Name: Facebook's role in Brexit --- and the threat to democracy | Carole Cadwalladr
Uploaded: 2019-07-07T03:04:11.000Z
Duration: 15 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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.

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

So it's 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 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.

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

because the last time I went to Ebbw Vale,

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

that was mostly funded by the European Union.

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.

I had this sort of weird sense of unreality,

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.

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.

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

she was practically the only foreigner in town.

one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.

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

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

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 --

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

they are already going because of Brexit.

And this entire referendum took place in darkness,

And what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook,

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

or what data was used to target these people.

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

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

Because what I and other journalists have uncovered

is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum.

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

people would walk around with literally wheelbarrows of cash

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

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

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