Carole Cadwalladr unveils the dark side of social media information gathering at Longford festival

Last Saturday, the Granard Booktown Festival saw a conversation between Carole Cadwalladr and Bryan Dobson.

Carole is best known for her investigative reporting and uncovering the role of facebook in promoting Brexit, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal for which she received a Pulitzer nomination.

Bryan Dobson introduced Carol by citing the citation of the story by the Pulitzer board.

“It’s very short,” he said, “It’s one sentence, but it’s beautiful.”

“It says that she was nominated for the award for reporting on how Facebook and other tech firms allowed the spread of misinformation and failed to protect consumer privacy, leading to Cambridge Analytica's theft of 50 million people's private information, data, which was used to boost Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election.”

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Naturally Data theft was the number one topic of the conversation on Saturday night leaving much of the audience thinking of switching out their smartphones for their dumber yet seemingly safer counterparts.

Carole walked the audience through what data theft actually is.

It all began with the introduction of Facebook's Newsfeed.

“That was when they started serving up that information algorithmically,” Carole explained, “And the key thing to this, which is relatively key to everything, they are gathering data, your private information, not just from everything you do on the web.”

This sent a shudder through the audience.

Carole spoke of how they use “a pixel” on almost every webpage, and once you click on those pages, that information belongs to Facebook.

It was these choices that compelled Carole to look into why companies and silicon valley were getting away with this kind of activity.

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Then she was reached out to by a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.

“He and the receipts for how they had gotten these millions and millions of people’s Facebook profiles, all their information, even their private messages and then they were using those to build algorithms and target people politically.

“And it really was quite clever, they made a personality quiz which they sort of put out on the internet.

“But if you did the personality quiz, at the end it sad there was another box which said can we you know take your Facebook and do you conset for us to use your Facebook Data.

Consenting to the use of their data also gave Cambridge Analytica permission to access their Facebook friends profiles as well.

It seems that this sort of Data farming is still ongoing today and is even harder to avoid than it was a decade ago as the world has become so heavily reliant on social media for their news and their relationships.

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Bryan Dobson made one thing clear “If it’s free, then you are the product”. This received a wide nod of agreement.

Following the talk, Carole first thanked the audience for their incredible questions and engagement.

“That was an amazing audience, they were so engaged and asked the most amazing questions and were listening so attentively, it was very impressive.”

She and Bryan also advised on combating the rise of information theft.

“Read more local journalism,” said Carole.

“That ship has sailed,” said Bryan, “ We have social media now, we can’t just put it back to where it was before but I think there needs to be more obligations and more accountability on social media.”

Local MEP Ciaran Mullooly was also in attendance. When asked whether the European Parliament have any plans in place to ensure more accountability on Social Media he said, “We’ve already passed the Digital Services Act which is supposed to be the watch guard on social media

“One of the reasons we believe there has been such a build-up in the US is that they fear what Europe is going to do.

“I’m not saying the Digital Services Act is perfect, it’s not perfect but it does have a certain control of what social media is doing.”