While organising an interview with Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first Social Media Investigations correspondent, I asked if I could meet her at home. It would be more intimate than meeting at the BBC’s offices, I said, more relaxed. But a communications manager called me on the phone. It’s a bit sensitive, she said. It’s not that Marianna doesn’t want me to go to her house, she explained, it’s just… the trolls.
In the first five months of 2023, the BBC received 14,488 messages abusive enough to be escalated by their system designed to detect hate; 11,771 of those, around 80%, were about Spring. Due to her reporting on conspiracy theories she’s regularly targeted with death threats and harassment, both on and offline. For a while, a man camped in a tent outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House shouting “disinformation agent” in her face as she left work. Which means, while I can say Spring welcomes me with a hug and invites me into her front room for a conversation that will span murder and Kate Middleton and teenage boys, I can’t describe the city she lives in, or who she lives with, or if she lives with anybody else at all, or give any personal details that might put her in danger.
“It’s quite a big deal for me this,” she says nervously, as we settle on her sofa. “I keep so private, because I know that the world I investigate has attracted this group of trolls who will stop at nothing to figure out literally everything about me and then use it in some way.” She once mentioned that her dad was a doctor, which led to strangers suggesting this connection is why she is invested in killing people with the Covid vaccine. Once she shared a picture online of her family’s 19-year-old cat and she was accused noisily of animal cruelty. “They also called her Chairman Miaow,” Spring adds, “which was actually quite funny.”
Spring grew up in south London. At eight years old she’d “make my poor little sister sit and watch BBC world news when we were on holiday. I remember my mum coming in and saying, ‘Why are you watching this, get outside!’” After graduating from Oxford, she sent Emily Maitlis some examples of her journalism and got a job on Newsnight. Later, as the 2020 American election approached, the BBC asked her to report on the sociological aspects of social media and its impact on democracy. Spring was 23. She’d been obsessed with news since 9/11 and, as she got older, became obsessed further with the conspiracy theories that surrounded it. When the pandemic began, reporting the real-world consequences of disinformation became even more necessary. A 2023 survey found that around a third of the public believe various conspiracy theories, such as “Covid-19 was a hoax” and “15-minute cities are an attempt by governments to restrict people’s personal freedom and keep them under surveillance.” What used to be seen as paranoia, now blurs into beliefs held by many millions.
For a typical investigation, Spring will create a series of fake online profiles to see what the algorithms deliver. “I think I currently have 24 phones. Every time I swing by the desk of the poor bloke who looks after the retired iPhones at the BBC he’s wary because he thinks I must be selling them on.”
Today her work, which includes Panorama investigations and a BBC podcast Why Do You Hate Me? (the new US series of which investigates the online phenomena that could influence the election), sees her dig into the darkest corners of the internet, a place she calls “Conspiracyland”. Here she meets the people who live there, like those who claim terrorist attacks have been staged. Sometimes she meets her own trolls, too. The harassment she receives “is almost always about me being a young woman, attempting to undermine my credibility, using gendered slurs. You know, I’m everything from a silly little girl who couldn’t possibly know what’s going on to an evil whore who’s eating babies.” She never would have guessed her own harassment would be such a large part of the story, “but I think it’s important to talk about it. I think a huge number of women in public life are subject to this and obviously it’s way worse if you also get racist abuse and other forms of hate. And it normalises it if we don’t talk about it.”
As well as using her own experiences as an example of how online hate metastasises, her work has become a vital tool for those seeking to understand the conspiracy theories that continue to shape our world and how, when the people in power abuse that power, they fuel anxieties that prompt these theories. Democracy relies on a shared reality, Spring says. “So, we’re sitting on the sofa, right? And I might love this sofa and you might hate this sofa, but if we don’t agree the sofa is here, we can’t have a conversation. That’s the thing we should be worried about – the conversation is not about the sofa, the conversation has to begin with, ‘Why don’t you think the sofa is here?’”
She’s had many such conversations with theoretical sofa deniers, like those she calls the “true believers”. Last year, she met a woman called Natalie in Totnes who believes that governments and global organisations are trying to control us through things like attempts to limit pollution. While telling her this, Spring says, Natalie suddenly started crying. “She said she felt so isolated from people in her life. It was the same in America, talking to a woman who believed Trump’s assassination was staged. She started crying, too. It’s stressful not being able to trust anything any more, to truly believe these plots are happening, that everyone is out to murder and kill people in your life. You can understand why that would make you feel untethered from the world around you.”
What might surprise readers, she says, is that most of the conspiracy theorists she’s met aren’t bad people. She sits with them at home, like we’re doing now. They have tea together. Biscuits. “Often they arrive at these places from really legitimate points. They really care, they’re very worried about other human beings who are being hurt, or powerful people doing bad stuff. But they are themselves being exploited by other people on social media. They’re being pushed that kind of content and others benefit from their attention.”
Other memorable interviewees include people whose lives have been overturned by these conspiracy theorists. In February, Martin Hibbert, a survivor of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, won his bid to sue Richard D Hall, who claimed nobody died in the attack, and that Hibbert and his daughter (both of whom were left with severe disabilities) were not there. “People like Martin are so brave. He’s willing to stand up against the conspiracy theories and abuse that he and his daughter have been subject to after living through something most people can’t even imagine. But also what he’s doing could set a really important precedent for how this stuff is dealt with.”
This is the most important part of Spring’s job, she thinks: giving a voice to people, like the family of 13-year-old Olly Stephens. In 2021, two schoolboys who ambushed him after a dispute online were convicted of his murder. Spring investigated the role social media played and exposed how teenagers’ Instagram, YouTube and Facebook accounts routinely recommend violent videos and knives for sale. People like Stephens’s parents “often feel as though the social media companies are not listening to what they have to say and the politicians don’t get it, and so if I can be the person that investigates it, that is the greatest privilege.”
Spring, 28 now, takes barely a breath in our two-hour conversation. She has the charisma and energy of a kids’ TV presenter, delivering complex ideas in digestible explanations with empathy and wit. “I am a very positive person, which is important because everything I investigate is largely very dark. That positivity is a really valuable thing, because it keeps you going – I’m someone who is fundamentally hopeful about people.”
I wonder where she sees her career going. Does she have ambitions to become the next Emily Maitlis? “Oh!” she says. Well, she loves the investigative work and the presenting, but it’s the public service element of her job that excites her. “The landscape is changing so much it’s quite hard to know what work is going to look like in 10 years.” And by then, she predicts, “everything will be a social media investigation – you can’t untangle the two things.”
Has she ever been taken in by disinformation herself? “Hmm!” She thinks, theatrically. Around the time she started doing this job, there were wildfires spreading across Australia and on her Instagram she started to see memes of, “I want to say… wombats? They were very cute and very big, and they were hiding other baby animals from the flames. I sent them to my friends, these wombats, but it later transpired the story was just complete rubbish. And that’s how all this works – you’re pulled in by anything that makes you have an emotional reaction.” It’s easy to be tricked, she says – that’s what disinformation is designed to do, to exploit our emotions, our legitimate concerns, our real anxieties, often for profit. That’s why we need to remove the stigma attached to people who get drawn in, she stresses. “There’s this idea that they’re stupid or crazy, but it’s just not the case – they’re often really cynical and clever and engaged. They probably spend a bit too much time on social media, which they readily admit to me, but honestly, they could be any of us.”
Earlier this year, in fact, it was. After the Princess of Wales’s absence from the public eye became a talking point, the palace published a family portrait to quash gossip, but the image only increased speculation, leading to “Kategate’” with thousands of people scrutinising photos and sharing theories to fill a vacuum of information. The seduction of conspiracy theories lies partly in a dissection of power – marginalised people seeking to unpick the control that those in power wield, or the sense they’re plotting to deceive us, and then, the power that comes from feeling like you’re are in possession of privileged knowledge. “I’ve investigated quite a lot of online sleuthing where people come up with things that are true,” says Spring. “Like they’d sussed out Molly-Mae’s new brand before she’d even announced it. But then there are other examples, everything from when Nicola Bulley disappeared to Kate Middleton, to Jay Slater who also disappeared this year.” Spring saw patterns appearing. “People often come from a point of caring, and wanting to understand what’s going on, but then we all get a bit sucked in. And the theories are more exciting and interesting often than the truth, which can be quite complicated and quite boring and quite sad. But sharing them has real consequences for the people who are at the centre of the story.”
This year, after the stabbing attacks in Sydney, falsely blamed on a Jewish student, then, when riots spread after a false name was attributed on X to the man who killed three children in Southport, Spring became increasingly desperate to interview Elon Musk about the part social media played. She’s tried many times – for a while, X’s comms department replied to all journalists’ emails with a poop emoji. Spring found herself lying in bed at night thinking about what she’d ask him. “Questions around decisions he’s made that appear to have had a real-world impact – decisions about blue ticks, decisions about the algorithm, decisions about what’s allowed and what isn’t. I was thinking, maybe I should just go to San Francisco, maybe he’d talk to me then. It’s worrying that he won’t, when you’re trying to hold these kinds of powerful institutions to account – these companies are as powerful as lots of governments in many cases.” She wants to ask him specific questions about people who have experienced serious harm as a result of disinformation and what’s being recommended on their feeds. “A lot of what I imagine Elon Musk would say is about how the UK want to clamp down on freedom of expression, and my challenge to that would be, well what about the freedom of expression of these people who’ve been harmed? When does it stop, how does it stop, and how do you how do you deal with that? This is the question at the crux of all of this.”
She’s thinking about the people she’s met in Conspiracyland, who see people they trust sharing disinformation at the top of their feeds, posts that are getting hundreds of likes, “and that not only affects their perception of reality, but more broadly this shared concept of reality that we all rely on.” Instead of answering her interview requests, “He’ll probably just share this interview. In the past he’s tweeted a picture of me which resulted in an absolute wave of online abuse and hate and threats.” But she’ll keep on asking. “I’m the BBC’s Social Media Investigations Correspondent, but have not interviewed anyone senior at his company for more than two years – that shows us that there’s a problem with accountability. If cabinet ministers just stopped doing interviews, everyone would be really outraged.”
One side effect of her work is that Spring has become a sort of unofficial social media agony aunt, with people messaging her regular questions, often about their experiences of trolling, or asking whether a story they’ve seen is real, or for advice on kids and phones. She always responds, but, she says, it’s not simply a case of telling them to go offline: “We’ve reached a point where it would be very difficult to live without our phones.” They’re our wallets, our map, our supermarket, our family. “And there are positives that come out of using social media, and it doesn’t feel like it should be on all of us to change how we live in order to keep ourselves safe – that is ultimately a responsibility that the majority of the major social media companies have signed up to.”
What does she think about the move to ban phones for kids? “Again, it shifts the accountability away from the companies and I don’t think we should be letting them off the hook that lightly!” It reminds her of people who, having heard about her experiences of trolling, ask why she doesn’t simply quit social media. “First, it’s what I investigate so it’d be a bit like asking a political journalist not to be in the House of Commons, but also, why should people have to leave a particular social media platform, when they’re entitled to be there, too?”
As the pandemic subsided she thought the conspiracy movement might calm down a little. “I thought people might go, ‘Oh, you’ve had a bit of a funny half hour there,’ but I don’t think that has been the case and I think it will continue to not be the case.” There are people, she says, who truly have shifted in how they view reality. “I don’t know how many more times I have to investigate almost the same thing, which is,” she lifts her head, vaguely maddened, “a situation in which something hateful or false spreads on social media, is actively pushed by the algorithms, that causes harm or has a serious consequence for people. Then I track all those people down, email the social media companies saying this has happened, and then…”
And then? “We go again! I don’t know how many times that has to happen before someone says, ‘OK, how are we dealing with this?’” What needs to change? “Well, when you start thinking of the companies more like governments, even though they’re not elected, that maybe helps? A lot of this is about fundamentally how the companies’ sites operate and it does frequently come back to algorithms. Until we reach a place where safety is more important than engagement, these kinds of things will keep happening.” She pauses and leans back on the sofa, which exists, and seats two, and is blue. “My job is to expose the problems. I guess, I hope people reading will come up with solutions.”
Marianna Spring’s podcast, Why Do You Hate Me, is now available on BBC Sounds (bbc.co.uk)
