Carole Cadwalladr Profile picture
Oct 8, 2021 12 tweets 6 min read Read on X
I’m so incredibly DELIGHTED for @mariaressa but I also want to explain why this decision by @NobelPrize is so important at this moment (& why it’s more very bad news for Facebook)
More perhaps than anyone, @mariaressa has explained how ‘a lie told a million times becomes a fact’.

She’s watched how her country became a brutal dictatorship & understood first hand how this was done through control of the information space

theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
She’s spent much of the last 5 years trying to warn the west what is coming for us.

How the firestorm of lies & distortions & fake news are a dictator’s best friend.

And how Silicon Valley’s failure to deal with it is a fundamental danger to democracy

In the Philippines, Duterte took over the information space first. Violence, intimidation, co-ordinated attacks took place online before the extra-judicial killings began.

Maria came under a systematic co-ordinated attack.

And it all happened on Facebook.
‘You cannot have integrity of elections, if you do not have integrity of facts’

And we don’t. We have neither.

@mariaressa has been beating this drum & trying to make us understand the existential assault on the truth. And where this leads

The election that brought Duterte to power was a month before Brexit.

We now know that in 2016, social media sites - but especially Facebook - were profoundly, deeply corrupted.

The Philippines was @mariaressa says ‘the first of the dominoes to fall’
@mariaressa has not just courageously risked her freedom to stand up to Duterte, she has used her situation to explain these wider truths.

And to hammer away at Facebook’s complicity time & again
Anyway, small thing, but I’m very very pleased that I got to raise what happened in the Philippines directly to the Facebook executive in charge of global elections at the time, this week.

The expression on her face..
And I hope it’s okay to share this. This was Maria’s message to our group yesterday. The situation in the Philippines is going from bad to worse.
This could not have come at a better time.
This is just too cute. The moment @mariaressa finds out she’s won the Nobel in the middle of a live seminar:

And this was the other side of the conversation…!

Adding this by @julieposetti to this thread.

The online harassment @mariaressa faces & which has such awful real world consequences is not just harassment against her as a journalist but as a female journalist: the victim of a terrible confluence of authoritarianism & misogyny

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More from @carolecadwalla

Mar 28
NEW: I’ve found an opaque financial vehicle owns a large chunk of the Observer. And neither it or the Guardian will say who it is. Why?

Well there is a clue. Which goes by way of Saudi Arabia…
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The capture of US media orgs is accelerating. And the UK is next in line. The BBC has fallen to an AI hype guy. And my old newspaper, the Observer, is publishing Palantir puff pieces.

But why? I set out to find out..
2/

open.substack.com/pub/broligarch…
In Companies House I found the Observer has a mystery investor: the North Hatley Trust.

Who is the North Hatley Trust? Good question!

There’s only the tiniest bit of public info about it. With one important clue..
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Read 12 tweets
Mar 25
NEW: Will Google's AI hype man kill the BBC?

I've written about Matt Brittin because the coverage of his time at Google is shockingly naive.

The BBC's next DG made his career as a yes man at a rapacious AI monopoly that preys on news journalism in order to destroy it.
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Out of a shortlist of 5, 4 were women with decades of experience of public service broadcasting. And one man with none at all: Matt Brittin.

But that maybe the least of his problems...
2/
thenerve.news/p/matt-brittin…
The BBC's profile quotes sources "close" to Matt Brittin to deliver a fawning portrait of an "inspirational leader". Only he's never led anything.

Brittin is a middle manager whose job was to stop Google being regulated and grow the business like late stage cancer.
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Read 8 tweets
Mar 17
Distracted by the slaughter of children in Iran & Lebanon? Me too! But what better time could there be for govt to quietly relaunch its Digital ID plan?

Missed it? Me too! But look who’s celebrating…

The director of ‘govt innovation’ at the Tony Blair Institute!
1/
The govt noisily scrapped Digital ID after huge pushback when nobody bought its ‘it’ll solve immigration’ bollocks. But as markets tanked last week - kudos to the comms team! - it was discreetly re-launched with all-new messaging: a ‘common sense solution to everyday probs’
2/
Darren Jones, Cabinet Office secretary, put out a press release claiming the govt will be holding a ‘consultation’.

NOT: ‘Do you want the govt & unknown tech companies to have all your data?’

BUT: (I kid you not): ‘At what age should you be able to get a digital id?’ 🤔
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Read 10 tweets
Feb 28
Congrats to all the news orgs that signed syndication deals with this company. You’ve licensed your journalism to be a core component of Trump’s illegal war machine. Great job everyone 👏
A special shoutout to the editor-in-chief & CEO of the Guardian, Kath Viner & Anna Bateson. The deal with OpenAI was an unforced error which legitimised OpenAI’s illegal scraping of Guardian data & IP. In exchange for a quick buck. The NYTimes, in contrast, chose to sue.
Anthropic stood up to Trump. But OpenAI has capitulated. And now all its ‘partners’ are complicit in the consequences.

That includes Guardian. It will financially benefit from its journalists’ work - inc mine - being used to support Trump’s illegal wars & ICE’s reign of terror.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 19
PREDICTION: If Andrew is charged (no assumption of guilt etc), we are going to have a crisis of both the press & judiciary.

In Britain, it is an offence to publish ANY info on defendant beyond bare facts.

But! US outlets can print whatever they like…
1/
Contempt of court is foundational principle of British justice: press must not prejudice a jury trial.

Editors risk a prison sentence if found in breach.

Even in digital age, the law held…but how could it possibly withstand deluge of US coverage in a case like this??
3/
Short answer: it won’t. Far right agitator Tommy Robinson weaponised UK laws on contempt as a ‘cover up’ over grooming scandal. And the New Yorker ignored & published on Lucy Letby.

If Andrew is charged, it’ll trigger a crisis for both the press & judiciary
4/
Read 4 tweets
Jan 28
NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system
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Palantir’s stated mission is to defend America. Peter Thiel is a radical libertarian who does not believe ‘freedom & democracy are compatible’.

Yet, the UK is overwhelmingly dependent on Palantir’s services. As a national security threat, this is off the charts.
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Please read the piece with comments from tech & national security experts.

We have no national security while we rely on highly political US Silicon Valley firms that are enmeshed in Trump’s increasing fascistic administration.
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Read 4 tweets

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