Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, has revealed that she receives 80 per cent of all abuse flagged within the corporation.
Spring, 27, hosts the BBC Sounds podcast Marianna in Conspiracyland and appeared in a Panorama documentary about the rise in hate speech on Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover earlier this year, titled “Elon Musk’s Twitter Storm”.
In a recent Times profile, it was stated that the BBC has software that marks messages containing physical threats, cyberbullying, violent language, negative sentiment and doxxing (releasing personal information such as address or phone number).
Of 14,488 pieces of correspondence that were automatically marked for review and further escalation, 11,771 were directed at Spring.
Speaking about this discovery, the journalist said that she was “quite relieved” in some ways, as it validated her concerns about the amount of harmful messages she was receiving.
“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,’” Spring told the publication.
After the Panorama documentary on Musk’s Twitter aired in March, the billionaire CEO responded with a sarcastic tweet that read: “Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise into a place that has… trolls.”
Later in the Times interview, published on Sunday (6 August), Spring explained that after Musk’s tweet about the programme, the abuse directed towards her spiked.
“It just felt really Wild West,” Spring said. “A committed bunch of followers see that as a kind of green light to come and bombard you with hate.”
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Marianna Spring— (Getty Images)
After joining the BBC as part of Newsnight in 2019, the reporter moved on to specialise in online disinformation the following year. The emergence of her role at the same time as the start of the Covid pandemic and the spread of related conspiracy theories was coincidental, but there have been some who saw this role as evidence of prior knowledge of the global crisis.
“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 stated.
“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.”
The Independent has reached out to the BBC for comment.
