Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr on her investigation into the firm at the centre of a data breach that shamed Facebook and exposed foul play in the EU referendum campaign and US presidential election
Earlier this year, The Observer and The Guardian broke the story that became the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It was the result of a year-long investigation in which Carole Cadwalladr worked with ex-employee turned whistleblower Christopher Wylie to reveal how the data analytics firm that was behind Trump’s 2016 campaign and played a role in Brexit, had used the data harvested from 87 million Facebook users without their consent.
Cadwalladr’s reporting led to the downfall of Cambridge Analytica and a public apology from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was forced to testify before congress. Facebook has since lost $120 billion from its share price. She won the British Journalism Awards’ Technology Journalism Award in December 2017 and the Orwell Prize for political journalism in June this year for her work “on the impact of big data on the EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election”.