Beyond the Valley of the Trolls.

Brian Lee Hitchens and his wife Erin read, online, from their home in Florida that coronavirus was either a hoax, no worse than normal flu, or, perhaps, in some way, linked to 5G. So wearing masks, social distancing, and other health guidelines were ignored by the couple and when they fell ill in May last year they didn't seek help. You don't go to the doctor, let alone hospital, for a little bit of flu.

Soon enough they were both in intensive care. Brian, eventually, pulled through but Erin, 46 - but with underlying health conditions - asthma, died. Brian doesn't think coronavirus is a hoax anymore and Erin no longer thinks anything. Unfortunately for both of them they had been seduced into getting their news from their social media feeds instead of reputable, and fact checked, sources.

The use of the word 'radicalised' may seem strong (and, for sure, Brian and particularly Erin are innocent victims in a far larger problem) but it's not inaccurate. Many people who spread disinformation on social media platforms do so without malicious intentions but those who actively choose to spread dangerous lies and false information about health care at the time of a deadly pandemic are guilty of something not far short of manslaughter.

I was back in my front room (as usual) and back with Skeptics in the Pub - Online to hear Marianna Spring, the BBC's first ever specialist disinformation and social media reporter - who has worked for Panorama, Newsround, and Radio 4, and her talk How to Become an Online Conspiracy Agony Aunt:Reporting on the Disinformation Front-Line in which she would tell us about her investigations, such as the case of Brian and Erin outlined above, into the real world impact of online conspiracy theories and how she and her team of fact checkers at BBC Reality Check have tried to gently move people away from being tempted by them.

Marianna is offensively young (I'm not really offended, just jealous) and she's only been in her current position for a little over a year which means she started just before the pandemic. Imagining she'd be focusing mostly on the upcoming US election, her world, like most of ours, was turned upside down by Covid. Which was, of course, from the very beginning, a great opportunity for anyone with a propensity to go down conspiracy theorist rabbit holes to emerge briefly from them and try to persuade others to join them in another trip back down there.

Initially, as you'll recall, much of the online energy was taken up by theories of unusual, unlikely, and unworkable cures. I remember people saying drinking alcohol could prevent you from catching Covid (sadly, untrue), my mum's friend Jean thought Ribena would keep it at bay, Trump had some dangerous ideas about drinking bleach, and Marianna reminded me that there was, in some circles, an idea that simply holding your breath would help you beat Covid.

Presumably the thinking behind that was that if you died from not breathing first, then you couldn't die from Covid. In the wake of these 'cures' came the lie that 5G was somehow behind it, or that Bill Gates was somehow personally responsible, or that it had all been planned by some sinister Illuminati style world government. The plandemic!

These ideas, these lies, become ever more harmful the further they're spread and Marianna has spoken to people whose lives have been ruined, whose families have been torn apart, by online lies both about Covid and those propagated by QAnon that insist that Donald Trump was, or perhaps still is, waging a war with a global cabal of Satanic paedophiles headed up, of course, by Hillary Clinton.

These conspiracy theories, of course, sound ludicrous to most of us but their success stems from the fact that, at least in their early stages, they exploit people's genuine concerns and fears and, often, offer easy answers to complicated problems. Nobody had lived through a global pandemic before. It's very anxiety inducing and, for some, it's easier to believe there is some sort of plan behind it all, no matter how nefarious, illogical, and unworkable that would be, than to accept nobody really knows exactly what is happening.

When Marianna became aware of a man named Alan who was spreading harmful conspiracy theories about Sarah Everard, the young woman murdered last month between Brixton and Clapham, she tracked him down, phoned him up, and, after a forty-five minute call, he confessed he was obsessed with online conspiracy theories and said that his family had suffered greatly in the pandemic and he found believing that news, all news it seems, wasn't real made life easier for him.

On reflection, he said he regretted sharing the post and he apologised for it. It won't always work but it is evidence that conversations in real life, over the phone, or even on Zoom can, sometimes, work. Shouting at people in ALL CAPS on the Internet or calling strangers morons online has, to the best of my knowledge, never worked once yet.

When Marianna spoke to an anti-vaxxer at a protest in Brighton and asked him why Bill Gates would even want to microchip every person on the planet, his response was telling. He told Marianna that, clearly, she thought most people were good. But that he thought most people were bad. People with that level of cynicism (who may have come to be that way due to genuinely bad and upsetting experiences) are very susceptible to conspiracy theories and to understand why people spread these lies and conspiracies it is part of Marianna's work to understand how the disseminators of dinsinformation think.

But she speaks, more often, to those who have been affected by the spread of bullshit than to those who spread the bullshit. One young man, Sebastian, told of how his own mother had grown a large online following during the pandemic by spreading untruths about Covid and explained that not only was he worried about the damage she was doing to public health but also about the damage she was doing to their relationship. 

A mother-son relationship that, eventually, ended due to the mother's preference for spreading lies on the Internet over the love for her own child. A lot of people are losing family members, or other loved ones, to the Internet but these cases seem almost irreparable. 

Those who have gone down the online conspiracy theory rabbit hole often choose not to emerge into the pure light of reason but there are some that do and Marianna, of course, has engaged with them also. Catherine, who grew up in a family that believed in alternative medicines and alternative lifestyles, came to become a huge believer in anti-vax conspiracy theories as well as a flat Earther. Like many who go down this route she became inordinately fond of the phrase "DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH".

Which, mostly, simply means look at the same websites I'm looking at. But Catherine was a bit different. She did actually do her own research and, in doing so, she educated herself out of her false and harmful belief system. It's a nice story and it would be nicer still if it was not so uncommon.

Sadly, stories like the one about Patricia from Texas seem to be more the norm. Patricia had taken part in a vaccine trial and, later, she found her feet had become covered in painful looking and uncomfortable sores. The US healthcare system being what it is, she was using GoFundMe to raise money to pay her medical bills and shared a photo, below, of one of the afflicted feet.

It wasn't long before conspiracy theorists were sharing it as anti-vax propaganda despite the fact there was no evidence that her sores, and her partaking in the trial, were even linked. The viral anti-vax post about Patricia and her poor tootsies had spread around Facebook and Instagram and reached as far as Romania and Poland before she'd even been told that she had a placebo instead of a vaccine so the sores could not possibly be related to the vaccine.

Truth doesn't matter to those who spread disinformation and the damage was, in many minds, already done. Another online post that went viral was about an unspecified uncle of a friend who worked at a university in Wuhan (or, in some versions, Shenzhen) and was full of supposed facts about Covid-19. Some of which were actually helpful (wash hands more frequently), some of which were dubious (the distance in which a sneeze can travel), some of which were untrue (exposure to the sun kills Covid), and some of which were downright dangerous (if you have a runny nose you definitely don't have Covid).

The post spread from Catholic Facebook groups in India to Ghana and into the US and the UK. Where an 84 year old man, Peter, in Buckinghamshire decided to share it and, to his delight, his repost also went viral. Marianna spoke to Peter and asked him why he shared the post and why, on realising his mistake, he hadn't deleted it and it turned out he, quite simply, really enjoyed getting 'likes' - and he was getting lots of them.

Another conspiracy theory that went viral was that of Stop the Steal. Untrue claims of burnt and destroyed voting ballots for Donald Trump in last year's US election were among the myths that inspired the insurrection, and deaths, the world witnessed at the Capitol Building in Washington DC on January 6th this year.

In the latter case, the man spreading the lies and enjoying the 'likes' was not an eighty-four year old man in Buckinghamshire but a seventy-five year old man in Washington DC. Donald Trump himself, then still President of the United States.

Those who contest or simply question conspiracy theories, not least those spread by Trump, are often met with hostility online. Trolling and abuse are seen by conspiracy theorists as a good way of shutting down debate. When anti-racism protestor Momo was accused, incorrectly and demonstrably so, of trying to set fire to a flag attached to the Cenotaph in London during a Black Lives Matter event he received messages telling him he should be "hanged, drawn and quartered" as well as no little racist abuse.

Something high profile black footballers will be all too familiar with and the reason that huge swathes of the football (and cricket) community are partaking in a social media blackout this weekend. To try to get the social media behemoths to do something about racism, trolling, and bullying on their platforms. 

A weekend boycott is, sadly, probably not sufficient but it's a start. There are other ways of going about it, too, but you need the patience of a saint which, it turns out, Gina Miller seems to have. After receiving racist abuse and death threats from a Brexiter troll named Alan she agreed to meet him. They chatted, discovered they'd had quite similar life experiences (though clearly had drawn different conclusions from them), and Alan apologised.

He now speaks publicly against trolling. Obviously not everyone is so easily disabused of the lies they've come to believe and the fact that even Marianna, who is clearly a patient sort, has been accused of being both a spy and a PSYOP (as well as receiving her own fair share of co-ordinated death threats) proves this.

But she claimed she won't allow the trolls to deter her from doing her work and she'll continue to keep talking to them to try and win them round. I wish her well. In my case, I've decided to mostly ignore and block them but we each come to our own conclusions how we deal with them. 

I admire Marianna's approach even as I feel less inclined to take it and I also very much enjoyed her speech (and the Q&A which took in subjects as diverse as Russia, "big pharma", distrust of the BBC and the MSM in general, government lies, false balance, the lack of human moderation on social media sites, Jimmy Savile, and Pinterest and even saw her raising her cat to the camera - a SitP Online tradition - so that everyone could coo over it - and it was a polydactyl cat too, a Skeptics bonus). I thank her, host Dave Jenknis of Coventry Skeptics, and Skeptics in the Pub - Online for both the time and effort they put into yet another illuminating and rewarding evening. One I found out about, of course, on social media!