Thoughts on TED and Coleman Hughes

Coleman Hughes

What happened? A rough timeline of content releases

1. TED talk delivered live: April 2023

2. TED talk released on TED.com: July 2023

3. TED talk released on YouTube: 13 Aug 2023 .

What is the meat of the argument that TED suppressed this talk and did they really threaten to withhold it?

Coleman Hughes was frustrated that Chris Anderson wanted to release his TED talk along with a debate on colour blindness. Coleman asserted a debate on his position would dilute the impact of his TED talk. I think Coleman’s concern was credible but ultimately didn’t materialize. In fact, as Chris Anderson hoped the debate amplified awareness of the talk.

Did TED suppress or threaten not to release Coleman Hughes TED Talk? Based on my read of his FP article and Chris Anderson’s tweets it does not appear so. What is my rationale: 

1. April 2023: Some TED employees took issue with Coleman Hughes’ talk. Chris Anderson emailed Coleman Hughes to share the debate amongst TED staffers and CH agreed to talk to the TED team. In the end, only one TED team member took Coleman up on the offer to connect. In this email exchange, Chris Anderson shares there was pressure internally to not post Coleman Hughes talk. It’s not clear that Chris Anderson ever said they wouldn’t just that there was pressure to censure. From Chris Anderson’s twitter post: “So there was pressure from some on our team not to post it.We overrode that.”

2. TED asked if they could release the Coleman Hughes talk along with an additional debate to further the discussion on Colour Blindness, which Coleman Hughes agreed to and later pushed back on, so they released them separately. The decision to release a debate is what triggered Tim Urban to post a critique of the decision to produce companion debate and noted that both the debate and Coleman Hughes TED Talk had low viewing stats.

3. Important: the FP article states Coleman Hughes worried TED wouldn’t release his talk but it doesn’t state that TED ever explicitly stated they would can the talk.

4. After all this additional coverage Coleman Hughes talk is still has relatively low views (129,347 views), Sal Khans talk is at 1.1m. Why?

While it’s possible that TED didn’t promote this talk as much as it could have doesn’t appear that there was any active suppression. Many TED talks aren’t released for months after the event.

Here are the relevant excerpts from the FP article .

TLDR:

1. The talk happened.

2. It triggered debate. Was there a threat to withhold? Nothing explicit.

3. It was released on TED.com and later on YouTube.

4. Additional content was appended to dive deeper into the topic. 

I don’t believe CH had to do anything to get the talk released. However, his critque of the process did get its views up by sharing the story of the “debate” that ensued. As of today, it is at 125k views, whereas Salman Khans is at 1.1m

My fundamental question is, did Chris Anderson threaten that without further action by CH they wouldn’t publish because of internal pressure? Or was he transparent with Coleman Hughes that there was tension in the organization and further discussion would be helpful as the talk triggered strong reactions.

If Chris Anderson did threaten to not release the talk that would constitute a failure to honour the spirit of TED.

However, it seems that Chris Anderson transparently shared with CH the tensions that the talk ignited. If this is the case, and i I think that it is, Chris Anderson was reasonable and facilitated further exploration.