In December 2019, Moonshot CVE Founder Vidhya Ramalingam gave a TEDx talk in London on how the internet can be used to find violent extremists and change their paths. From TEDx:

How does the daughter of Indian immigrants end up attending white nationalist rallies in Sweden? While advocating for migrant rights and working against far-right extremism, Vidhya Ramalingam didn’t see anyone talking to people in these movements to try and understand why they were there. So, she began to immerse herself in white nationalist environments and to build relationships both with people within the movements and with those who had decided to leave.

Through countless encounters and conversations, a pattern emerged: being made to feel accepted and understood is what gets people into hate movements – and this same feeling can be used to get people out. But what does this mean for the 21st century, where social media is allowing hate to flourish in entirely new ways?

Informed by her personal experience, Vidhya co-founded Moonshot CVE, using technology to identify people at risk of violent extremism and repurposing advertising technology to intervene and send out messages of help. By leveraging technology to scale deeply personalised and localised human interactions, Vidhya now has the evidence to prove that real change is possible.

Watch the video above or on YouTube. More images from TEDx are available on Flickr.