The BBC’s Marianna Spring: ‘The more violent the rhetoric, the more important it is I expose it’

The broadcaster's first disinformation correspondent spends her time pursuing trolls and dismantling conspiracy theories. In return she is abused, slandered, threatened. She talks about battling cranks, extremists - and Elon Musk

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.'"