Inside s tor y: obtaining the exposé

Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who has been working on the story for over two years, explains the complexities and significance of her scoop

Where did you initially get the idea for this piece and did you realise the scope of it when you started research?

Just after Trump was elected, I stumbled across something very weird going on with Google results (if you typed ‘are jews’ into Google, you got the suggestion ‘are jews evil’, and a whole page of antiSemitic articles), and I came across an academic in America called Jonathan Albright who had just discovered that the fake news problem we’d started hearing about was actually a vast ecosystem. He was the first person to say the words ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Analytica’ to me.

It’s understood that throughout your investigation you had quite a bit of disbelief from editors that the story could be true. How difficult was it to handle?

I wouldn’t say disbelief. It’s a hugely complex story, but none of us could work out how to do it as news – it was just too complicated. Then my amazing colleagues on Observer

New Review stepped in and enabled me to get it out as a feature last May ( The Great

Brexit Robbery)… that was the article that was the precursor to everything else that’s followed and it’s down to them having the guts and fortitude to wrestle it into the paper.

How did you come into contact with Christopher Wylie? How many other sources do you need for a story like this?

I hunted him down! Another ex-employee told me ‘Find Christopher Wylie.’ So I did...

How intimidating does it feel to be central to unveiling a story like this, which reaches into governments and security services?

Very.

Were there any moments where you felt the story might never come out?

Yes! Most of last year... it took months and months and months longer than I thought. And it has been a long, hard and difficult slog.

What do you hope will be the outcome of the story?

I hope that everything changes. Silicon Valley cannot have the unaccountable power that it has. This needs to be the beginning of the end.