Artificial intelligence is at the heart of online toxicity, Grand Committee hears

"Ben Scott, a Stanford fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society and a former advisor to Hillary Clinton, said that it wasn’t until the tech giants got hooked on machine learning that concerns about their polarizing effect and impact on democracy really took off.

“It’s not just the ads that get targeted. Everything gets targeted. The entire communications environment in which we live is now tailored by machine intelligence to hold our attention,” he said.

“The more time people spend on the platform, the more ads they see and the more money they make. It’s a beautiful business model, and it works.”"