Carole Cadwalladr Keynote Speaker

Carole Cadwalladr is an award winning journalist, podcaster and media entrepreneur.

She wrote for the Guardian and was a feature writer for the Observer for twenty years.  She previously worked at The Daily Telegraph, and was nominated for numerous Press Awards.

She is now an independent writer and among her projects,  she writes a newsletter for SubStack ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ – with more than 65,000 subscribers.   She is also a co-founder and regular contributor to ‘The Nerve’, a ‘fearless’, female-founded media title set up by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists who believe in more truly independent journalism.

As an investigative journalist,  Carole was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting in 2019, receiving praise upon her investigation and coverage into Cambridge Analytica and its role in Brexit.   Her sheer dedication in exposing a nexus of corruption that resulted in Mark Zuckerberg being called before Congress, and exposing Cambridge Analytica’s role in mass-harvesting data to influence elections (Brexit and Trump), goes far beyond the question of Remain or Leave.

In 2019, Cadwalladr gave her first landmark TED talk, “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threats to democracy”, regarding her the links found between Facebook and the Brexit election.   This talk led to worldwide acclaim but it also sparked a three year long lawsuit which was won by Carole in June 2022.  This case was one of several brought against her and other leading journalists and they are thought to be motivated by powerful individuals and firms to tie up the press in expensive and time consuming legal defenses (these are called SLAPP suits). Her second notable TED Talk was in 2025 and is called ‘This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like’ – it has had close to 2 million views.

She was featured in the acclaimed Netflix documentary ‘The Great Hack‘ – this Bafta nominated film explored the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer.  In 2025, she co-hosted a BBC podcast ‘Stalked’ which was a top 5 podcast on BBC sounds.

Cadwalladr has won other awards, including the British Journalism Awards: Technology Journalism Award in December 2017 and The Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2018. She is the author of ‘The Family Tree’, published in 2006 and was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize.