Facebook's role in brexit

You can't blame facebook for brexit but, at the very least, you can accuse them of enabling and allowing the spread of misinformation for financial gain.

A few weeks ago, British journalist Carole Cadwalladr gave an impassioned speech at the TED conference where she took on the silicon valley big guys for their role in this mess. Even calling out Zuckerberg and friends by name. Considering Facebook was a sponsor, it took some courage.

Watch the video, it's well worth your time. I'd never seen the actual ads that were run pre-referendum, they were basically flat out lies. Quite impressive.

A week later, she wrote an article for the Observer describing how she took on the tech titans in their lair.

Predictably, the reactions weren't very warm:

In the theatre, senior executives of Facebook had been “warned” beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint. In fairness, what multi-billion dollar corporation with armies of PRs, lawyers and crisis teams, not to mention, embarrassingly, our former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, wouldn’t want to push back on the charge that it has broken democracy?

We need more empathy at the top of these organisations:

The world needs all kinds of brains. But in the situation we are in, with the dangers we face, it’s not these kinds of brains. These are brilliant men. They have created platforms of unimaginable complexity. But if they’re not sick to their stomach about what has happened in Myanmar or overwhelmed by guilt about how their platforms were used by Russian intelligence to subvert their own country’s democracy, or sickened by their own role in what happened in New Zealand, they’re not fit to hold these jobs or wield this unimaginable power.

Somehow, I doubt this is compatible with the exponential growth expected by investors…