When I decided to go to Davos this year, I didn’t have many ambitions other than to make my voice heard. I know that the World Economic Forum is a hotspot for the richest one per cent, the most powerful people on the planet, and corporate interests. The vast majority of us are not represented or even spared a thought in these spaces, and that’s why I felt it all the more necessary to attend, despite the exorbitant cost.
Each day, I would take the hour-long bus journey into Davos, through the picturesque Swiss Alps, feeling extremely out of place sitting alongside corporate folk and skiers, and having to remind myself why I was doing this.
For the past three years, I’ve been an online safety campaigner after losing my sister Aimee to online harms in 2022. Knowing that this year’s Davos would be championing the AI hype like never before, pandering to Big Tech’s pockets, I knew my story would be an outlier. But what I didn’t expect was how close I’d come to the belly of the beast, and the very tech CEOs responsible for the scale of online harms that we see today.
I was kindly invited to take part in the New York Times annual debate, arguing against the motion that “AI will succeed where humanity has failed”, as part of a team of four and in front of a jury of tech leaders. In my intervention, I spoke on the parallels between the story of Adam Raine, who was 16 when ChatGPT encouraged him to take his life, and my sister, who was 21 when she died after being on a pro-suicide forum responsible for at least 133 UK deaths.
I had hoped being open with CloudFlare’s CEO about Aimee’s story would evoke some sort of compassion. How wrong I was to expect humanity from a billionaire
The jury was made up of four people, and I only learned who they were a few days before the debate. When I found out that Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, was going to be on the jury, I immediately sent an erratic voice note to my parents. In 2025, I had reached out to a law firm to see whether legal action could be a way we could hold the actors who enabled the pro-suicide website to account. I learned that CloudFlare provides DDoS protection to the forum my sister was on. For non-tech folk like me, what this essentially means is that CloudFlare’s infrastructure is a vital piece of the internet jigsaw for this forum to be able to operate.
Before the debate, I decided to speak to Prince. I introduced myself as an online safety campaigner and told him what had happened to my sister, and asked whether he knew of CloudFlare’s involvement with this pro-suicide site. I had hoped being open with him about Aimee’s story would evoke some sort of compassion, maybe condolences, or even a follow-up meeting to discuss whether they would consider removing the site as a client. How wrong I was to expect humanity from a billionaire.
After denying CloudFlare’s involvement and getting defensive, Prince decided to use what all tech billionaires have over us – power. “Look, what I’m going to do is call my security and have them remove you,” he told me, not looking me in the eye. I walked away in order to prevent the situation from escalating, and burst into tears.
Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg being faced with bereaved families in the US Senate in 2024 and allegedly approving minors to engage with sexually explicit chatbots, Elon Musk making the ability to generate sexually explicit deepfakes a paid feature on X, or CloudFlare’s CEO threatening to call security on me after I told him about the loss of my sister, these actions speak to the fact that the tech elites that rule our digital world do not have the same priorities as we do. Expecting them to act on empathy, humanity or compassion is like expecting a private corporation to act in the interests of collective good.
This is what makes it so urgent that our politicians and regulators hold Big Tech companies to account – and not just with a slap on the wrist or a kindly worded request that they adhere to their responsibilities that legislation such as the Online Safety Act has proposed. So far, Ofcom’s approach has been timid, trumpeting hefty fines but rarely deploying them, and instead launching time-consuming investigations while harms continue.
Frustrated parents are growing impatient, with many calling for a social media ban for under-16s, including bereaved parents Esther Ghey and Ellen Roome. Meanwhile, the UK government is singing to Big Tech’s hymn sheet.
Ordinary people are on the frontlines picking up the pieces of social media companies’ greed; we’re lonelier than ever, battling an information crisis, and our country is increasingly polarised. But my mistake in confronting a tech billionaire was thinking we can appeal to the morality of those at the top of these companies. If we do not speak the language that they understand – money and power – they’ll ignore us.
The Nerve contacted CloudFlare ahead of publication and Prince was invited to comment. They did not respond.
Adele Walton is a journalist and online safety campaigner. She is the author of Logging Off: the Human Cost of our Digital World and co-founder of Logging Off Club