At SXSW, Chelsea Manning Has No Regrets—But Thinks Facebook Probably Should

Chelsea Manning sat down with Vogue’s Sally Singer at SXSW on Tuesday to talk about her newfound freedom, her feelings about technology, her political aspirations, and the future. Manning, who has filed to run for Senate in her home state of Maryland, expressed no regrets about the 2010 WikiLeaks “data dump” that landed her with a draconian (commuted) 35-year prison sentence, saying “I made a decision to do something and I made that decision and I’m owning that decision. When it comes to something like that it’s not about second-guessing it or regretting it.” (Among the more than 70,000 files Manning ferried to WikiLeaks was video footage taken during an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in which civilians were killed.)

Of more pressing interest to Manning, who is currently working on a book and a documentary based on her life, and who maintains a notably upbeat social media presence (“I wanted people to know: I’m not afraid of being a former prisoner. I’m not afraid of being a trans person. I’m not afraid of being who I am.”) was the current state of technology, meaning “the implications of it,” she told Vogue. “Technology is not unbiased, it is not neutral—whether it’s artificial intelligence, or your credit rating; whether your neighborhood is heavily policed, whatever biases that we as developers and we as humans have put into the software, that’s going to be the outcome.” Onstage in Austin, Manning further explained that “we as technologists and as developers, especially those of us that work on systems that affect millions of people—and yes I’m talking about the Twitter algorithms and Google algorithms—we need to be aware of the consequences of what we’re making.” Developers have a responsibility to be aware of the potential consequences of the tools they develop, Manning submits—they should also feel a responsibility to be aware of how their software could also be abused, as in the case of Facebook’s role in the recent American presidential election. “That’s going to be the norm unless we become more self-aware and more cognizant of the systems we build,” Manning said. “Because our systems are going to be exploited. Every piece of software can be misused. . . . Like doctors have a code of ethics, software developers should have a code of ethics.”

And they’re not the only ones. When asked about how she felt regarding the current situation in Washington, Manning said that our current moment has been decades in the making. “The political rhetoric and style of governance that we’ve been seeing is not an aberration,” said Manning, who also touched on the militarization of police and styles of policing during her talk. “It’s a conclusion of the systems we’ve built.”