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Why do the Uber Files matter? It’s a question we’ve been getting a lot since we began publishing the investigation. While our reporting uncovered untold aspects of Uber’s aggressive rise into international markets, the company has acknowledged its past mistakes and says it’s turned a new leaf under new leadership.
Many of our reporters had similar questions when ICIJ and media partners first began digging into the leak.
“My initial impression … was, ‘Uh oh, these files are really old. How are we going to make something new of it?’” said chief reporter Sydney Freedberg. “But as I got into it, I said, ‘Holy Toledo, this stuff is really explosive.’”
In a new episode of the Meet the Investigators podcast, Sydney joins ICIJ’s Nicole Sadek and French reporter Damien Leloup from Le Monde to discuss the most explosive Uber Files findings, and why they’re relevant today.
Like other ICIJ investigations, not all of the secret activities uncovered in the Uber Files can be seen as breaking the law. But they do raise tough ethical and political questions about how multinational companies game the international system, subvert democratic processes, and use money, power and access not available to the rest of us to shape public policy toward monied interests.
“To me, what these documents reveal even more is the need to fix lobbying disclosure rules to make them fit for multinational companies like Uber,” Sydney says in the podcast. For Damien, the Uber Files also factor into current political fault lines around labor, technology and the future of his country.
“This investigation sort of put the finger on a key fracture in French society … And that happens to be a major ideological difference between the Renaissance Party, which is Emmanuel Macron’s party, and the left wing block.”
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