84 CalmMoment.comthings ahead of time, like submit drafts, in some
senses it felt like I was more organised than I am
normally. But at the same time, I managed to
displace my anxiety onto things like: what
should I wear?”
Before the Cambridge Analytica story came out,
Carole avoided public speaking and would turn
down opportunities because it made her too
nervous, but she’s started push herself to do it
more because she feels it’s important to get the
story out there. TED Talks are nerve-wracking
even for experienced public speakers. “You have
one shot, because they film it. You can’t retake it,”
Carole explains. “And then it’s online forever, so
you do really feel the pressure. And then, because
of it being very much in the heart of Silicon Valley- and I was really kind of sticking it to them –
I knew it was going to be a big deal.”
While Carole is now probably best known for
her research into Cambridge Analytica, she didn’t
start out as a tech reporter. In her twenties, she
worked as a travel writer before being accepted
onto The Telegraph newspaper’s graduate training
scheme. She quickly realised that the macho world
of news reporting wasn’t for her, so she moved on
to writing features, eventually ending up at
The Observer. “I always loved The Observer as a
paper and it was always the one I wanted to work
for... to be able to write across all bits of the paper.
[...] Until I managed to destroy that by becoming
a full-time dystopia correspondent!”
Over time, Carole began to write more
technology stories for a wider audience. Although
she was initially inspired by new technologies, she
began to feel troubled by the increasing power that
the tech companies had. “Right before the Trump
election, I just noticed a constellation of different
things, but particularly the way that Hillary
Clinton’s emails had been hacked and were being
weaponised. And I thought: if you can do that, you
can’t ever really have a free and fair election again
because this is technology disrupting politics.”
Carole looked online to see if anyone had already
written about the subject and was surprised to find
that no one had. She followed it up with stories
about fake news and Google searches, which led
her to a US academic called Jonathan Albright,
who was mapping the fake news ecosystem. He
was the first person to mention the name of
Cambridge Analytica to her.
While Carole’s story is now reaching a much
wider audience, for a long time it felt like a lonely
task. “For 18 months, it was like Cambridge
Analytica was my personal obsession. My friends
knew about it and there was sort of a small caucus
of people on the internet who followed the story,
but when we published the whole thing... now it’s
kind of famous! It was a real headspin that.”
She says that much of her time working on the
story has been very stressful, but the most difficult
time was in the run-up to the publication of her first
article using Cambridge Analytica whistleblower
Chris Wylie. “In the three months leading up to
that, I was just finding out all this stuff, and I was
acquiring all this documentation and... it was really
creepy, because it was about Steve Bannon on the
national security council. He was in the White
House; he was in the Pentagon. We knew that
Cambridge Analytica had got contracts with
The Pentagon and with the State Department.”
In that period, Carole was in possession of
material that no one else had and working with
anonymous sources, which was something she
hadn’t done before, and she worried about
protecting them: “It was just a really new
and uncomfortable world. And then the other
period when it was very dark and difficult wasliving
Having avoided public
speaking in the past,
Carole is now committed
to getting the story out
there however she can.Photograp
hy^ ChrisAthanasiou