Eighty per cent of online abuse received by BBC journalists is directed at one woman: the corporation’s 27-year-old disinformation correspondent. It’s the price of calling out conspiracy theorists, she tells Phoebe Luckhurst.
The BBC has a system for monitoring online abuse of its journalists. Software detects correspondence containing physical threats, cyberbullying, violent language, negative sentiment and doxxing (revealing someone’s personal information online) and flags these cases for “escalation” and further assessment. Between January 1 this year and late June there were 14,488 escalations. Of these, 11,771 — more than 80 per cent — were directed at one reporter: Marianna Spring, its 27-year-old disinformation and social media correspondent, who only joined the corporation four years ago.
“When I found that out, I was quite relieved,” Spring says. “To have someone be, like, ‘Oh, actually, you do receive this phenomenal level of abuse,’ it makes you think, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I’m not going mad.’” Her iPhone is full of screenshots of the worst examples. She reads me a few, which make for predictably grim listening. Scroll through her social media mentions, if you dare, and you’ll be immediately greeted with such slurs as “filthy dirty propagandist”, “liar”, “communist b****”, “leftist disgusting ugly dog” and “you’re a mindless slug of greed that I hope publicly gets thrown under a moving bus. Literally or figuratively”.
“I’ll often click [on a profile],” Spring says, “and you’ve got, like, a dad with his baby.” One incident of harassment earlier this year, which she can’t reveal details of, spilled offline into the physical, real world and has been referred to the police.
Depressingly, a successful woman in the media is probably used to a certain level of abuse. But few have become as frequent a target as Spring, especially since Laura Kuenssberg stepped down as political editor last year. In 2020 Spring was so prolific on BBC television she gave Amol Rajan a run for his money, appearing 280 times. She has presented Panorama documentaries, co-hosts the successful Americast podcast and has already made four podcast series, the latest of which, Marianna in Conspiracyland, has been played almost 1.5 million times. In 2021 she appeared in Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list. In March she was part of a Newsnight team that won a Royal Television Society award. Her first book, Among the Trolls, comes out next year.
The up-and-coming young thing, it’s no wonder the Beeb’s elder statesmen are keen to be seen with her: Jeremy Bowen, 63, appeared on a special bonus episode of Marianna in Conspiracyland, and her Americast co-host Justin Webb, 62, has sung her praises. It could be their way of showing recognition that Spring is working on a new front line in reporting, one that doesn’t have to involve bulletproof vests in a foreign country.
Spring’s job involves immersing herself in the social media cesspit, and facing down people who believe in vast, opaque, state-sponsored conspiracies — people who feel let down by politicians and the media, who believe that events such as the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing did not happen, and that the US government is responsible for 9/11. People who don’t necessarily care for it much when the BBC says they are mistaken.
After a Panorama episode in which Spring suggested hate and disinformation had proliferated on Twitter after the site’s takeover by Elon Musk last year, the billionaire sarcastically tweeted: “Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise into a place that has … trolls.” His reaction whipped up his followers into a frenzy. “It just felt really Wild West,” Spring says. “A committed bunch of followers see that as a kind of green light to come and bombard you with hate.”
For obvious reasons, Spring is reluctant to provide too many details on her background, but she is hardly a diversity hire. Born in 1996, she grew up with her parents and younger sister in the south London suburbs. While at her private school, she took part in a cub reporter scheme run by the local newspaper publisher Newsquest, then studied French and Russian at Oxford, where she wrote for one of its student newspapers. She applied but failed to get onto the BBC graduate scheme, but while on work experience at The Guardian, a reporter suggested she contact correspondents at the BBC whom she admired. “I emailed the stars I loved, like Emily Maitlis, Fiona Bruce, Mishal Husain, and Emily replied to me. I sent some links to some reporting I’d done, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come in and meet our deputy editor? We sometimes have shifts going at Newsnight.’ And that’s how I started at the BBC.”
That was 2019. A year later she was appointed disinformation and social media correspondent. It proved to be impeccable timing. As Covid colonised the planet and our world became concentrated online, overnight Spring’s beat became a vital one. “The conspiracy theorists love to say that [the BBC] created my role because they knew Covid was coming. I did not know Covid was coming,” Spring says. “It was a moment of huge uncertainty, people relying on social media a lot, looking for answers. I think that loss of agency and purpose explains a lot of it.” But as time went on “the conspiracy element of it started to become much more extreme. And that’s when you started to get the whole, ‘Covid is a hoax, it’s caused by 5G’ — the stuff that went beyond legitimate concerns.”
Over the past three years these extreme viewpoints have jumped from the fringes of the internet to the mainstream, and are regularly aired on outlets including GB News. They have remained even as Covid fades away.
Marianna in Conspiracyland, a ten-part podcast that launched in June and has been a hit with younger listeners, explores the post-pandemic conspiracy movement, focusing on Totnes in Devon, where a prevailing hippy anti-establishment philosophy has morphed into something less grounded in actuality. “I think certain communities in the southwest have been very open to alternative lifestyles,” Spring says carefully.
A conspiracy “theory” is possibly too grand a way to describe the swirling collection of ideas that feature in the podcast, which includes anti-vaccine rhetoric, fears about surveillance and a “digital cashless reset” (governments and banks are plotting to control access to your money), but it’s an absorbing if disorientating listen. Spring applies particular scrutiny to a free newspaper called The Light, which prints 100,000 copies a month, has established links to the far right and has directed readers to the work of Eustace Mullins, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who died in 2010. In a glossary of “news speak” that appeared in a recent issue it described democracy as “an illusion that you have a say in your slavery” and defined the BBC as the “Ministry of Truth”.
Spring meets The Light’s editor, Darren Nesbit, in one episode, and their conversation is mostly civil if frustrating. But days after they meet a poem appeared on Smith’s Facebook page, alongside a picture of Spring: “Her name is Marianna Spring/ Shilling for cash is her thing/ In disinformation she finds inspiration/ Her eyes light up and go kerching”.
In another memorable encounter she speaks to Jason Liosatos, a Totnes-based artist, about antisemitic remarks he made online. He denies they’re antisemitic. What would constitute antisemitism, Spring asks him. “Get a big knife and stab someone who’s Jewish or Israeli, going, ‘I hate Jews and Israelis, I hate Jews and Israelis.’ That would be anti-Jewish and anti-Israel.” He makes a stabbing motion with his hands. A rather stunned Spring notes: “I mean, that would be murder.”
Spring is now frequently contacted by people whose family members have fallen down the rabbit hole. “Dozens and dozens of messages, every single day,” she says. “Yesterday I had an email from somebody saying Conspiracyland really resonated with them because they’re divorcing their partner of two decades over this stuff.
“There are huge misconceptions about the kinds of people who believe conspiracy theories. This image of people as stupid and crazy is not the case. I often find people are very switched on, hyper-curious and engaged and deeply distrustful. Often they’ve been really let down by people in authority or power and then turn to social media that starts to play on that distrust.”
How do you begin to reason with people entrenched in a warped world view, stuck down the rabbit hole? “You end up having these topsy-turvy conversations.” She points at the sofa we’re sitting on. “I might love the cream sofa, you might hate the cream sofa, but we agree there’s a cream sofa and we’re sitting on it. If you don’t agree there’s a cream sofa, it’s really hard to have a conversation.” For this reason she tries to focus on why they believe what they believe, rather than what. “If you start to get into that too much you just end up going round and round and round.”
The BBC’s response to this grave new world of misinformation is BBC Verify. A team of roughly 60 journalists, including the BBC analysis editor Ros Atkins, it fact-checks stories and verifies video and images. It’s designed to be a bulwark against fake news and AI-generated content, while also providing transparency about how BBC journalists work.
But who decides what to “verify”? With the assumption in some circles that BBC is staffed by “lefties”, would BBC Verify take on exaggerated claims about, say, global warming as keenly as they would QAnon? Some critics of Americast claim it is biased against Donald Trump and right-leaning voters — though Spring can point to an episode in which Jon Ronson and Gabriel Gatehouse focused on left-wing conspiracies. “It doesn’t matter whether the story is about right wing or left wing,” Spring says. “It’s about investigating the topics that are causing the most serious harm and that are having the greatest reach in terms of disinformation and hate.”
The BBC is hardly immune to getting things wrong. Last month BBC News was forced to backtrack and later apologise after the business editor Simon Jack reported that Nigel Farage’s Coutts account had been closed due to insufficient funds. It later materialised the bank just didn’t like him. The reporting of a 2014 raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home and the 2012 Newsnight investigation that falsely implicated Lord McAlpine have eroded trust in the brand. “Jimmy Savile is one of the main topics that comes up when I’m interviewing people,” Spring says. “I didn’t work at the BBC [then] — I was at school!”
According to a 2023 survey on UK news brands by YouGov, 44 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said the BBC was “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy”, making it the highest-scoring brand by this metric (although a relatively high 21 per cent expressed a level of distrust). According to 2022 analysis of Reuters Institute data by Press Gazette, however, the BBC experienced a 20 percentage point drop in trust between 2018 and 2022, from 75 per cent to 55 per cent.
Spring clearly has a Reithian belief in the BBC’s value, although she seems clear-headed enough — and young enough — to see what journalists can do better in this turbocharged digital era of fake news. “There’s this idea that, before social media, broadcasters were the people that tell you what’s going on from up on high and you watch the telly and you say, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’ Now everything is very much a flat hierarchy, and so we [as journalists] have to show empathy and we have to want to understand different perspectives.”
And if journalists can do better, could social media’s billionaires? “Pandora’s box is open,” Spring says bluntly. “Social media now is so intertwined with our lives that we can’t go back.”
For a 27-year-old who spends her life on social media, Spring shares very little about her life publicly — save for the fact she is a Spurs fan (“my most controversial opinion”). When she shared pictures of her 18-year-old family cat, even the cat got trolled. “Anything you share is fair game.” She has a private Instagram account, but on Twitter, where her account is public, “I think quite hard about blocking people, because I also think there’s something about blocking people that means they can be, like, ‘Oh, you’re not open to a conversation.’”
She insists the trolls won’t stop her. “There are loads of people who get awful online abuse. I don’t get racist abuse, I don’t get homophobic abuse. There are journalists all across the media who experience this.” She says she is “resilient”, though concedes it can feel overwhelming. But being online is, ultimately, her job — and where she gets her best stories.
It is the fuzziness between online and offline that most concerns her. An online threat is only “just” an online threat if it stays online. “I have to be aware of my physical safety in a way that I never was before. That is the thing I really don’t like.” Her family and friends must worry — and after spending 90 minutes with her, I’m a bit worried too. “I’ve a brilliant support system around me and they love what I do. I think part of my positive approach is that I really don’t want them to be worried about me at all.”
Back in the online world, among the trolls, Spring has reached a simple and depressing conclusion: “It’s really normal to really hate me”
Written by: Phoebe Luckhurst
© The Times of London
