YouSaid · the spoken record

Carole Cadwalladr

lines on the record: 120
first: 2019-07-08
most recent: 2019-07-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And what he was discovering was he took a list, a list had been published of these websites which were publishing fake news articles and he used a tool which looked at all the links going in and out and then he mapped them. And what he sort of saw was, and he'd just done that when I got him on the telephone. And he was freaked out. I was freaked out. He was freaked out. He was saying it's like a cancer. You can see it sort of strangling all the mainstream sources of news and information. And it sort of worked out. There's something systemic at work here whereby it's eclipsing what should be coming up.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the one they suggested. Anyhow, I was kind of screenshotting things and thinking, what on earth am I seeing? And then my really lucky break was a day later, it was only a day later, I stumbled across this academic who was then a small school in the United States, Jonathan Albright. And he had just started mapping, trying to map this sort of ecosystem of these far right websites. Right.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was this, you know, it's this kind of like Trump had just been elected. It was this sort of dark and stormy November night. And I was like, what on earth am I looking at here? And I was like, is this me? And so, you know, I was trying it on different browsers. I was trying different search terms. I got exactly the same thing with a whole range of searching, including women. So when I did women and I put our women, again, I got R women evil. And there's this thing when Google is really certain of the answer, like 100% certain it puts the answer in a box. And so for our women evil, it put the answer in a box. And it said yes. Women are evil. Because every woman contains a little bit of prostitute inside.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the entire page of results, and I was like, I didn't ask that question. Google has suggested a question and now it's answering it. And every single one of those answers was yes, Jews are evil And then at the bottom, it said suggestions of what do you want to search for next? And the suggestion was, did the Holocaust happen? So I was like, well, okay, let's click that link. And I clicked that link. Every single result was saying, no, the Holocaust didn't happen. The top result went to Stormfront. Which is a Nazi website.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was this thing about this, you know, when I started looking at the topic and I got really, I just started getting, I was like, how does Google search actually work? And so this playing around with it and putting in terms. And this was this thing I put in Jews into the search bar. You know, at Google, you make it into a question. So I put our dues. And the suggestion I got was our Jews evil. Was the top one And you don't even have to press return, it just fills your results.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I actually mean the focus of the first big piece I did, which was just a couple of weeks after the election was Google.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One message It's democracy. So you talk about getting to Cambridge Analytica. Is that really shifting things? Is Facebook for the most part have been saying, well, maybe there was a little influence, maybe there was some Russian purchasing, but they really weren't discussing it. And I remember bothering them at the time. And there wasn't a lot of idea that there might have been a problem on the platform. And I had been at that 2008 event where he talked about third-party information. I remember that very vividly and thinking, is that a good thing for this idiot company to be getting the information off of Facebook? Facebook wasn't very big at the time. It wasn't as big. It was big, but it wasn't.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you could actually try and do this to a state in America, for example, or the idea of trying to do this to an entire country. I mean, it was just the way that sort of technology sits so much at the heart of these democratic systems. And as I say, it was a constellation of different stories. And just this having just written about the whole philosophy around the idea of destruction. So it's this professor of business, I think, Clay Christiansen, and he called it the mudslide hypothesis, which is so a kind of small change, a small technological advantage can become this sort of tsunami and has overturned established industries. I think his example was IBM. So it was really the idea of, well, actually, we've seen it happen. We've seen it happen across all these industries. And it really does look like politics.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think as well, I'd also covered one of the stories I'd sort of done a big feature on was anonymous and lull sec and that whole way. And there was one story in particular which kind of captured my attention, although it turned out to be a red herring in some senses. But there'd been just days before the US presidential election, there was a DDOS attack. On a nation state, on a country. So this was hackers took down the entire internet for a, I think it was Sierra Leone. I can't remember now. And I just thought, isn't that kind of astonishing, isn't it? And there was a suggestion that this was a trial run.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What about you to do that? Because you know, a lot of people didn't. The Americans certainly weren't, and they were sort of following along. They just accepted the emails. I'd been writing about the... Social impact of technology on people's partisanship and stuff like that. But is it being an outsider or what do you think? It was just dead obvious or because of Brexit here?”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my editor sort of said, you know, do a long feature piece on let's do a thing on this phenomenon on fake news and whatever. And so that was, you know, two weeks after the presidential election, November 2016.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, now we now know incredibly strategically. And they were the first reports coming out of Macedonia about these teenagers writing fake news artists. And I thought, well, somebody must have written that. Somebody must have written this piece. And I Googled it, and I was like, oh, nobody has written this piece. So I just did it as a sort of short op-ed. Comment piece, and then we had the US presidential election and Trump was elected. You know, there was that sort of moment of shock and the first suggestions about the use of technology and the platforms and Mark Zuckerberg saying it was ludicrous, the idea that Facebook had played any role.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just met, you know, these thousands of entrepreneurs who are all out to disrupt some industry or another, or somebody I remember meeting somebody who wanted to disrupt socks. I never quite understood that. But seeing how, you know, I've experienced myself the way that journalism has been disrupted. It destroyed technology destroyed the business model for newspapers. We saw how it disrupted the music industry. And it was just a sort of few weeks before the US presidential election. That, you know, I just was noticing this sort of constellation of different news stories and thinking, well, you can't really have an election like you used to. Hillary Clinton's emails had been leaked. And so this idea that”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And anyway, and actually one of the things which was very pivotal in how I started thinking about this particular issue of technology and democracy was I went to a tech crunch disrupt conference in San Francisco.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not Ray. Yeah, not Ray. He's discovered the secret. So it was this. So Ray works for people. He now works. I got an interview with him before he started working for Google. This is what they got very upset about because by the time the article came out, he was working for them. And there he was saying that machine intelligence is going to overtake human intelligence by the year. I think it's 2028.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I said to him once? I go, No matter what there's a line from Moonstruck that Olympia de Caucus says to her husband when he's cheating on her, he goes, no matter what you do, Victor, you're going to die.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was just, I mean, it was just fascinating and sort of barbaric, really, not barbaric, but brutal. You know, we're working 12, 13, 14 hour days walking 16 miles a shift. And these people, this was really jobs of last resort. And this was in South Wales, which is very much a crucible of the labour movement, but unions weren't inside the warehouse. Nobody really knew what was going on inside. You know, this thing of walking half a mile to your break to have five minutes to sit down, to walk back to your workstation. And these were really jobs of last resort. And so that was just sort of one aspect of it. And I was following, I went out to Silicon Valley several times to interview people, different stories. And, you know, I'd had the experience of Google being very cross with me for...”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was just going to be amazing, this bright new future. And so I just started covering the topic. But in the very much, I'm a feature writer. I write for a lay audience. I've never been inside the technology section. It wasn't for people who are interested in tech. It was about the cultural and the political implications of this kind of stuff. And at the same time, I carried on with my other job, which was I wrote across the newspaper and interviews and reportage and op-eds and things. But, you know, I kind of, we've all been on that journey of seeing the downsides of this kind of technology and getting concerned about the monopolies of it. And so I also started covering that. And so, for example, I went undercover in an Amazon warehouse in Wales for a week, maybe six, seven years ago now.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I heard, you know, Wikipedia was still sort of fresh and new it felt at the time and Jimmy Wales stood up there and explained, you know, how this magical thing operated, you know, beyond, you know, something which you just hadn't been seen before and didn't seem like it would be possible. And so it just, it really did just sort of blow my mind. I just started, you know, getting interested in it and starting to write your mind. Oh, very positively. I was very squarely on utopian. I was utterly tech utopian.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We already know that's where I'm doing. So I actually started writing about tech a long time ago. I always, you know, a year ago I used to say, well, I was just a feature writer and I stumbled across this story. But actually, the genesis goes back a long time in that I went to a TED conference in 2005, I think it was, when it was still a secret kind of conference for millionaires. And I was really, you know, I had talk after talk from, you know, about how technology was going to save the world and the crowd was going to come together. We were going to cure cancer and it was going to be amazing. Yeah, that would be.”
2019-07-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT