Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring review – into the cesspit of online hatred

An unflinching exploration of conspiracy theories and their knock-on effects also makes heroic attempts to understand the people behind them

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it. For her pains, Spring has already received – and deserved – some professional awards. But she has also been the target of some of the most vicious targeted attacks that any journalist has had to face: of the 14,488 social media posts targeting staff that the BBC logged between January and June 2023, for example, 11,771 related to her. Any journalist who can endure such an onslaught and remain sane deserves respect.

Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them. But Spring’s gaze widens into an exploration of the collateral damage such theories cause, not only to individual believers and their families but in the way they undermine the deliberative capacity of democracies. She looks at the way technology has created a world in which, as Jonathan Swift famously put it, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” – but one in which even blatant falsehoods endure long past their sell-by date because the internet never forgets. And she recounts, in graphic and depressing detail, the unspeakable things that people do and say online. But she also makes some heroic attempts to contact the trolls behind the slurs, sometimes with really interesting results.