Marianna Spring: I received 11,771 threats for tackling online conspiracy theories
Since the pandemic, most of us know someone who has gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole - to some extent. Whether they have concerns about 5G masts, fears that Covid vaccinations cause “turbo cancer”, that victims of wars are actually actors, or even a belief that the government can “control the clouds”, many strange and evidence-free ideas have taken hold.
But what drives people to believe that almost everything - from the worst attacks and wars to global health crises and climate change - is a hoax designed to kill us? Why have some people been more vulnerable to these ideas than others? And where does the vitriol with which these theories are shared on social media come from?
Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent is reporting from the frontlines of what she calls “Conspiracyland”, tracking down the trolls and their victims to reveal the harm that is being caused.
And the price she has paid for her truth-finding mission is receiving 11,771 death threats and abusive messages in the past year. She will be talking about her experiences at the Cambridge Festival, which is supported by the Cambridge Independent.
“I often get asked, why Marianna, why is that why do you keep doing this?” she says.
“I genuinely think that there’s something quite worrying going on in terms of the impact that social media is having on how our society works, and how we all work, and the harm that that can cause – even though it also comes with good bits. Unfortunately, I think the good bits are also at the moment accompanied by harm and so I feel very strongly about doing this.
“And I think that really helps me to deal with the hate and the trolls because it’s a job I love doing. I think it’s vital that we expose how this all works. I ended up seeing myself very much as a case study. It helps me to better understand how this works.”
The threats have been extreme, and one that did give Marianna pause was from a man who was camping in a tent outside the BBC who was later found to be in possession of a flick knife. Given the deaths of two serving MPs and the attack on author Salman Rushdie, how much have the threats affected her life?
“The thing I don’t like is the abuse that implies someone’s going to take action offline or harass me in some way,” she says.
“Most of the time you can compartmentalise this stuff that is happening on social media and to be honest, most of the time, it’s so extreme, you’re thinking, I actually am not a satanic paedophile who’s going to abduct a baby and run away and all this kind of weird stuff. It’s just so far from the truth that you can really separate it from who you are. Someone described it well to me recently as a bit like an out-of-body experience. Lots of people are talking about you but it’s not actually you. So they’re talking about some weird version of you that they’ve created that just is very far from actual you.”
But she does admit: “I have to think about my safety a lot more than I ever thought I would have to.”
And she is “very protective” about her family and friends to the extent that she couldn’t name them in the dedication page of her book.
“I’m so wary - even when I shared a picture of my cat on social media, she got trolled So it’s like anyone, anything, that I share is fair game. And you never quite know what on earth these people are going to come up with.”
However, she feels that harassment and death threats, particularly for women in public life, have been normalised.
”It’s really important that people acknowledge how sinister it is that in a democracy right now it’s basically accepted to some degree that, you know, people can harass or target a young female investigative reporter at her work or on her way into work.
“And there are people who supposedly believe in freedom of expression and care deeply about that to the extent where it triggers some of the hate. That worries me and I’m by no means the only person who experiences that. I also don’t receive racist hate or homophobic hate. But you think about what that means for MPs and politicians. You think about what that means for even doctors and nurses. You’ve experienced huge amounts of this and the average person who is targeted in this way and I think that’s really sinister for people’s ability to express their opinions. In my job, I don’t express any opinions at all. I’m just doing my report.”
Marianna has just published a book: Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, which is about her investigations into people who spread harmful mistruths on social media and their victims, which she will discuss at the Cambridge Festival. In is she visits Manchester Arena bombing survivors Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve, who received a serious brain injury and lost the use of her left arm and leg and now needs 24-hour care. Martin is paralysed from the waist down. And yet there are conspiracy theorists online who claim that the bombing never happened and that victims are “actors”.
One conspiracy theorist shared a video in which he tries to film Eve outside her home.
“I’m all for freedom of speech,” Martin explains to Marianna in her book, “but it crosses the line when you’re saying I’m an actor or I’ve not got a spinal cord injury or Eve’s not disabled, she’s not in a wheelchair.”
Martin is now suing the man for defamation.
Marianna says: “Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve were both left with life-changing injuries after the Manchester Arena bombing and I was totally bowled away by Martin’s courage in speaking out for him and himself and Eve about this. To be subject to someone denying the reality of it, suggesting that those injuries they had lived through and totally changed their lives never really happened, was just was so upsetting.”
She went to the conspiracy theorist’s doorstep to confront him with the truth about Martin and Eve and ask why he was saying the bombing was a hoax.
“He was someone who, when you watch his videos, or you see his content online, comes across as very sure of himself and very adamant that he’s going to stick to his guns and continue saying what he has to say. But actually, when I was there right in front of him and saying this has caused really serious harm to the survivors, it slightly burst that bubble a little bit. It was very much I think a lesson about how important it is to put these things out into the real world and have a conversation about them, because then you’re able to sort of demythologise people. They’re very different, often, to the online personas that they create.”
She also met Lisa, a woman who had lost a finger and received a facial scar during the bombing, who had been impacted by online theories that the bombing had been faked.
So what draws people into believing and spreading these kinds of conspiracy theories?
Marianna says: “Conspiracy theorists often have this motto: I do my own research. But the reality is we can’t all do masses of scientific research that’s really rigorous and stands up to scrutiny. And so we do have to trust to some extent in experts and expertise and people who know what they’re talking about.”
But she believes that a series of events that have shaken the public’s belief in government and authority, and have fed directly into people turning towards conspiracy theories. Not least of these was the Partygate scandal, which revealed that people working in government were ignoring lockdown rules at a time when the public was restricted from seeing family and friends, and even from saying goodbye to dying relatives. And the murder of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens revealed significant problems within the police, the recruitment of officers and investigations into officers suspected of crimes. Trust in the police plummeted.
“It’s almost like they were moments that confirmed to a lot of people what they’d suspected over perhaps a longer period of time, particularly with regard to Partygate,” she says. “While investigating conspiracy theory movements I was meeting people who would say ‘these people who were telling me to follow all of these rules, then appeared to be not following those rules’. And that has, very understandably, made them think, ‘Hang on a second. What’s going on here?’ And so, incidents like that absolutely bolster belief in conspiracy theories.
“There are very legitimate reasons why people don’t have trust in a lot of the sort of systems that exist. People have had bad experiences. They’ve been let down. They feel very frustrated. And that’s all totally understandable.
“But the problem is it leaves people more vulnerable to believing extreme conspiracy theories. They’re more vulnerable to being exploited by other people on social media in this way to being exposed to this kind of content. And actually, that doesn’t serve to help them at all; it very often leaves them isolated.”
Now she urges people to think carefully before accepting a theory they may have read or seen on social media and to watch out for the following red flags, the first being: do I want it to be true?
“I’d say all my top three bits of advice would be if you see something and immediately you think that you want it to be true, that it plays into your biases. Just stop for a second and assess it and think: do I know this is true or do I just want it to be true? Because I find that’s often the case, particularly at the moment with AI-generated content as well as so-called ‘secret recordings’ that are fake. It can really make you think, Oh, maybe this is something that I want to believe rather than actually being true.”
Another way to consider whether something is fake is to interrogate the source. “Where does this come from? Is it from someone that I can trust or has a track record of sharing useful correct information or is it someone that doesn’t have that reputation and perhaps I need to interrogate it a bit?” she suggests. “See if there’s a second source or a third source or a fourth source.
“And and then when it comes to explicitly conspiratorial content, there’s often a whole new language you learn: psyop, hoax, crisis actor. Looking for words like that which tend to be used by the conspiracy theory movement is quite a good way of saying, ‘Oh, hang on, let me interrogate this a bit further and see what’s actually going on here’.”
One thing that is “super high” on her agenda is AI-generated audio that “pretends to be often secret recordings, or someone who has been caught out saying something, but it actually turns out not to be true”.
This could be used more and more as elections near, she warns.
“I've seen since multiple examples of faked audio about Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker in Parliament. I've seen one of Keir Starmer, I've seen several Conservative politicians being targeted. It seems like something that is going to be really hard to navigate as the election approaches here in the UK. And I think it's really important that we keep exposing the examples where that does cause real-world harm so that people understand the impact that it has and also possibly how to spot it, which is very much that question of: Is this something I want to believe but I actually have no evidence that it really happened.”
Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland is published this month. Marianna Spring will be part of the discussion ‘Misinformation, statistics and lies’ (26 March, Cambridge Union Society) with Kamal Ahmed, former BBC economics editor and editor-in-chief of the News Movement, and statistician Prof David Spiegelhalter, University of Cambridge – one of more than 350 mostly free events at the Cambridge Festival. Visit festival.cam.ac.uk/ for booking details.
