A small but significant event has just occurred. This morning the legal case between Arron Banks and the journalist Carole Cadwalladr was due to start. The case came about because of Cadwalladr’s claim that Arron Banks – who was a founder of the Leave.EU campaign (the non-official Leave campaign) – was offered money by the Russians. Cadwalladr has been going around for years making these and other unfounded accusations in every forum and on every platform she can manage. It is not as though her campaign has been obscure. The Observer newspaper has supported her, and as her entirely unsubstantiated claims grew, she was shamefully awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism.
Carole Cadwalladr was the front and lead – or should that be (intelligence services) ‘led’ – presstitute in the Cambridge Analytica story. This, IMO, was a huge distractory exercise, aimed at Trump and Brexit. Read the latest Twitter threads from @carolecadwalla on Thread Reader App! Thread Reader Share this page! Carole Cadwalladr. Follow @carolecadwalla. Late giver-upper. Guardian & Observer writer. 284 added to My Authors. Add to My Authors Carole Cadwalladr. Posts about Carole Cadwalladr written by davidhencke. Journalists fiercely debated the power and influence of Facebook following a controversial decision – now revoked – to remove news coverage from Australia on its site in a bitter dispute with the Australian government.
Although she claimed to see Russian agents everywhere it was finally Banks who decided to sue Cadwalladr. She crowdfunded – posing as the underdog truth-teller against the big rich Russian agent – and then last night (having rinsed her supporters for cash till the last minute) she pulled out of the hearing. As Guido reports here she conceded that she had no evidence and could not go ahead with the case. She is now reportedly forced to pay a first down-payment of £62,000 in costs, with more to come.
Yes, Carole Cadwalladr has been tweeting. On Sunday evening, Cadwalladr decided to deviate from telling her half a million Twitter followers that the UK is in the palm of the Russians. On Twitter, she slings fireballs at her critics, who include powerful figures in politics, business, and Silicon Valley. She has a stubborn idea of justice, and will frequently reach out to writers, editors, or anyone else she believes has engaged with her or her work unfairly or used a sexist trope.
Perhaps it is necessary to say at this point that I have never met either Banks or Cadwalladr and have no special love for either of them. But what has just happened is something that should cause a certain ripple of consequences.
Firstly, it should be noted that the campaign of defamation which Cadwalladr has engaged in over recent years has been poisonous. I have read many of her unsourced, unsubstantiated claims with amazement that they were ever published. For years she has pumped these claims about Russian agents and Russian money throughout our body politic. Drivers pc-ware laptops & desktops. In the process she has not only attacked individuals, but every member of the British public who voted for Brexit in 2016.
Cadwalladr and her financial backers have for years pretended that the British public were misled into voting for Brexit. Instead of listening to the genuine concerns of their fellow citizens they engaged in a smear-campaign against us. They pretended there were not serious reasons to vote the way we did, but only vacuous, stupid people, led down the wrong road by agents of a foreign power. It was an outrageous claim, outrageously encouraged and tolerated by Cadwalladr’s colleagues and peers because she seemed to be confirming their own bigotries and prejudices.
She and her friends pumped poisonous toxins into post-2016 Britain, from a position of considerable privilege and with some serious financial backing of their own. Now, when Cadwalladr has to stand up just one of her claims in court it turns out – as some of us guessed all along – that she cannot. She never had the evidence to justify her attacks on Banks or the British public.
A decade ago Cadwalladr’s predecessor Johann Hari was forced to hand back the Orwell Prize for journalism after being found to be dishonest in his reporting. Perhaps this year Cadwalladr could do the decent thing and voluntarily hand back her award as well. Her behaviour has in fact been far more damaging to this country and the journalistic trade than Hari’s ever was. It is one thing if a newspaper wants to continue to publish the unsubstantiated claims of a conspiracy theorist. It is quite another that a distinguished award for journalism should continue to encourage such behaviour.
Update: Carole Cadwalladr has disputed the fairness and accuracy of this article as follows:
- She says she is continuing to defend the libel claim by Arron Banks. The hearing referred to was an interim hearing in the case.
- She is defending the claim on the basis not that the statements complained of by Mr Banks are true (she has dropped that defence) but on the basis that she reasonably believed it was in the public interest for her to have made them.
- The trial of the case will take place next year and it is only then that the outcome of the claim will be decided.
Journalist Carole Cadwalladr explores how social media platforms like Facebook exerted an unprecedented influence on voters in the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. She speaks during Session 1 of TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 15, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
The day after the Brexit referendum, British journalist (and recently announced Pulitzer Prize finalist) Carole Cadwalladr went to her home region of South Wales to investigate why so many voters had elected to leave the European Union.
Carole Cadwalladr Twitter Profile
She asked residents of the traditionally left-wing town of Ebbw Vale, a place newly rejuvenated by EU investment, why they had voted to leave. They talked about wanting to take back control — a Vote Leave campaign slogan — and being fed up with immigrants and refugees.
Cadwalladr was taken aback. “Walking around, I didn’t meet any immigrants or refugees,” she says. “I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town. When I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country. So I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn’t really understand where people were getting their information from.”
A reader from the area got in touch with her after her story ran, to explain that she had seen things on Facebook, which she described to Cadwalladr as “quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.” This was misinformation that Cadwalladr was familiar with — the lie that Turkey was going to join the EU, accompanied by the suggestion that its population of 76 million people would promptly emigrate to current member states.
Carole Cadwalladr Twitter Images
She describes trying to find evidence of this content on Facebook: “There’s no archive of ads that people see, or what had been pushed into their news feeds. No trace of anything … This entire referendum took place in darkness because it took place on Facebook.” And Mark Zuckerburg has refused multiple requests from the British parliament to come and answer questions about these ad campaigns and the data used to create them, she says.
“What I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum, and they took place on Facebook,” Cadwalladr says.
Pico usb devices driver. The amount of money you can spend on an election is limited by law in Britain, to prevent “buying” votes. It has been found that the Vote Leave campaign laundered £750,000 shortly before the referendum, which they spent on these online disinformation campaigns.
“This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for a hundred years, in a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged on just 1 percent of the electorate,” Cadwalladr says.
Cadwalladr embarked on a complex and painstaking investigation into the ad campaigns used in the referendum. After spending months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wylie, she found that a company called Cambridge Analytica “had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads, and it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.”
Despite legal threats from both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Cadwalladr and her colleagues went public with their findings, publishing them in the Observer.
“Facebook: you were on the wrong side of history in that,” Cadwalladr says. “And you are on the wrong side of history in this. In refusing to give us the answers that we need. Rdh driver download. And that is why I am here. To address you directly. The gods of Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too … We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology … What the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it.”
Cadwalladr offers a challenge to tech companies: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands, I don’t think it is. And so my question to you is: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.”
Carole Cadwalladr Twitter Facebook
And for everyone else, Cadwalladr has a call to action: “Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable. And we have to fight. And we have to win. And we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It’s up to us: you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control.”