[13][14] In 2013 he was appointed data editor and from around June 2013 he worked on the Edward Snowden leaked documents on British and US intelligence organisations Government Communications Headquarters and National Security Agency.

In October 2013 it was announced that Ball had joined Guardian US, the American online section of the newspaper where he took up the newly created position of special projects editor.

[18][19] Ball was part of the team whose investigation into HSBC's money laundering was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils.

[20] Ball has been critical of the lack of fact-checking by journalists and news consumers, of using clickbait headlines and the culture of media being forced to rely on advertising revenue from 'clicks' and social media 'shares' and has said, "While we are demanding that the audience trust mainstream outlets and put us on a higher pedestal, our business models favour getting the clicks – if you'd had stopped and waited to verify and check, you'd have missed out on the traffic all-together and got no revenue, so we actually reward running this unchecked footage.

[30] Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, published 2017 by Biteback Publishing,[31] discusses how truth has become devalued in the current socio-political climate, how the political left and right tend to exist in an "eco-system of bullshit: the combination of campaigns, media, technologies and more that come together to spread questionable information",[32] and examines whether this is a phenomenon post- Brexit and the Trump campaign.

It has been described as "thorough and courageously even-handed" (The Times)[33] and expressing a "vivid analysis of how the business models and incentives currently prevailing in digital media render decent discourse all but inaudible" (Kazuo Ishiguro).

It looks at members of the British establishment and those in positions of influence, and the culture of lying and pretence in place of competency and real skill.