Social Justice in Tech: Damian Collins – Tech Crusader

Ahead of the Curves
Written By Matthew Gwyther

The third podcast in the series “Social Justice in Tech” in partnership with investment bank Stifel. In case you missed them, you can find the link to first and second podcasts here.

1 minute read 25 minutes of audio

Damian Collins, Chair of the Parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee is a born crusader. A blue-suited bruiser who has locked horns with Dominic Cummings, Jeremy Kyle and Aaron Banks, Collins is a vocal proponent of tighter online regulation. He believes social media companies should provide more information about who controls popular online groups and channels and should be made to step-in when “known lies” are spread.

Facebook in particular has come under his committee’s scrutiny amid concerns that Russia used the platform to influence the 2016 Brexit referendum and the many vagaries of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Last year, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to appear before the committee but refused. Collins responded by sending the Sergeant at Arms to the hotel room of a software executive and seizing relevant emails from the man’s laptop.

Currently on the stump fighting to retain his Folkstone constituency, in this interview with Jericho’s Matthew Gwyther, Collins reveals what he’d do to put the “digital gangsters” in their place.

To find out more about the Social Justice in Tech or other Jericho programmes, please get in touch. To subscribe to Jericho podcasts, click here. To work with Jericho as a client, please drop us a line.

Matthew Gwyther

Matthew edited Management Today for 17 years and during that time won the coveted  BSME Business Magazine Editor of the year on a record five occasions. During a fifteen year career as a freelance he wrote for the Sunday Times magazine, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Observer, GQ and was a contributing editor to Business magazine. He was PPA Business Feature Writer of the Year in 2001. He has also worked on two drama serials one for Channel 4 and one for the BBC.  Before becoming a journalist he had a brief and inauspicious spell as a civil servant working at the Medical Research Council in its London Secretariat.

Matthew is the main presenter on BBC Radio 4’s In Business programme.

Matthew is also the co-author of Exposure published by Penguin in London and New York in the Autumn of 2012. It is the story of whistleblower Michael Woodford, the “Southend samurai” who left school at 16 and worked his way up to the top post of the Japanese industrial conglomerate Olympus, only to discover that his board were involved in a two billion dollar fraud.

Contact: matthew.gwyther@jerichochambers.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-gwyther-8b043210/
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