I do mean to pick up where I left off in going through the Radio 5 interview, but one thing I want to get out of the way is this statement towards the end of the interview:
SH (at 18:55): ‘My colleague Lauren who has nothing to do with the public eye is bullied on there. Every. Single. Day.’
Those of us who read here regularly know of course that that is untrue (assuming of course that ‘there’ refers to here) but I wanted to be able to provide evidence that it is untrue.
For the benefit of anyone new-ish, I should explain why this colleague might be mentioned here at all.
It’s because SH says that she doesn’t read here herself but has others screengrab content and report back. Her colleague is assumed to be one of the main people screengrabbing and reporting back. As SH says, her colleague is not someone in the public eye, but she appears to have been – and still to be – very much part of SH’s engagement with these threads.
To test – as an independent researcher might – whether SH’s statement in the Radio 5 interview about her colleague was true, I took a sampling approach and read all the posts here on 10 randomly selected days.
Because the day on which I did the research (yesterday) was the 16th, I read the posts on the 16th of each month for 10 months, starting a year ago – so 16th November 2019, 16th December 2019 etc through to 16th August 2020. There were 491 posts in total (covering a surprisingly wide range of subjects).
Of these 491 posts there was only one that mentioned her colleague and only in passing.
The post – in May this year – was provoked by a tweet by SH in which she says: ‘They will say any tit to make themselves feel better. Also, they name me and publish screengrabs daily, I’m told.’
The post in response reads:
'The “I’m told” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there!
Hi Sali! I know you must read here. Or maybe you get Lauren to do it in exchange for some awful shoes. Anyway, remember that 90% of people on this thread used to be your fans. Maybe look at some things you’ve done and you’ve written before kicking off at us.’
This would seem fairly typical of the context in which her colleague would be mentioned – i.e. in response to SH making a statement about what is said here whilst also saying or implying that she doesn’t actually read it.
The frequency of mentions (one post in around 500) would also seem about right – i.e. occasional.