This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermine Sheikh.

How to Survive the Broligarchy. That's the name of the new substack by our guest, award-winning investigative journalist Carol Codwoldader, a former reporter at The Guardian and

The Observer.

Carol Codwalader gained international recognition for her expose on the Cambridge Analytica

data scandal of 2018.

Thank you for staying with us for part two of this conversation.

And here we thought we'd just go back in time.

Talk about at the time what you discovered and ultimately, who was held accountable?

Well, that's a very good question, to which there is not a good answer. Basically, what happened

is it was the election Donald Trump 2016 I started this investigation that week into what we now understand is the fake we it was the fake news ecosystem was the words we used at the time it was the foot we began hearing this term fake news and these articles which

had been totally made up and had, you know, we discovered had spread across social media.

And what I did in that sort of one week after Trump got elected, I did this first deep dive

into understanding how these weren't just some individual articles, but there was actually an entire

network. And in that first article that I did, I first heard the name of this company called

Cambridge Analytica. And it was a data company and it had publicly said that it had worked

for the Brexit campaign and for the Trump campaign.

And it was a really bizarre and peculiar company because it wasn't just a data analytics

company. It actually had a 30-year history as a military contractor. It had worked for the

US government. It had worked for the UK government. It worked for non-NATO

countries around the world. And then it was using influence to try and persuade populations.

So it's called information operations or psychological warfare. It's so, for example, if there's a

village in Afghanistan and you have a choice, you either

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