In English

Investigative tech journalist. Moderator. Speaker.

Svea Eckert is an investigative tech journalist based in Hamburg, Germany. For more than fifteen years she has reported for ARD, Germany's largest public broadcaster, and its regional station NDR, from ninety-second live pieces for the evening news to year-long documentary investigations. Her work covers artificial intelligence, cybercrime and digital violence, big tech and disinformation.

Her documentaries include The Power Machine on how autocrats and populists use Meta, featuring whistleblower Frances Haugen, Inside the Cyber Mafia, a year inside the networks of organised online crime from the call centres of Southeast Asia to the victims in Germany, and Fake Science, an international investigation into predatory publishers first presented at DEF CON in Las Vegas. Her reporting has won the German Journalism Award, the Helmut Schmidt Journalism Award, the Goethe Media Award and the DRK Media Award, among others.

In 2026 she is a Mercator Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, researching how newsrooms can report on AI between hype and doom. Her book Im Netz der Täter on digital violence, written with Till Krause, is published by Droemer Knaur in November 2026. She hosts three podcasts and has spoken at DEF CON, the Chaos Communication Congress, re:publica, the European Parliament and the European Broadcasting Union.