Holding tech giants to account and taking on Covid-19
Oxford academic Dr Jennifer Cassidy has represented Ireland at the UN and does book club with Samantha Power but in March, the coronavirus stopped her in her tracks. The digital diplomacy expert tells Donal Lynch about what she went through and explains w
DONS, Stephen Fry once observed, “tend to be so horribly gnarled”. He must not have met Dr Jennifer Cassidy, the brilliant and beautiful academic who has become one of the stars of Oxford University. Cassidy’s area is digital diplomacy, an apposite speciality in an era of Trump, Twitter and Russian election meddling. The Dublin woman has hosted Ted Talks, represented Ireland at the UN in New York and helped to monitor elections in Cambodia. And she did all this before turning 33.
That recent birthday was celebrated in lockdown, and for Cassidy the pandemic has been eventful and occasionally traumatic. Weeks before Covid-19 officially took hold in the UK, Cassidy contracted the coronavirus. Where she picked it up is “the million dollar question”, she says. She was involved in evacuating a student who came from Wuhan Province in China, but he was not believed to have passed it on. In February she had travelled to Italy with Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs but she had also used the tube in London. So its provenance remains a mystery.
“One of the symptoms I’m highlighting a lot, and it’s not the most attractive but it is real, is nausea and stomach issues. Everyone was mentioning a cough but these were the first things I noticed. They were very bad. Since then many people presented with these same issues. I had to sleep with a bin beside by my bed, it was that bad — that went on for a few days.”
Jennifer was particular worried because she’d had major surgery on her eye 18 months ago and felt that her immune system was still at a low ebb. She has a huge presence on social media and when she was laid low and failed to post updates to Twitter, some people became dramatically concerned. “A random Twitter follower called the police because I hadn’t tweeted in five days,” she says, adding that the man’s fears were assuaged. “Another person told me they had checked rip.ie.”
Her flatmate became ill as well but not as ill as Jennifer, who was hospitalised on March 22. “I was on a drip and had oxygen,” she says. “It was quite frightening at the time but three or four days after that I was back to normal.”
At that time there was no coordinated national response to Covid-19 in Britain and Jennifer was “horrified” at the now notorious press conference where Boris Johnson said the country would pursue a herd immunity strategy. “It was unbelievable how it was all handled. It was difficult even to get tested. I’m just very grateful I was able to get the care I needed.
Growing up in Dublin — she went to Wesley College — the plan was to become a violinist, but the upper echelons of excellence in that hypercompetitive field seemed unreachable.
“I never won an academic prize but I loved history and I studied politics for undergrad in Trinity,” she says. “I had a phenomenal lecturer (and former current affairs producer with RTE) called Jacqueline Hayden and it was a transformative class — she really changed my life.”
After graduating with a first, Cassidy applied to Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics and got into all three of them. She chose Oxford, where Professor
Louise Richardson had become vice chancellor, the first Irish person to hold the prestigious post. Oxford, she says, was a culture shock in some ways.
“Although there’s wealth in Ireland, I’d never seen wealth at that level. You did feel like you had to put on a face,” she recalls. The intimidation factor of being surrounded by so many bright peers was also real: “I didn’t speak once in the whole first term. I had huge impostor syndrome, even though I knew I earned my place.”
After Oxford, where she got another first, she represented Ireland as an attache at the UN in New York. The assembly is organised alphabetically, she tells me, and she was stuck in block with Israel and Iran.
“Seeing that political theatre play out made me feel privileged and lucky to experience that high level of politics at the beginning of my career. It made me see politicians as human beings. Some of them were condescending to me. There were many comments about my age and gender, and that’s why I wrote a book on gender and diplomacy.”
She was also involved in election monitoring in Cambodia and says that sexism was worse there: “In Cambodia there was open sexism, and one of the reasons I left diplomacy was that I didn’t want to dissent my whole life.”
She went back to Oxford when Ireland had the presidency of the European Council.
“At that time nobody was really using Twitter in diplomatic circles but I had a feeling it wouldn’t stay out of the general assembly hall forever,” she says. “For my PhD proposal I looked at whether social media could be used to interfere in elections online. Trump came along in the last year of my PhD and he basically proved my thesis.”
At Oxford she is now part of a digital diplomacy research group which does consultancy work with different ministries abroad. She says that some countries have now tacitly acknowledged the enormous role that tech giants have in shaping elections and have, in effect, begun to treat them as states.
“Ambassador Casper Klynge (of Denmark) made history when he was first ambassador ever to Silicon Valley,” she says. “The only other country which has followed suit in this is France.
“It should happen more in my opinion because there is no denying that these companies can shape diplomatic outcomes and elections more than states can.
“The problem is that they are not governed under international law. Whether they should be is a question I struggled with. Diplomatic bureaucracy is very slow-moving;
Twitter can change its algorithms twice a day — we don’t know whether this is the case. The law will never be able to keep up with the change of pace. There needs to be something to hold them to account, however.”
She says all of the moving around made close relationships difficult.
Her closest friend is a Saudi woman whose mother was the first female representative in the Saudi parliament. She says she had a romantic relationship that ended last year. “I ended it with him, I won’t go into it.”
She says that looking around at other women her age gives her pause. “My sister, for instance, is a year-anda-half older than me. We’re basically Irish twins. And she has a relationship, a second kid on the way, a house. And I don’t think I’ll ever own a house in my life on an academic salary. She runs her own business and I can’t even drive.”
There have been some small consolations to lockdown: she is involved in a virtual book club with former Barack Obama advisor Samantha Power — a particular thrill
for her. She continues to isolate at her rooms in Oxford.
“A few days ago I got quite low because I’d recovered and the reality hit,” she explains. “My entire family was in Ireland and I was so looking forward to seeing my god-daughter. My sister was pregnant and I had my mother freaking out quite a bit.
“I’ve tried to establish a routine but I’m the least domestic person you could meet. I’m just really looking forward to coming home and seeing everyone. That’s going to make my year.”
‘A random Twitter follower called the police because I hadn’t tweeted in five days’