Marianna Spring is on the receiving end of 80% of the BBC’s online abuse (Picture: Getty)
A journalist at the BBC receives 80% of online abuse aimed at the corporation.
Marianna Spring was appointed the BBC’s first correspondent specialising in disinformation and social media in 2020 and in her first six months on the job alone was on the receiving end of more than 11,700 slurs.
The timing was somewhat exceptional, given the pandemic came soon after when awareness around disinformation had arguably never been more crucial.
After appearing in a documentary about the rise in disinformation and hate spreading on Twitter following the takeover of Elon Musk, the Tesla founder mocked the finding and Spring was hit with more attacks than ever.
She’s now claimed it’s become ‘really normal to really hate me’.
Somehow though, she manages to shrug it off with impressive resilience and explained why she still doesn’t always turn to the block button and the vitriol won’t stop her from working.
‘I think there’s something about blocking people that means they can be, like, “Oh, you’re not open to a conversation,’” she told The Times.
Spring now fears for her physical safety (Picture: BBC)
‘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.’
While she is able to dust off the bile on social media, Spring did admit she has been left fearing for her physical safety ‘in a way that I never was before’.
‘That is the thing I really don’t like,’ she said.
Spring appeared on Monday’s BBC Breakfast discussing a new case she’s investigating after a woman was horrified to read an article in The Irish Light newspaper suggesting her son died from the coronavirus vaccine when he’d actually died by suicide in 2021, aged 18.
When she complained, the paper called her ‘a disinformation agent’ on Twitter.
After Spring explained the case, Charlie Stayt asked how she could possibly deal with the weight of 80% of the BBC abuse after reading her interview.
‘It’s not always easy, but it actually tells us a lot about how this all works and it’s the same for this case,’ she said.
‘Hate can be a really powerful way of deterring accountability, it’s hard to know the intentions of the conspiracy theorists and people who send it.
‘Maybe they truly believe these conspiracy theories or maybe they know sending online abuse and hate might mean you are less likely to want to hold them to account.’
She added: ‘Ultimately, we have to keep doing our jobs and I have to keep doing my job which is investigating cases like this, especially when they are having a really serious impact on the people involve.’
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‘It’s not always easy’