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

Summary

The speaker recounts their experience in South Wales post-Brexit, where despite significant EU funding, a majority voted to leave, citing immigration concerns despite low immigrant rates. They explore the role of social media, particularly Facebook, in spreading misinformation during the referendum, highlighting the lack of transparency and accountability in ad targeting and spending. The talk delves into the connection between Brexit and Trump's campaign, the use of data analytics for political manipulation, and calls for action against the unchecked power of tech giants, emphasizing the urgent need to preserve democracy in the digital age.

Takeaways

• 🇬🇧 Brexit's Impact: The script discusses the aftermath of the Brexit vote and its profound effects on Britain, including the departure of Japanese car manufacturers.
• 🏭 Ebbw Vale's Transformation: Describes the town of Ebbw Vale in South Wales, which despite high EU funding for infrastructure and education, voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU.
• 🗳️ The Paradox of Leave Voters: Highlights the irony that many Leave voters felt the EU had done nothing for them, despite visible EU-funded projects in their community.
• 🤔 The Disconnect: Points out the disconnection between the actual immigrant population in Ebbw Vale and the perception of high immigration driving the Leave vote.
• 📰 Media Influence: Suggests that right-wing tabloids played a significant role in shaping public opinion on immigration, despite the area being a left-wing stronghold.
• 📱 Social Media's Role: Reveals the influence of Facebook in spreading misinformation about immigration, particularly concerning Turkey joining the EU, which was a lie.
• 🚫 Facebook's Lack of Transparency: Criticizes Facebook for not providing information on ad spending, targeting, and the source of funds used during the Brexit campaign.
• 🏦 Financial Irregularities: Discusses the illegal financial activities by the 'Vote Leave' campaign, including the funneling of money through another entity to bypass spending limits.
• 🕊️ Brexit as a 'Petri Dish': Compares Brexit to a testing ground for the tactics used in the Trump campaign, including the use of fear and hate to manipulate voters.
• 🌐 Global Reach of Disinformation: Notes the spread of disinformation and divisive tactics online beyond the UK and the US, affecting democracies worldwide.
• 🔍 The Need for Truth: Calls for transparency and accountability from tech companies to understand the full extent of their platforms' role in recent political events.

Q & A

What was the main task assigned to the speaker by their editor after the Brexit vote?

The speaker was asked to go back to South Wales and write a report on the town of Ebbw Vale, which had one of the highest 'Leave' votes in the country.

What significant changes did the speaker observe in Ebbw Vale since their last visit?

The speaker observed that Ebbw Vale had undergone significant development with a new college of further education, sports center, road-improvement scheme, train line, and railway station, all funded by the European Union.

What was the main reason the people of Ebbw Vale claimed for voting to leave the European Union?

People in Ebbw Vale claimed they wanted to take back control and expressed frustration with immigrants and refugees, despite the area having one of the lowest rates of immigration.

How did the speaker find out about the misinformation on Facebook regarding immigration?

A woman from Ebbw Vale contacted the speaker and mentioned the scary stuff she had seen on Facebook about immigration, particularly concerning Turkey.

Why was the Brexit referendum described as taking place 'in darkness'?

The referendum took place 'in darkness' because it largely occurred on Facebook, where ads and information are not publicly archived, making it impossible to research their impact or origins.

What was the role of Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit and Trump campaigns?

Cambridge Analytica worked for both campaigns, profiling people politically to understand their individual fears and target them with Facebook ads, using illicitly harvested profiles from Facebook.

What was the significance of the 'Vote Leave' campaign's actions being referred to the police?

The 'Vote Leave' campaign was referred to the police because it had laundered money through another campaign entity in a manner ruled illegal by the electoral commission, which also unleashed a fire hose of disinformation.

What was the role of Arron Banks in the Brexit campaign and why was he referred to the National Crime Agency?

Arron Banks funded the 'Leave.EU' campaign and was referred to the National Crime Agency because the electoral commission could not determine the origin of his money or if it was even British.

Why did the speaker compare the situation in Britain to a canary in a coal mine?

The speaker compared Britain to a canary in a coal mine to illustrate that Britain is showing the early signs of the damage that technology can do to democracy, serving as a warning to the rest of the world.

What is the broader implication of the speaker's argument regarding technology and democracy?

The broader implication is that the technology invented by Silicon Valley giants has been used to disrupt democracy, and unless action is taken, it may become impossible to have free and fair elections in the future.

What is the speaker's call to action for the audience and tech companies?

The speaker calls for the audience and tech companies to acknowledge the damage done to democracy and to take back control by demanding transparency, truth, and regulation of these powerful platforms.

Outlines

00:00

🏭 Post-Brexit Reality in Ebbw Vale

The speaker recounts their experience in Ebbw Vale, South Wales, after the Brexit vote in 2016. They were tasked with investigating why the town, which had one of the highest 'Leave' votes, chose to exit the EU, despite significant EU funding for local projects like a new college, sports center, and infrastructure improvements. The locals expressed dissatisfaction with the EU and a desire for control, citing immigration as a primary concern despite minimal immigrant presence. The speaker highlights the disconnect between the town's actual situation and the perceptions shaped by media and social networks.

05:01

📊 The Dark Side of Digital Campaigning

This paragraph delves into the manipulative tactics used during the Brexit referendum, focusing on the misuse of social media platforms like Facebook for spreading misinformation and the circumvention of electoral spending laws. The speaker discusses how the 'Vote Leave' campaign and other groups like 'Leave.EU' broke the law, spending illegal amounts on targeted ads that propagated false narratives. The speaker also touches on the broader implications of these actions, pointing out the global reach of such tactics and their potential to undermine democracies worldwide.

10:03

🗳️ The Crisis of Democracy and the Role of Tech Giants

The final paragraph addresses the tech giants of Silicon Valley, accusing them of being complicit in the erosion of democracy through their platforms. The speaker uses the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine to illustrate how the UK is experiencing the consequences of unchecked technology in the political sphere. They call for transparency and accountability from these companies, emphasizing the importance of understanding the truth behind the manipulation that occurred during the Brexit referendum. The speaker ends with a call to action for everyone to reclaim control over their democratic processes and resist the rise of authoritarianism.

Keywords

💡Brexit

Brexit refers to the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, a political and economic union of European countries. It is central to the video's theme as it discusses the aftermath and the impact of the Brexit vote on the UK, particularly in South Wales. The speaker mentions the shock of the Brexit vote and the high 'Leave' vote in Ebbw Vale, illustrating the disconnect between the region's economic reliance on EU funding and the public's decision to leave the Union.

💡Ebbw Vale

Ebbw Vale is a town in South Wales, known for its history in coal mining and steelworks. It is significant in the script as it had one of the highest 'Leave' votes in the Brexit referendum, despite receiving substantial funding from the European Union for regeneration projects. The town serves as a case study to explore the reasons behind the Brexit vote and the perceived disconnect between EU support and local sentiment.

💡Immigration

Immigration is the act of moving to a new country with the intention of residing there. In the video, the speaker notes that residents of Ebbw Vale expressed frustration with immigration and refugees, despite the town having one of the lowest rates of immigration in the UK. This highlights the role of perception and misinformation in shaping public opinion on political issues like Brexit.

💡Control

The concept of 'control' is a recurring theme in the script, particularly in relation to the Brexit campaign slogan 'take back control.' It reflects the desire of some voters to regain sovereignty and decision-making power from the EU. The speaker explores this sentiment, questioning where it originates given the tangible benefits the region receives from EU membership.

💡Referendum

A referendum is a direct vote in which the entire electorate is invited to vote on a particular proposal. The Brexit referendum is a pivotal event in the video, as it led to the UK's decision to leave the EU. The speaker discusses the impact of the referendum on British democracy and the role of social media in shaping its outcome.

💡Disinformation

Disinformation refers to false or misleading information that is spread deliberately. The video discusses how the 'Vote Leave' campaign used disinformation in the form of ads, such as claims about Turkey joining the EU, to influence voters. This highlights the manipulation of information during the referendum process.

💡Electoral Fraud

Electoral fraud encompasses various illegal practices aimed at affecting the outcome of an election. The script mentions the 'Vote Leave' campaign's illegal activities, including overspending and the use of disinformation, which the speaker describes as the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years.

💡Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that became infamous for its role in data mining and analysis during political campaigns. The speaker mentions the company's involvement in profiling individuals for targeted Facebook ads, which involved the illicit harvesting of data from millions of Facebook profiles, contributing to the manipulation of public opinion.

💡Technology Platforms

Technology platforms in this context refer to social media and other online services that facilitate communication and the spread of information. The video discusses how these platforms, particularly Facebook, were used to disseminate disinformation and influence the Brexit vote, raising concerns about their impact on democracy.

💡Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central authority and limited political freedoms. The speaker warns that the unchecked power of technology platforms and the spread of disinformation risk aiding the rise of authoritarianism by undermining democratic processes and institutions.

💡Democratic Disruption

Democratic disruption refers to the challenges and changes brought about by technology to traditional democratic processes and norms. The video emphasizes how technology has been used to manipulate elections, as seen in the Brexit referendum, and calls for action to preserve the integrity of democratic systems.

Highlights

Post-Brexit vote assignment to report on South Wales, where the author grew up.

Ebbw Vale, South Wales, had one of the highest 'Leave' votes in the UK, with 62% voting to leave the EU.

Ebbw Vale received significant funding from the EU for infrastructure and education projects.

Despite EU funding, locals expressed dissatisfaction with the EU and a desire to take back control.

Residents cited immigration and refugees as their main concerns, despite low immigration rates in the area.

The author discovered that misinformation about immigration was spread via Facebook, influencing the Brexit vote.

Facebook's lack of transparency regarding ads and data usage during the Brexit referendum.

The Brexit vote had profound economic impacts, with Japanese car manufacturers leaving Wales.

Evidence of electoral fraud and overspending by the 'Vote Leave' campaign during the Brexit referendum.

Cambridge Analytica's role in profiling individuals for targeted Facebook ads, using illicitly harvested data.

The connection between Brexit and Trump's campaign, using similar tactics and data.

The author's investigative efforts to uncover the truth about Facebook's involvement in political manipulation.

Facebook's legal threats to prevent the publication of findings on their role in political subversion.

The call to action for tech companies to take responsibility for their role in democracy and misinformation.

The broader implications for democracy and the need for collective action to address the unchecked power of tech companies.

Transcripts

So, on the day after the Brexit vote,

in June 2016,

when Britain woke up to the shock

of discovering that we're leaving the European Union,

my editor at the "Observer" newspaper in the UK

asked me to go back to South Wales, where I grew up, and to write a report.

And so I went to a town called Ebbw Vale.

Here it is.

It’s in the South Wales Valleys, which is this quite special place.

It’s always had this very, sort of rich, working-class culture,

and it's famous for its Welsh male voice choirs and rugby and its coal.

But when I was a teenager, the coal mines and the steelworks closed,

and the entire area was devastated.

And I went there because it had one of the highest "Leave" votes in the country.

Sixty-two percent of the people here voted to leave the European Union.

And I wanted to know why.

When I got there, I was just a bit taken aback,

because the last time I went to Ebbw Vale,

it looked like this.

And now, it looks like this.

This is a new 33-million-pound college of further education

that was mostly funded by the European Union.

And this is the new sports center

that's at the middle of 350-million-pound regeneration project

that's being funded by the European Union.

And this is the new 77-million-pound road-improvement scheme,

and there's a new train line, a new railway station,

and they're all being funded by the European Union.

And it's not as if any of this is a secret,

because there's big signs like this everywhere.

[EU Funds: Investing in Wales]

(Laughter)

I had this sort of weird sense of unreality,

walking around the town.

And it came to a head

when I met this young man in front of the sports center.

And he told me that he had voted to leave

because the European Union had done nothing for him.

He was fed up with it.

And all around town, people told me the same thing.

They said that they wanted to take back control,

which was one of the slogans in the campaign.

And they told me that they were most fed up

with the immigrants and with the refugees.

They'd had enough.

Which was odd.

Because walking around, I didn't meet any immigrants or refugees.

I met one Polish woman who told me

she was practically the only foreigner in town.

And when I checked the figures,

I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has

one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.

And so I was just a bit baffled,

because I couldn't really understand

where people were getting their information from.

Because it was the right-wing tabloid newspapers

which printed all these stories about immigration.

And this is a very much left-wing Labour stronghold.

But then after the article came out, this woman got in touch with me.

And she was from Ebbw Vale,

and she told me about all this stuff that she'd seen on Facebook.

I was like, “What stuff?”

And she said it was all this quite scary stuff about immigration,

and especially about Turkey.

So I tried to find it.

But there was nothing there.

Because there's no archive of ads that people had seen

or what had been pushed into their news feeds.

No trace of anything, gone completely dark.

And this referendum that will have this profound effect forever on Britain --

it's already had a profound effect:

the Japanese car manufacturers that came to Wales and the north east

to replace the mining jobs --

they are already going because of Brexit.

And this entire referendum took place in darkness,

because it took place on Facebook.

And what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook,

because only you see your news feed, and then it vanishes,

so it's impossible to research anything.

So we have no idea who saw what ads

or what impact they had,

or what data was used to target these people.

Or even who placed the ads, or how much money was spent,

or even what nationality they were.

But Facebook does.

Facebook has these answers,

and it's refused to give them to us.

Our parliament has asked Mark Zuckerberg multiple times to come to Britain

and to give us these answers.

And every single time, he's refused.

And you have to wonder why.

Because what I and other journalists have uncovered

is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum.

And they took place on Facebook.

It's because in Britain, we limit the amount of money

that you can spend in an election.

And it's because in the 19th century,

people would walk around with literally wheelbarrows of cash

and just buy voters.

So we passed these strict laws to stop that from happening.

But those laws don't work anymore.

This referendum took place almost entirely online.

And you can spend any amount of money on Facebook or on Google or on YouTube ads

and nobody will know, because they're black boxes.

And this is what happened.

We've actually got no idea of the full extent of it.

But we do know that in the last days before the Brexit vote,

the official "Vote Leave" campaign

laundered nearly three quarters of a million pounds

through another campaign entity

that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal,

and it's referred it to the police.

And with this illegal cash,

"Vote Leave" unleashed a fire hose of disinformation.

Ads like this.

[Turkey's 76m people joining the EU]

This is a lie, it's a total lie.

Turkey is not joining the European Union.

There's not even any discussions of it joining the European Union.

And most of us, we never saw these ads,

because we were not the target of them.

"Vote Leave" identified a tiny sliver of people

who it identified as persuadable, and they saw them.

And the only reason we are seeing these now

is because parliament forced Facebook to hand them over.

And maybe you think,

"Well, it was just a bit of overspending.

It's a few lies."

But this was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years.

In a once-in-a-generation vote

that hinged upon just one percent of the electorate.

And it was just one of the crimes that took place in the referendum.

There was another group,

which was headed by this man, Nigel Farage,

the one to the right of Trump.

And his group, "Leave.EU" -- it also broke the law.

It broke British electoral laws and British data laws,

and it's also being referred to the police.

And this man, Arron Banks, he funded this campaign.

And in a completely separate case,

he's being referred to our National Crime Agency,

our equivalent of the FBI,

because our electoral commission

has concluded they don't know where his money came from.

Or if it was even British.

And I’m not even going to go into

the weird timing of Nigel Farage’s meetings with Julian Assange

and with Trump's buddy, Roger Stone, now indicted,

immediately before two massive WikiLeaks dumps,

both of which happened to benefit Donald Trump.

But I will tell you that Brexit and Trump were intimately entwined.

This man told me that Brexit was the petri dish for Trump.

And we know it's the same people, the same companies,

the same data, the same techniques,

the same use of hate and fear.

This is what they were posting on Facebook.

And I don't even want to call this a lie,

[Immigration without assimilation equals invasion]

because it feels more like a hate crime to me.

I don't have to tell you

that hate and fear are being sown online all across the world.

Not just in Britain and America, but in France and in Hungary

and Brazil and Myanmar and New Zealand.

And we know there is this dark undertow which is connecting us all globally.

And it is flowing via the technology platforms.

But we only see a tiny amount of what's going on on the surface.

And I only found out anything about this dark underbelly

because I started looking into Trump's relationship to Farage,

into a company called Cambridge Analytica.

And I spent months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wiley.

And he told me how this company, that worked for both Trump and Brexit,

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.

It took an entire year's work to get Christopher on the record.

And I had to turn myself from a feature writer

into an investigative reporter to do it.

And he was extraordinarily brave,

because the company is owned by Robert Mercer,

the billionaire who bankrolled Trump,

and he threatened to sue us multiple times,

to stop us from publishing.

But we finally got there, and we were one day ahead of publication.

We got another legal threat.

Not from Cambridge Analytica this time,

but from Facebook.

It told us that if we publish, they would sue us.

We did it anyway.

(Applause)

Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history in that.

And you were 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.

(Applause)

Mark Zuckerberg ...

(Applause)

and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey,

and your employees and your investors, too.

Because 100 years ago,

the biggest danger in the South Wales coal mines was gas.

Silent and deadly and invisible.

It's why they sent the canaries down first to check the air.

And in this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through,

we in Britain are the canary.

We are what happens to a western democracy

when 100 years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology.

Our democracy is broken, our laws don't work anymore,

and it's not me saying this,

it’s our parliament published a report saying this.

This technology that you have invented has been amazing.

But now, it's a crime scene.

And you have the evidence.

And it 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 truth.

And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a few ads.

And people are smarter than that, right?"

To which I would say, "Good luck with that."

Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates

is that liberal democracy is broken.

And you broke it.

This is not democracy --

spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash,

from God knows where.

It's subversion,

and you are accessories to it.

(Applause)

Our parliament has been the first in the world

to try to hold you to account,

and it's failed.

You are literally beyond the reach of British law -- not just British laws,

this is nine parliaments, nine countries are represented here,

who Mark Zuckerberg refused to come and give evidence to.

And what you don't seem to understand is that this is bigger than you.

And it's bigger than any of us.

And 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.

Because 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?

Because you set out to connect people.

And you are refusing to acknowledge

that the same technology is now driving us apart.

And my 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?

The history of the South Wales Valleys is of a fight for rights.

And this is not a drill -- it's a point of inflection.

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.

(Applause)

(Cheers)

(Applause)