Conspiracyland – Marianna Spring

‘After a while I was able to recognize that actually conspiracy theories for me were approval-seeking behaviour. I wanted to feel part of the demise of governments, exposing the truth, fighting the good fight.’ It was realizing that the information she had been fed was misleading – and that the intentions of those promoting it might not be so pure as she’d once believed – that finally woke her up to the truth.

Catherine saw how social media algorithms had only further cemented her anti-vax beliefs, and knew she couldn’t just sit back and watch. She could see the immediate threat bad information posed during a global health crisis, and she felt terrible. This could be a matter of life and death. So, she sought out a new community that battled the mistruths spread by people she used to be like.

She found several in a Facebook group dedicated to debunking online myths, which she decided to join. Catherine’s experience has given her a series of questions to challenge those still embedded in the world she left. Her first is about whistle-blowers – the insiders who decide to reveal what’s really going on. If there were all of these sinister plots playing out across hospitals and government departments, where so many people are employed, why has no one come forward? Why would doctors and nurses and the media and politicians across the spectrum all readily lie and harm people – and surely it couldn’t be kept secret from everybody?

‘If there was some grand conspiracy at play here, how many people would need to be involved in that theory all the way from the top down? You are talking hundreds of thousands of people… What are the odds of nobody saying anything?’ A conspiracy theorist might come back and argue that there are whistle- blowers. During the pandemic and the Ukraine war, for instance, there were people who built an online following by styling themselves as truth-telling doctors or bloggers opposing the establishment.

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent and an award-winning journalist. She presents podcasts and documentaries investigating disinformation and social media for BBC Radio 4, as well as for BBC Panorama and BBC Three. She is also one of the presenters of the BBC’s Americast podcast. She has been named the British Press Guild’s Audio Presenter of the Year and Royal Television Society Innovation winner.

1kitap1.com/en 1kitap1.com/en First published in hardback as Among the Trolls in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books. Copyright © Marianna Spring, 2024 The moral right of Marianna Spring to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 526 7 E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 525 0 Printed in Great Britain Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ www.atlantic-books.co.uk 1kitap1.com/en To Mum, Dad, and everyone I love but can’t name because of the trolls.

1kitap1.com/en CONTENTS Introduction 1 True Believers 2 The Non-Believers? 3 Collateral Damage 4 Escaping the Rabbit Hole 5 The Life of a Lie 6 Shock Troops 7 Bot or Not? How State-Sponsored Disinformation Works 8 Virtual Is Now Real 9 What Next? Acknowledgements Notes Index 1kitap1.com/en INTRODUCTION I was five years old when hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001. My mum collected me from school and told my teacher what a terrible day it was.

As we walked home, I asked her what had happened. She explained how these aeroplanes had been flown into the towers on purpose. I kept asking her – was it an accident? To which she would reply ‘no’. I couldn’t get my head around how something like that could happen deliberately. It was terrifying.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: d3d086ec38af8557
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 7,945,272 bytes (7.577 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781838955267, 9781838955250
• Pages: 271
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 450.17 minutes
• Total Words: 90,034
• Total Characters: 526,263
• Average Words per Page: 332.23
• Average Characters per Page: 1941.93

Most Frequent Words

people (419), media (399), social (374), conspiracy (351), like (273), one (245), online (237), it’s (232), world (192), theories (179), also (178), time (169), told (157), said (157), way (142), hate (138), really (137), disinformation (136), didn’t (134), even (122), think (113), real (108), part (107), he’d (107), accounts (106), first (101), pandemic (95), much (94), wasn’t (94), content (93), gary (93), new (89), found (89), posts (88), get (86), see (86), believe (86), life (85), several (85), back (84), don’t (84), around (83), evidence (83), abuse (83), theory (82), that’s (82), she’d (82), often (81), sites (81), family (80), made (79), make (79), wanted (79), war (77), covid (77), many (76), want (76), i’ve (75), seemed (75), twitter (74), years (73), shared (73), account (73), videos (73), happened (72), i’m (72), different (72), russian (71), now (70), trolls (70), whether (70), take (70), know (69), marianna (68), group (68), home (67), facebook (67), though (66), used (65), someone (64), post (64), person (63), friends (63), started (62), groups (62), well (61), lot (61), never (61), russia (61), felt (61), something (60), still (60), right (59), find (59), called (59), two (59), become (58), became (58), others (58), users (58).

PDF Download