Marianna Spring, the BBC’s excellent disinformation and social media correspondent, is out meeting the over-internetted again. The dedicated Spring covers online mistruths, those who peddle them and those who believe them. So in
Disaster Trolls she talked to people convinced that the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing were in fact actors. In
Death By Conspiracy, she tackled anti-vax campaigners, and described how a man died of Covid because he believed what they said.
This time round, for her new Radio 4 series
Marianna in Conspiracyland, Spring considers whether online conspiracy theories could end in violence. She focuses on the UK, though she mentions the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots in the US, and also talks to a German reporter who was attacked by a mob. Mostly, she trains her attention on a free newspaper called
the Light. It prints at least 100,000 copies a month, and has 18,000 followers on its Telegram account.
Spring starts off in Totnes, Devon, home to happy hippies, crystal-strokers and other alternative lifestylers concerned about climate change and big pharma. The
Light is widely distributed here and draws readers in through its libertarian, anti-vaccine stance. So far, so familiar. Unfortunately, once you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid/ swallowed the red pill/ seen or, indeed, read the
Light, it offers up some far less palatable opinions. Such as the idea that people should be tried for “crimes against humanity” over the pandemic. “A lot of people would like to see justice,” says one of the paper’s readers. He’s referring to an idea usually called Nuremberg 2.0, after the Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg 2.0 insists that anyone involved in the rollout of the Covid vaccine should be investigated. “And if they’re found guilty, they face the punishment,” he says. Spring asks him if that punishment should be hanging. “Yes,” says this seemingly reasonable man.
As ever, Spring remains calm when the battier proponents of conspiracy theories articulate their views. Sometimes, though, those who push extreme ideas don’t like to own up to them.
Darren Nesbitt, editor of the
Light, mealy-mouths about “free speech” and “people making up their own minds”, while offering the hard stuff – extreme rightwing views from horrible organisations such as Patriotic Alternative and Alpha Men Assemble – on the
Light’s Telegram. Nesbitt is nice to Spring when she interviews him, calling her “a smart, bright journalist full of energy”. Later, on Facebook, he publishes a poem that describes her as “shilling for cash”.
I applaud Spring’s careful, reasonable reporting in this fascinating series, which features a good cross section of believers and sceptics and ends with Spring, lightly, wondering about her own safety. I wonder about it, too.
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Hope you're all keeping cool.
Here's to a calm, ct-free weekend.
