inspiring women
CalmMoment.com 83I
n April of this year, Observer newspaper
journalist Carole Cadwalladr stood before
the biggest names in the technology industry
in Silicon Valley and told them that they had
broken democracy. In her TED Talk, which
has been viewed by 2.2m people to date, she
revealed how a company called Cambridge Analytica
had harvested the data of millions of Facebook
users and used it to influence voters in the 2016
US elections and in the UK’s EU referendum.
This compelling story has now been made into
a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, which
highlights in shocking detail how Cambridge
Analytica was able to gain access to personal
information about Facebook users and their friends
without their knowledge. This data was then used
to target undecided voters with Facebook ads
intended to sway their votes. It’s a wide-ranging,
complex story that raises real issues about who
has access to our personal information online –
and what they choose to do with that data.
That this story came to light at all is down to
Carole’s tenacity and research over two yearsin the face of intimidation and harassment. As a
result, she has received numerous awards for her
writing and earlier this year she was nominated
for a Pulitzer, one of the journalism industry’s most
prestigious awards.
While you might picture a stereotypical hard-
nosed reporter, in person Carole is warm, funny
and self-deprecating, and she still finds it strange
to be interviewed about her work. “I’ve done a tiny
bit of [being interviewed] and I find it bizarrely
uncomfortable and also I’m really shit at it as well,”
she laughs. “Unfortunately, I am quite an honest
and upfront kind of person, which is actually not
a good strategy for an interview.”
I meet her at the Hay Festival in Wales
(hay festival.com), one of the UK’s most prestigious
writing festivals, just a few weeks after her viral
TED Talk and she’s clearly still buzzing from the
experience. She says: “It was very terrifying.
I spent a lot of time fretting about it beforehand
[...] you know with journalism you always file at
the last minute and you write at the last minute.
And so with this, because I had to do certainIn the first of our inspiring women series, we talk to
award-winning investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr
Words: Sarah Orme“I knew it
was going to be
a big deal”
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