James Ball – writer, author and broadcaster

James Ball is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author, fellow of the think-tank Demos, and the political editor of The New European.

He has worked as the global editor of TBIJ, a special correspondent at BuzzFeed UK and special projects editor at The Guardian, where he played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, as well as the offshore leaks, HSBC Files, Reading the Riots and Keep it in the Ground projects. At WikiLeaks he was closely involved in Cablegate – the publication of 250,000 classified US embassy cables in 2010 – as well as working on two documentaries based on the Iraq War Logs.

James is the author of multiple books, including "Post-Truth and "The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet”. His most recent book, “The Other Pandemic: How Qanon Contaminated The World” was published by Bloomsbury in July 2023.

Is anyone out there?

Dead Internet Theory says that you’re the only human left online. It started out as a conspiratorial joke, but it is edging ever closer to reality (Prospect Magazine, Nov 2024)

‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline

One minute you’re doing the downward dog, the next you’re listening to conspiracy theories about Covid or the new world order. How did the desire to look after yourself become so toxic? (The Guardian, 2023)

Roger Waters: I’m on a Ukrainian ‘Kill List’

In an explosive, wide-ranging interview, the Pink Floyd co-founder discusses his controversial views on Ukraine — and Russia, and Wikileaks, and Israel, and so much more. (Rolling Stone, 2022)

TikTok intifada: the role of new media in old conflicts

(Spectator, 2021)

"[A] vivid analysis of how the business models and incentives currently prevailing in digital media render decent discourse all but inaudible"– on Post-Truth

Kazuo Ishiguro

“A timely and important book by one of the smartest of the new generation of journalists and thinkers.” – on Post-Truth

Alan Rusbridger

“A crisp, highly informative introduction to what ails the information industry and what can be done about it … Ball’s analysis of where the media have gone wrong is thorough and courageously even-handed.” – on Post-Truth

The Times

"A fascinating exposé of the world behind your screen. Timely, often disturbing, and so important" – on The System

Caroline Criado Perez

"Nimble and persuasive … Ball chronicles [how] the relentless commercial tracking of life online created an opening for more alarming intrusions" – on The System

The New York Times

"…could not be more timely. Ball clearly loves this technology he writes about, has empathy for its self-styled guardians and would-be revolutionaries, and fears it too. He knows, as well as any of us, how rotten it’s become and how much worse it could become." – on The System

Cory Doctorow

"An insightful book about the conspiracy movement compares it persuasively to a self-replicating disease . A disturbing study of the origins and resilience of an exceptionally versatile and pernicious network of paranoid digital malcontents" – on The Other Pandemic

Rafael Behr, The Guardian

"A worthwhile, pacy and well-written book. It is an important one, too. We need to understand why people are hoodwinked by and have faith in conspiracy theories because it is happening with increasing frequency." – on The Other Pandemic

The New Scientist

"Ball is a tech-savvy writer who worked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks before it became a Moscow data dump. In The Other Pandemic, he tells the reader how an essentially adolescent male online culture of the early 2000s morphed into the Hydra-headed conspiracy theories of the 2020s."

David Aaronovitch, Financial Times