# Transcript: Who Owns the Truth?

**Date:** March 12, 2026 · 10:00 PM  
**Session:** [Who Owns the Truth?](/sessions/2026-03-12/pp1162678-who-owns-the-truth)

## Summary

A fireside chat between journalist Tara Palmeri and CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed exploring how algorithms have fundamentally reshaped truth, journalism, and public discourse. The conversation covered how social media platforms prioritize engagement over accuracy, the decline of institutional journalism, and the rise of algorithmic manipulation by bad actors, while arguing for transparency and democratic oversight of the algorithms that now mediate our understanding of reality.

## Topics

`algorithmic manipulation` · `independent journalism` · `platform accountability` · `misinformation` · `digital hate` · `media disruption` · `content moderation` · `algorithmic transparency`

## Key Takeaways

1. The algorithm decides what people see regardless of journalistic rigor — complex investigative stories get buried while simple emotional reactions go viral, fundamentally undermining quality journalism.
2. Bad actors deliberately weaponize engagement mechanics: neo-Nazi playbooks and figures like Andrew Tate exploit the fact that hate and controversy generate visibility, which leads to normalization and shifts the Overton window.
3. Platform owners hold unchecked power over reality — Mark Zuckerberg could dial Facebook's negativity setting up or down for 350 million Americans with a single decision, with no transparency or accountability.
4. Building direct trust with audiences is the only viable survival strategy for journalists in an algorithm-dominated landscape — institutional credibility alone is no longer sufficient.
5. TikTok's algorithm targets vulnerable users: accounts posing as 13-year-old girls received self-harm content within 2.6 minutes, and accounts suggesting vulnerability got 12 times more harmful content.

## Full Transcript

Welcome to day one at South by Southwest. So we're going into a really existential conversation about who owns the truth and knowledge. We're being driven and almost in some ways controlled by the algorithm, something that Imran Ahmed has been working on deeply every single day to give us more autonomy over what we see and to make sure that this practice is staying in check. And yet, as a journalist, I am building an independent media company working within the constraints of what we have to deal with right now.

Imran Ahmed shared his origin story: working in UK Parliament, witnessing the rise of anti-Semitic rhetoric on the left, and the Brexit referendum where conspiracy theories about the EU importing Muslims and Black people to destroy the white race proliferated on social media. A far-right party called Britain First gained a million Facebook likes by posting videos of them invading mosques. Two weeks before the EU referendum, Thomas Mair shot and stabbed MP Jo Cox while screaming 'Britain first, death to traitors' — the hashtag being used for the Great Replacement Theory on social media.

That day was a profound realization: every conventional institution — Parliament, the government, the BBC, journalism — had missed something fundamental. The primary place where we share information, establish social morals, negotiate our values, and even negotiate what we call facts, had shifted to online spaces. Bad actors had learned to weaponize these platforms more effectively than anyone else, and the mathematics of those platforms determined what information people saw in ways completely different from the real world. Ahmed spent three years studying platforms, then founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate to create political advocacy around changing how we regulate and legislate social media, and eventually AI.

Tara Palmeri described her journey from Jersey to becoming a journalist — first generation American, studying communications at American University. She grew up listening to her father, who was 'MAGA before MAGA was MAGA,' listening to Sean Hannity, while her mother had different political views. That household discourse drove her interest in understanding what motivates both sides. She graduated early to work on Obama's inauguration as a news assistant, running scripts for anchors like Christiane Amanpour and Jake Tapper.

Palmeri went on to cover Brexit from Brussels, spending time in Labour towns like Doncaster where she heard candid views about Polish immigrants — paralleling how Trump talked about Mexicans in America. She wasn't surprised when Brexit passed or when Trump won, having seen the populist movement firsthand. She became a White House correspondent for ABC News, CNN contributor, but grew disillusioned with corporate media, which she found was more about access and bookings than breaking news.

She eventually launched her independent media company, timing it with the resurgence of the Epstein story. She had spent years building sources on that story, traveling with survivor Virginia Giuffre, breaking stories that prosecutors used as witness testimony against Ghislaine Maxwell. The Epstein story became a case study in how algorithmic amplification can distort complex stories — threads from the Epstein files that aren't necessarily accurate get pushed by the algorithm, while careful, survivor-centered journalism struggles to break through.

On how journalism is changing: journalists no longer write the first draft — AI does, and they never will again. Home pages don't really matter anymore. Major websites realize they rely on algorithms. The only way to survive as a journalist is to build direct trust and relationship with your audience. People don't trust institutions, for good reason. There is now a burden on journalists to maintain audience trust, ensure information is factual and verified, and show the reporting process with full transparency — something that wasn't possible within institutional journalism.

But there are problems. An investigative journalist can work for a month on a story, break it on Substack, and within an hour, people with millions of followers angle it in a more emotive way, generating more outrage. They pick up the story and own it — the original journalist doesn't get the algorithmic payoff, the subscriptions, or the followers.

Ahmed identified three fundamental shifts in our information ecosystem: news has moved from shared audiences to individualized streams shaped by prior behavior; commentary arrives faster than verified reporting; and information is intermediated by algorithms that are commercial products designed to sell attention. These platforms are, in his words, 'fucking billboards' — they sell ad space, they don't care about content, they just want eyeballs to sell ads.

Palmeri described what it's like being beholden to an algorithm: 'It's a horrible feeling. You can decide what's true and what's newsworthy, but the algorithm decides what people actually see.' She gave examples: a complex investigative story about conflicts of interest in the Epstein case barely breaks through, while a simple reaction video walking out of a Trump rally at MSG got millions and millions of views with almost no editorial value. The algorithm favors emotion over complexity.

Ahmed explained how bad actors deliberately weaponize social media algorithms. Andrew Tate has said you need a third of your followers to absolutely hate you, because they give you the engagement that pushes you up the algorithm. Neo-Nazi playbooks found by CCDH outlined a strategy: say the wildest things possible, because when opponents engage with your content, all that matters is visibility. With visibility comes normalization. With normalization, the Overton window shifts. The fringes move to the mainstream — a precise description of the last ten years.

This creates a central dilemma for journalists: should they cover extremist candidates who are gaming the algorithm? Palmeri interviewed a Florida gubernatorial candidate who went from 2% to 23% in polls, running a campaign built on racist provocations and algorithmic manipulation, endorsed by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Covering him exposes his views but also creates algorithmic frequency that benefits him.

Ahmed made the case for algorithmic transparency. After January 6th, Mark Zuckerberg personally dialed back the Facebook algorithm's negativity setting — it was on 10, designed to maximize negative content because Facebook had found that negativity kept people on the platform longer. Zuckerberg could make reality seem better for 350 million Americans with a single decision. When people posted fewer negative comments and spent less time on the platform, they dialed it back up the next day. That's the unchecked power these platforms hold.

CCDH research demonstrated the harm: accounts set up as 13-year-old girls on TikTok received self-harm content within 2.6 minutes, eating disorder content within eight minutes, and harmful content every 39 seconds in the first half hour. Accounts with usernames suggesting vulnerability (like 'Susan lose weight') received 12 times as much self-harm content. The algorithms are designed to push on insecurities — even for adults, Instagram feeds aging-related insecurity content to women regardless of what they post.

Ahmed expressed his core advocacy position: there should be transparency in algorithms, transparency in how advertising shapes platform content, and democratic checks and balances on the power these platforms hold. An unaccountable, opaque algorithm should not decide what we know about the world. Palmeri agreed, noting that she feels this generation may be the last cohort of real journalists who care about truth, doing what amounts to public service in an ecosystem that doesn't reward rigorous journalism. Both speakers emphasized that mentorship is critical for the next generation of journalists — you cannot learn journalism in college, you need mentors who show you how to navigate the real work of finding truth.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6*

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