Carole Cadwalladr


Carole Jane Cadwalladr is a British author, investigative journalist and features writer. She is a features writer for The Observer and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph. Cadwalladr rose to international prominence in 2018 when she exposed the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Cadwalladr was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, alongside The New York Times reporters, for her coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Early life

Cadwalladr was born in Taunton, Somerset educated at Radyr Comprehensive School, Cardiff, and Hertford College, Oxford.

Career

Cadwalladr's first novel, The Family Tree, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Author's Club First Novel Award, the Waverton Good Read Award, and the Wales Book of the Year. It was also a Daily Mail Book Club pick and was dramatised as a five-part serial on BBC Radio 4. In the US, it was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. The Family Tree was translated into several languages including Spanish, Italian, German, Czech, and Portuguese.
As a journalist, her work in the second decade of the twenty-first century has been about issues related to technology. She has for example, interviewed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
Starting in late 2016 The Observer published an extensive series of articles by Cadwalladr about what she called the "right-wing fake news ecosystem".
Anthony Barnett wrote in the blog of The New York Review of Books about Cadwalladr's articles in The Observer, which have reported malpractice by campaigners for Brexit, and the illicit funding of Vote Leave, in the 2016 EU membership referendum. She has also reported on alleged links between Nigel Farage, the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and the Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that has been investigated in the United States. With regard to the Trump presidential campaign allegation, although the full report remains unpublished, the Mueller investigation reported that it had not found evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election. Before Cambridge Analytica closed operations in 2018, the company took legal action against The Observer for the claims made in Cadwalladr's articles.
In April 2019 Cadwalladr gave a fifteen-minute long TED talk about the links between Facebook and Brexit, titled "Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy". According to Cadwalladr she delivered the talk directly to the people she described as "'the Gods of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey'. The founders of Facebook and Google – who were sponsoring the conference – and the co-founder of Twitter – who was speaking at it." She summarised her speech in an article in The Observer: "as things stood, I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken. And they had broken it." The speech was applauded. Some of the "tech giants" criticised complained about "factual inaccuracies", but when invited to specify them did not respond..
Arron Banks initiated a libel action against Cadwalladr on 12 July 2019 over her claims that he had had a "covert relationship" with and been offered money by the Russian government. Banks dropped two elements of his action, in January 2020.
Cadwalladr is a member of All The Citizens, a not-for-profit organization registered as a UK-based limited company. The organisation is made up of journalists, filmmakers, advertising creatives, data scientists, artists, students and lawyers, which intends to crowdfund individual projects and campaigns.

Journalism awards

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