The point is that so many academics, experts, civil rights groups were warning of exactly this.
The insurrection wasn’t some sort of black swan event impossible to predict. Facebook’s failure to take essential measures to protect against violence was pointed out *repeatedly*
It was why @FBoversight was launched. To warn the public that Facebook’s failure to act was to use @tribelaw’s words to watch ‘a coup d’etat in progress’
My phone threw up this memory yesterday. The last time a whistleblower spoke so directly, Facebook melted down.
It precipitated their biggest corporate crisis to date.
And yet. Not a single executive was held to account.
In fact, that house of cards may be about to fall. The whitewashing job that enabled Facebook to emerge from the Cambridge Analytica wreckage may yet be exposed.
And this new whistleblower brings Facebook again into the spotlight…
Pay attention to how @nickclegg is trying to deflect & divert.
I especially love how he emphasises Facebook removed ‘the original #StopTheSteal group’ conveniently glossing over all the other #StopTheStealgroups Facebook did nothing about. Including the one Steve Bannon was in
And here it is: the Nick Clegg defence in full. This is why they pay him the big bucks.
Social media doesn’t kill people. People kill people.
It’s a direct lift from the NRA school of media management. And if that all Facebook has left, it should be very very worried indeed
Today, the Observer ‘transfers’ to Tortoise Media, a process that involved neither journalists nor readers.
This is 100+ journalists being ‘banged out’ of the Guardian offices, an old Fleet Street custom that’s usually a jolly occasion. This felt more like a medieval damnation.
Journalism is a team sport. And that’s it. The entire @ObsNewReview editorial team is gone! Female-led, female dominated, the entire commissioning team, art director, production staff & photo editor.
My journalistic home for 20 years…totally destroyed.
See the embedded thread. I don’t even think the Guardian management & board have any idea of what they’ve lost.
NEW: My piece for the Observer on how I was so deep into my investigation into Cambridge Analytica that I failed to realise that Hannah - my ex's daughter - was facing a human version of it: a stalker who was harvesting her data and weaponising it against her. 1/ theguardian.com/world/2025/mar…
I write about how I finally realised the scale of what was happening to Hannah, how comprehensively the police had failed her & how another woman, from the same class as her at the same school had also had a stalker, Alice Ruggles. Her stalker had murdered her. 2/
Hannah had 9 different characters harassing her, including 'Premium Escorts' purporting to sell her services & folders of evidence. I was overwhelmed by my own trials but I landed on the idea of emailing Georgia Catt, the brilliant producer of a podcast series I'd loved, The Missing Cryptoqueen
3/
Last week, the new owners of the Observer wrote to tell me they would *not* be issuing me with a new contract.
So...I want to say publicly that it was an absolute privilege to speak on behalf of my Observer colleagues during our strike. I don't regret doing so. And I learned so much from it.
1/
It means my 20 years at the Guardian & Observer is drawing to a close 😢. For most of that time, it's been the journalistic job of my dreams. I worked with the best editors, photographers & designers & got to do stories that wouldn't have been possible anywhere else. I know how lucky I've been.
2/
And I'm lucky too, in a way, that this is happening as the world convulses. My beat has been trying to understand the information revolution, it's the crisis beneath the crisis...& now I'm throwing myself into its swirling eddies just as the wave hits the shore.
This is what should be on every front page right now. What's happening in the US right now is an illegal power grab by a private citizen.
IT'S A COUP.
It's a digital coup. It's Musk who's leading it. The consequences are terrifying. And it's coming for us next. 1/
Please read this. I'm far from alone in saying it. The great
@TimothyDSnyder, @RBReich, @ruthbenghiat have all been shouting it.
There's superb reporting happening into every aspect of what's happening. But there's no framing. It's all facts, no story. broligarchy.substack.com/p/it-is-a-coup
This is a digital coup. A data coup. What Musk's cyber troops - mercenaries - have done is take control of the federal government's operating systems. They've downloaded or scraped vast quantities of data. It's a hack on an unprecedented scale. 3/
Britain: we have to understand wtf we’ve done. We’ve allowed one of Trump’s closest allies have access to our entire NHS data systems. This is the CEO of Palantir telling shareholders that ‘when it’s necessary to scare enemies & on occasion kill them’
There is much more I want to say on this but if you’re in the US right now, you need to understand that Silicon Valley is your creepy ex boyfriend. Who’s now conspiring with Donald Trump. They have your data & it can & will be weaponized against you.
Understand: the first use case of all technology is always against woman. A predator(s) used technology to surveille, harass & intimidate Hannah. And this is now what’s coming for journalists, activists, civil servants, lawyers & many more in the USA now.
The technology we use in every day life is powered by what @shoshanazuboff christened ‘surveillance capitalism’. But now we are heading into‘surveillance authoritarianism’. We are already in a coercively controlling relationship with these platforms