<
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/04/bbc-marianna-spring-violent-rhetoric-conspiracyland>
"On my way into Broadcasting House, the BBC’s London HQ, I saw some graffiti on
the building – “BBC Covid Liars”. I had just finished Marianna Spring’s most
recent podcast,
Marianna in Conspiracyland, and there was something neat and
droll about seeing its proposition in real life: Covid hoaxers are real and
they are alive with their own righteousness. Not only that, but the BBC is at
the centre of their theorising – the supposed public service broadcaster
brainwashing the people of the UK.
What I didn’t know until I met Spring, 27, the BBC’s first specialist
disinformation and social media correspondent, was that when the graffiti
appeared a week ago, posters of Spring’s face went up with it. “I don’t like
the way that the huge volume of online abuse spills over into offline action,”
she says, trenchant but understated. She doesn’t want this normalised, for
people to think: “it’s OK to go outside the BBC and leave a message saying,
‘We’re outside.’”
Conspiracyland is Spring’s latest plunge into the world of Covid hoaxers and
anti-vaxxers, the cranks who would once have seemed harmless (and probably have
had more harmless theories, such as homeopathy is good for athlete’s foot) but
are now possessed by a fiery righteousness that has completely burned through
their neighbourliness. As a piece of investigative reporting,
Conspiracyland
is vivid and thorough. As a social snapshot, it is unsettling, full of people
who seem community-centred but harbour violent fantasies about seeing their
adversaries hang; people who seem soft and lefty but are enmeshed in the tropes
of the far right. It is so fair-minded that at times it feels like it is taking
a set of scales to a gun fight, but we will talk about that later."
Via Stuart Duckworth and Clarice Boomshakala Bouvier.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
