Facebook's role in Brexit -- and the threat to democracy | Carole Cadwalladr

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In an unmissable talk, journalist Carole Cadwalladr digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters -- and linking the same players and tactics to the 2016 US presidential election -- Cadwalladr calls out the "gods of Silicon Valley" for being on the wrong side of history and asks: Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features journalist Carol Kedwalader, recorded live at TED 2019.
0:09.0	So on the day after the Brexit vote, in June 2016, when Britain woke up to the shock of discovering that we were leaving the European Union,
0:20.4	my editor at the Observer
0:21.6	newspaper in the UK asked me to go back to South Wales, where I grew up and to write a report.
0:28.2	And so I went to a town called Ebuvale. Here it is. It's in the South Wales Valleys, which is this
0:35.0	quite special place. It's always had this very sort of rich, working class culture,
0:41.3	and it's famous for its Welsh male boys' choirs and rugby, and it's coal.
0:45.3	But when I was a teenager, the coal mines and the steelworks closed,
0:51.3	and the entire area was devastated. And I went there because it had one of the highest leave votes in the country.
0:58.2	62% of the people here voted to leave the European Union,
1:02.7	and I wanted to know why.
1:05.6	When I got there, I was just a bit taken abat.
1:08.0	Because the last time I went to Ebervale, it looked like this.
1:12.9	And now, it looks like this.
1:15.5	This is a new 33 million-pound College of Further Education
1:20.2	that was mostly funded by the European Union.
1:24.6	And this is the new sports centre that's at the middle of a 350 million pound
1:31.4	regeneration project that's being funded by the European Union. And this is the new 77 million
1:39.1	pound road improvement scheme. And there's a new train line, a new railway station, they're all being
1:43.6	funded by the European Union. And it's not as if any of this is a secret, because there's a new train line, a new railway station, they're all being funded by the European Union.
1:45.0	And it's not as if any of this is a secret
1:47.0	because there's big signs like this everywhere.
	...

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