‘It’s important to talk about online abuse’: Marianna Spring on trolls, conspiracy theorists – and positivity

‘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’: Marianna Spring. Photograph: Manuel Vázquez/The Observer

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.