Around five years ago, it struck me that I was losing the ability to engage with people who aren’t like-minded. The idea of discussing hot-button issues with my fellow Americans was starting to give me more heartburn than the times that I engaged with suspected extremists overseas. It was starting to leave me feeling more embittered and frustrated. And so just like that, I shifted my entire focus from global national security threats to trying to understand what was causing this push towards extreme polarization at home. As a former CIA officer and diplomat who spent years working on counterextremism issues, I started to fear that this was becoming a far greater threat to our democracy than any foreign adversary. And so I started digging in, and I started speaking out, which eventually led me to being hired at Facebook and ultimately brought me here today to continue warning you about how these platforms are manipulating and radicalizing so many of us and to talk about how to reclaim our public square. I was a foreign service officer in Kenya just a few years after the September 11 attacks, and I led what some call “hearts and minds” campaigns along the Somalia border. A big part of my job was to build trust with communities deemed the most susceptible to extremist messaging. I spent hours drinking tea with outspoken anti-Western clerics
yael eisenstat
— source ted.com | Yaël Eisenstat | Aug 2020