How Do You Stage a Conversation in a Bitterly Divided, Politicized Climate? TED's Third Try | TED2019 Dispatch

But prejudice and division don't disappear just because a few good ideas exist.

"I'm standing here speaking directly to you, to you gods of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, and your employees, and your investors too... What happened in Britain is a sign of what is coming for the future of Western democracy. When election law that is more than a century old can be subverted by technology, our democracy is broken and our laws no longer work. The technology you invented is fascinating, but right now it is a crime scene."

After walking through how she covered Brexit in South Wales and pulled the Cambridge Analytica scandal apart layer by layer, British journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Carole Cadwalladr turned the second half of her TED talk into a battle cry.

This was the afternoon of April 15, Vancouver time — the opening talk of the TED 2019 annual conference. And the gods of Silicon Valley were sitting in the audience. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who in recent months had stopped attending even the company's all-hands meetings, turned up at the conference as usual. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, another man named from the stage, was on the speaker list too.

As for the employees and investors of these Silicon Valley giants: 44 people at the conference publicly listed themselves as working for one of the three companies named. Silicon Valley venture capitalists were everywhere. They made up most of the 283 attendees at the donor level and above, each of whom paid at least $25,000 for a ticket to spend a week at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Cadwalladr's indictment of the tech giants began with Brexit. Fake news was pushed in bulk through social networks and YouTube at British voters of particular classes and tastes, while Facebook's targeted advertising system left political ad buys impossible to regulate. After resisting for more than a year, Facebook began logging and opening up its history of political ad placements, and after a nine-month investigation Britain's Electoral Commission concluded that the Brexit campaign's spending had exceeded the legal limit.

"What Brexit shows is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it. Lies spread in the dark, paid for with money from god knows where. This is a subversion, and you are the tool. Is this what you want? Is this what you want to leave behind in history — servants of a global authoritarian movement? You say your goal is to connect all of humanity, and yet you refuse to admit that your technology is pushing people apart." Cadwalladr closed by calling on the Silicon Valley giants to take responsibility and to cooperate with European countries' election investigations and regulation. The whole talk was as unsparing as her columns for The Guardian and The Observer.

When it ended, the entire hall stood and applauded for about 40 seconds.

TED's head, Chris Anderson, then came on stage and said this was a talk unlike anything the TED main stage had seen before.

Anderson, a former magazine publisher, runs the TED conference differently from other conferences. Gatherings of rich people like this one usually keep to fairly mild subjects and avoid provoking the audience or the sponsors — the World Economic Forum and even The New York Times' own business forum are no exception.

Cadwalladr told me afterward that TED had read her script in advance and knew she would name these sponsoring companies, and even individuals, outright, but had not asked her to change a word. She thought that took some courage, especially since Facebook had only just become a TED sponsor this year, while Google has funded TED for more than a decade.

In the end TED's 12-person editorial board decided to offend its sponsors for an issue it cared about, and put Cadwalladr on first, followed immediately by a warm-up conversation with astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman about the black hole photograph.

In a sense, the annual TED conference held in Vancouver every April is itself a media outlet that publishes once a year: more than 100 talks packed into five and a half days. They are shot by a dozen or so of the giant cameras used at sailing regattas, cut into videos and posted free online, without ads, over the following year and more.

At the same time, the conference supplies the whole TED organization with tens of millions of dollars a year in operating funds. On how a TED talk is prepared and how the conference is run, there are two reports from 2017: How to Prepare a TED Talk and What Do You Get for a $10,000 Ticket?

The talks cover everything under the sun every year, but a few of them are chosen to stand for what TED cares about most. Anderson said at a press briefing last year that he doesn't want to do the front-page headlines of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times; he wants to find the most important thing of each year. His favorite example is 1989. The news the world paid most attention to that year was political — the collapse of the Soviet Union, the upheaval in Eastern Europe. But the idea of the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee created that same year, drew almost no coverage. In fact, by then the Soviet collapse was only a matter of time, while the web was a breakthrough that still shapes the lives of everyone today.

The subjects Cadwalladr works on — Brexit, Cambridge Analytica — are exactly the front-page headlines of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. TED did this year what it said last year it would not do, though it also gave the stage to both sides.

After Cadwalladr's battle cry, the next voice heard in the hall was the Republican Party's.

TED 2019's second speaker, Frank Luntz, is the voice of the Republican Party in the literal sense. As an adviser to George W. Bush, he was the one who repackaged the estate tax and the property tax as the "death tax," and he is also the main reason people today no longer say "climate change" but say "global warming" instead.

"I finally understand why they put me in this slot," Luntz said at his own expense. When he worked out his talk with TED beforehand, he had not known the running order or what anyone else would be talking about.

Luntz joked that although he gets introduced as a Republican strategist, what he really wants is to be democratic socialist Bernie Sanders' Secretary of Agriculture, so he can watch all kinds of free things fall out of the trees.

Even the countries where people can still speak are, for the most part, sunk in political division. By Luntz's research, 49% of Americans aged 18 to 29 have at some point refused to talk to a friend or a family member over a difference in political views. In his own quick poll of the TED audience, only about a third raised their hands.

Luntz did not defend social networks for spreading hatred or sharpening division. Instead he tried to use the skill he has, language, to offer practical techniques for talking across the divide.

As Luntz put it, the moment you say "I hate Trump," or hate whoever else, the conversation is already over. The answer is more skillful talk, enough to keep the conversation alive. For example:

• Say "Imagine," not "Dream" — even the American Dream is, by definition, not real, while "imagine" invites the other person to build a picture of their own, and that is what talking is;
• Say "I Get It," not "I'm Listening" — don't open by hinting that what you are hearing doesn't matter;
• Say "Cleaner, Safer, Healthier," not "Sustainability" — the latter implies keeping things as they are;
• Say "A Healthy Economy," not "Economic Growth" — the latter sounds like MIT and Harvard, while "healthy" fits almost anywhere;
• Say "Mutual Respect," not "Tolerant" — the latter means I accept you but I don't like you, while the former holds out the chance of learning something;
• Say "Inclusion," not "Diversity" — the latter suggests rounding up a few people from different places and forcing them together, and it went political long ago.

He was the second speaker of the first day to bring the hall to its feet.

A more direct answer to Cadwalladr came from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

On the morning of the 16th, Dorsey appeared on the TED stage in his everyday clothes — black hoodie, grey jeans, expensive Rick Owens sneakers — plus a hat pulled down over his ears.

Dorsey talked with Chris Anderson on stage for 30 minutes about how, as the CEO of one of the most important information platforms there is, he is handling the spread of fake news and hate speech and dealing with the division his own company has helped create.

Twitter is not the largest social network. By the daily numbers it only began disclosing this year, 126 million people open Twitter each day, less than a tenth of Facebook's figure and an eighth of WeChat's. But from presidents and government accounts around the world to athletes and reporters, and even Xinhua's English-language service, Twitter is the channel they choose to speak through.

While Twitter was answering, TED also publicly invited Zuckerberg or Sandberg to come and respond at this week's conference, and on Tuesday it released Cadwalladr's talk for the whole world to watch (click here; the order of talks at the conference is not the order they go online, and only one video is posted each business day).

Something like this has happened before. In 2014, after Edward Snowden gave a TED talk remotely through a robot, the deputy director of the National Security Agency joined by video link, saying he did not want to miss such an important discussion — even though the memorial wall inside his own building is engraved with the words "They Served In Silence." But after an unbroken run of scandals, Zuckerberg is no longer as fond of talking on camera as he was a year ago.

Before the conference opened, Anderson said at the press briefing that in recent years TED has, in effect, been forced to start caring about politics. What TED once stood for — "Technology, Entertainment, Design" — kept a certain distance from politics, so it could pay closer attention to progress that really lasts.

TED, which started in 1984, has watched several generations of American technology companies grow from experiments into empires. Its first conference brought in the Mac that Steve Jobs had just released, and the CD that Sony and Philips developed together. By the time Anderson took over TED in 2002, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were both taking an active part, and the two families' foundations are still among TED's biggest sponsors today.

In 2016, Uber founder Travis Kalanick was still up there talking about how regulation gets in the way of innovation and progress. By the time TED's opening talk began in 2018, Zuckerberg was already being grilled by U.S. senators in Washington. A year on, Facebook and Google being questioned by Congress no longer counts as news, and #MeToo has blown through the whole technology and investment world like a storm.

Anderson said TED can no longer, and should no longer, simply tell the story of technology the way it once did — business models, high growth, how the money is made. "TED needs to bring deeper discussion."

The first change came in 2017. Two days into that year's conference, three speakers had already named Trump. The head of the ACLU, the well-known American civil rights organization, in a highly inventive talk, called Trump a tyrant outright. But more than one attendee complained to me that they came to TED precisely to get away from the things on the evening news. By the point in the conference when attendees take the stage to argue back, someone had accused TED directly of encouraging disrespect toward the President of the United States. Whoever the president is, the point is that he is the president.

Last year's talks avoided Trump altogether — or more precisely, largely avoided every heated political subject. The most important talk of the opening day was a pair of discussions on whether the future looks optimistic or pessimistic.

After two experiments, TED has begun to face politicized subjects head-on and to give both sides a hearing.

Division, of course, does not disappear because of a few talks. Cadwalladr told me that even with the whole hall applauding she could see two people in the front row rolling their eyes; "screw it" was the thought going through her head. A Silicon Valley investor told me afterward: "Her talk was powerful, but she definitely got some of the numbers wrong."

And although Cadwalladr's and Dorsey's talks came from the two opposing sides, neither brought a newer solution. Cadwalladr's answer, broadly, is stricter laws from government, and social networks stepping in with more human staff the way traditional media do, to make sure hate speech does not spread unchecked.

Dorsey, for his part, walked calmly through his engineer's line of analysis throughout, without a flicker of emotion or expression.

When Twitter was designed 13 years ago, it raised user activity by encouraging retweet counts and follower counts. But reasoned argument has never spread the way provocation does, and as the internet grew from a small circle into the place where all of humanity spends its days, hatred and attacks became what that mechanism produces most.

Dorsey's answer has two parts:

• Use new technology to solve a technology problem.

Specifically: use machine learning to find rule-breaking speech and delete it after a human confirms the call. So far 38% of rule-breaking speech is handled this way. Twitter also deleted millions of bot accounts last year. More detailed figures were published on Twitter's official blog at the same time.

1. Redesign Twitter to encourage meaningful conversation

"One big problem right now is that it's hard for people to learn anything from social networks. Some people can — they have a very rich social circle, but it takes a long time to build." Dorsey said a social network designed 13 years ago doesn't fit today's world well. Twitter has commissioned a third-party organization, working with the MIT Media Lab, to measure what counts as a healthy, meaningful conversation across four dimensions: whether the two sides' exchange overlaps at all; whether the two sides are arguing from the same facts (not necessarily true ones); whether people are exposed to different views; and whether the exchange is open and civil.

At the end, Anderson offered a comparison: "Right now we're on a giant ship called the Twittanic. Captain Jack always listens to what we say, and that's great. But we're already shouting, 'Jack! There's an iceberg ahead, turn now!' When are you going to turn the wheel?"

Jack Dorsey's answer was: "Speed doesn't solve the problem. What we need is a framework that can scale and can hold up under adjustment."

The audience was not very satisfied. Silicon Valley angel investor Chris Sacca, sitting in the hall, tweeted a question: "Would you be willing to significantly cut active user numbers and engagement, the two things Wall Street uses to value your company, in order to 'improve the health of the conversation'?"

Dorsey did not answer on the spot. But next to Google and Facebook, who send only their lawyers and their successors on stage, Dorsey earned applause simply by sitting there.

If a few talks could solve the problem, the world would not look the way it does today. Luckily First Aid Kit arrived just in time and, over three songs, delivered exactly what the band's name promises.

Beyond the questions with no answer, TED this year had, as usual, a hundred-odd people talking about less divisive progress. The CEO of Rocket Lab, the biggest of the small-rocket companies, talked about his plan to democratize satellites; a zoologist tried to package the adorable fishing cat as the flagship animal for protecting mangrove ecosystems; Joseph Gordon-Levitt will appear as the founder of HITRECORD, and nobody knows what he will say.

There is also all-around explorer Victor Vescovo, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear, and the head of engineering at Google ATAP; several authors with new books out, including New York Times columnist David Brooks and Janelle Shane, the scientist who writes jokes with artificial intelligence; and independent directors — one who spent ten years tracing the 1953 coup in Iran, another who makes films about scientists. The full list is here. We'll be filing more reports from the conference over the next few days.

Cover image: the TED2019 conference, via TED