Carole Cadwalladr Sounds the Alarm At TED.

Harvesting Children’s Data and Growing Political Crisis: ‘It’s a Coup’

Carole Cadwalladr, a seasoned journalist and well-known TED speaker, arrived at TED 2025 with a powerful, urgent, timely message — and she didn’t pull any punches.

Our Children: The First Casualties

“In years to come, allowing your child to be data-harvested from birth will be considered child abuse,” Cadwalladr declared from the TED stage on April 7, 2025. It wasn’t a throwaway line but a carefully calibrated warning, drawing from historical parallels that couldn’t be ignored.

“You know, social laws change. We don’t send children down coal mines anymore,” she continued, establishing the moral framework for her argument. What society once accepted — children working in dangerous mines for economic benefit — we now recognize as exploitation. Cadwalladr suggests we’re at a similar inflection point with children’s data.

“The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance,” she explained. “It harvests our data in order to sell stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism.”

This architecture doesn’t discriminate by age. From birth, our children are cataloged, tracked, and profiled by systems designed to maximize engagement and extract value. Their developing minds and identities are being shaped by algorithms optimized not for their well-being, but for corporate profit.

“Chat GPT has been trained on my IP, my labor, my personal data. And I did not consent,” she pointed out, highlighting how AI systems are being built using the creative output and personal information of millions without permission — including our children’s school assignments, creative expressions, and social interactions.

From Personal to Political: The Technology of Control

Cadwalladr’s warnings about children’s data quickly expanded to the broader political landscape. “It’s always the data. It’s the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley,” she said, drawing a direct line between the harvesting of children’s information and the manipulation of democratic processes.

She reminded the audience that the data practices that allow companies to profile children are the same ones that enable political manipulation. “When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting 87 million people’s Facebook data, people freaked out, rightly. This is chicken feed compared to that, but it is the blueprint.”

The blueprint has only been refined and expanded. What began with voter manipulation has evolved into something far more comprehensive. “You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the U.S Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence, it’s a hack. That data is now feeding AIs that are choosing who to attack and who to replace.”

Naming the Crisis: “It’s a Coup”

Then came her most provocative statement: “It’s a coup, and then you probably don’t want to hear that, and especially here, but we can’t fight it if we can’t see it, and we can’t see it if we don’t name it.”

Cadwalladr wasn’t being hyperbolic. She was naming a systematic power grab enabled by technology and executed through both commercial and political channels.

“The Russian and American presidents are speaking the same words. They are telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start.”

She coined a term for this new alignment of power: “brolligarchy” — the merging of global tech platforms with autocratic political forces. “There is an alignment of interests that runs from through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It’s the type of power that the world has never seen before.”

Her warning carried special urgency: “Coups are like concrete, when they stop moving, they set. It is already later than we think.”

Flashback: The Warning We Ignored Six Years Ago

This wasn’t the first time Cadwalladr had tried to alert us. Six years earlier, in April 2019, she stood on the TED stage in Vancouver and directly addressed “the gods of Silicon Valley” about their role in undermining democracy.

Fresh from exposing how Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87 million Facebook users to influence both Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election, Cadwalladr had warned: “This technology that you’ve invented has been amazing, and now it’s a crime scene.”

Her 2019 talk was unprecedented. She had called out Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jack Dorsey by name — with Dorsey scheduled to speak on the same stage the following day. She challenged them to address the crisis in liberal democracy that their platforms had enabled.

“It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not,” she had said then. “It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again.”

The price for her courage was steep. As she revealed in her 2025 talk: “The last time that I stood on this stage, it led to a three-year legal battle culminated in London’s High Court, in which it felt like I was on trial for my life because I was. My career, my reputation, my finances, even my home was on the line.”

That legal battle was recognized by 19 press freedom organizations as a “SLAP” (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) — using the law as a weapon to silence critics.

Yet she returned, despite the personal cost, because the danger had only grown.

The Fight Ahead: Digital Disobedience

“Privacy is power. And we have more of it than we think,” Cadwalladr assured the audience. Despite the grim assessment, she offered a path forward through what she calls “digital disobedience.”

“We have to learn how to digitally disobey. That can be as simple as the drop down box. Don’t accept the cookies, don’t give your real name. Download the signal, the encrypted messaging app.”

Individual actions matter, but Cadwalladr emphasized the need for collective resistance. “30,000 people rose up to support me,” she recalled. “They contributed almost a million pounds to a legal defense fund because they saw a bully trying to crush me, and they would not let it stand.”

This collective action offers a model for confronting the larger crisis. “We have to have each other’s backs right now, because we are the cavalry now.”

The Beautiful Internet We Deserve

What makes Cadwalladr’s message so vital for our work at the Sustainable Media Center is that it isn’t merely a warning — it’s also a vision. “There is a beautiful internet of the future, free from corporate capture and data tracking. We can build it,” she told the TED audience. “It is gonna take a movement, but we can learn from movements that have been before us.”

This vision of a better digital future — particularly for our children — is why her final challenge resonates so deeply: “We know who we are, and we know what we stand for. And my question to Silicon Valley is, do you?”

As Cadwalladr warns, “Coups are like concrete, when they stop moving, they set.” The surveillance infrastructure surrounding our children is still wet concrete — we can still reshape it before it hardens into permanence.

The time to act is now, while there’s still time to build the internet our children deserve, not the one surveillance capitalism is constructing for them. At the Sustainable Media Center, we hear Cadwalladr’s alarm bell ringing, and we’re working with partners to answer the call.