This episode was originally broadcast as a live webinar on 22 October 2020
Moderated by:
Peter Jukes – Author, dramatist and screenwriter. Peter became a journalist ten years ago when working on the phone hacking scandal. He is the CEO of Byline Media and co-founder of the Byline Festival and the Byline Times.
On the panel:
Carole Cadwalladr – Author and investigative journalist. Carole is a features writer for The Observer and used to work at The Daily Telegraph. In 2018 she exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal, and in 2019 was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for her coverage of this event. She appears in the documentary film ‘The Great Hack’ and in 2019 delivered a TED talk on ‘Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy’. Carole is a member of All The Citizens, a non-profit organisation that crowdfunds to support investigations into abuses of power.
Damian Collins MP – Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe since 2010. From 2016 to 2019 Damian was Chair of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, helping to launch the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Data Privacy, which met in London in 2018. He led inquiries into online disinformation, football governance, doping and homophobia in sport, reality TV and immersive and addictive technologies. Damian is also Chairman of the Conservative Arts and Creative Industries Network. During the COVID-19 pandemic he co-founded Infotagion, a fact-checking website and podcast series looking at health disinformation. His first book, ‘Charmed Life: The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon’, was published by HarperCollins in 2016.
Kyle Taylor – Founder and Director of Fair Vote UK, which published whistleblower evidence of Vote Leave’s lawbreaking in the EU referendum and supported Chris Wylie’s whistleblower revelations around Cambridge Analytica’s global data theft and misappropriation. Fair Vote UK now campaigns on digital democracy reform and platform regulation in the UK and internationally. He is also the lead claimant in a class action lawsuit against Facebook and acts as Secretariat to a parliamentary inquiry into foreign money and electoral transparency. Kyle was the Chief of Staff to a UK government minister and has worked on half a dozen elections, including the 2016 US Presidential Campaign and the 2020 US Presidential Campaign. His first book on the subject of data and democracy will be published in autumn of 2020.
Alicia Wanless – Co-director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Alicia researches how people shape—and are shaped—by a changing information space. With over a decade of experience in researching and analyzing the information environment, focusing on propaganda and information warfare, Wanless applies this learning to support government, military, and major tech companies to develop policies and integrate information activities into training programs that better reflect how the information environment is manipulated. Wanless is currently a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring alternative frameworks for understanding the information environment.