwalladr said. \u201cSpreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash from God knows where \u2014 it\u2019s subversion, and you are accessories to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And for those of us who don\u2019t run giant technology platforms, she added, \u201cMy question to everybody else is: Is this what we want? To let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones as this darkness falls?\u201d<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/JLaAWmw5jq0\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the same day that she became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work bringing the Cambridge Analytica scandal to light, journalist Carole Cadwalladr took the stage at TED to <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-14795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t