I received 11,771 abusive messages and death threats – but it hasn’t stopped my pursuit of conspiracy theorists

I first met Martin Hibbert one day in August. He was one of the people who survived the terror attack at Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017. It was sitting in his living room listening to him that made me realise how low trolls had sunk.

Twenty-two people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, at the end of an Ariana Grande concert. Martin’s daughter Eve, who was 14 at the time, experienced a serious brain injury and now relies on round-the-clock care. Martin is paralysed from the waist down. And yet several people have suggested that the bombing didn’t happen.

Conspiracy theories claiming Martin and Eve are acting and the bombing was a hoax have plagued their recoveries. One conspiracy theorist, Richard D Hall, tracked down Eve at home, attempting to film her to check if her injuries were real. He shared a video showing his tactics to his thousands of online followers. In the footage, he holds up a poorly camouflaged camera, which is propped up on a stick adorned with leaves.

‘I’m all for freedom of speech,’ Martin said. ‘But it crosses the line when you’re saying I’m an actor or I’ve not got a spinal cord injury or Eve’s not disabled.’ 

I’ve spent the last four years exploring conspiracy theorists like these, as well as delving into trolling, as the BBC’s disinformation correspondent. You’d be mistaken in thinking this is a universe limited to social media. In fact, it’s a parallel world with its own leaders, its own holiday retreats, its own protests, even its own conspiracy theory newspapers.

Real examples of corruption and conspiracy are extrapolated by some and used to declare that almost everything is staged – from global pandemics to terror attacks. A committed minority calls for the execution of journalists, politicians, nurses and doctors, stating that these people are complicit in sinister plots to harm people.

While investigating this strange new world, I frequently go out and meet the victims but also the conspiracy theorists and the trolls themselves. I’ve had cups of tea with people who’ve been told that the worst day of their life never happened and interviewed people caught up in wars accused of acting.

In some cases, the people targeted by disinformation and hate are tackling it themselves with legal action. A woman in Ireland took a conspiracy theory newspaper to court after it used a photo of her son to wrongly suggest his death could be linked to the Covid-19 vaccine. However, challenging trolls can come at a cost, as sometimes those targeted find themselves on the receiving end of more hate.

But the hard reality is that we’re all living among the trolls now, and just recognising the scale of the problem can play a part in defending against the harm it causes. As can figuring out who the culprits are – and what drives them.

I first realised the Manchester Arena victims and their families were being targeted by trolls and conspiracy theorists when I saw an anonymous account replying to the posts of a grieving mum who’d lost her son. The troll was tweeting out pages of a book written by Richard D Hall that claimed the victims who had lost their lives, including this woman’s son, were really in hiding.

Weeks after I met Martin, I spoke to Lisa, who had also been injured in the bombing. Hall had documented online and in his book his attempts to use a hidden camera to spy on her while she worked. He’d wanted to check whether she was really injured.

I saw with my own eyes Lisa’s missing finger, the scar on her face. She described being in the lobby of Manchester Arena to collect her daughter when the explosion happened, and how guilty her daughter felt. She described the years it had taken her to come to terms with the injuries. And then to be told that it was fake…

The invasion of privacy by conspiracy theorists has, she says, also left her fearful. ‘You just don’t know who’s out there,’ she told me, ‘who might be lurking in a garden or standing round a corner with a hidden camera.’

Why would someone do this? That’s a question I’ve asked almost every conspiracy theorist I’ve investigated. It can be a profitable business. It’s possible to build a profile online and cultivate social media followers who can make you feel important, almost like a celebrity. It can be hard to untangle intention, though, because many of these people also seem to convince themselves of the ideas they’re peddling.

After talking to the Manchester Arena victims, I wanted to know what was driving Richard D Hall. Working with the teams at BBC Panorama and Radio 4, we pieced together his background: a former engineer and failed comedian, he has been sharing conspiracy theory videos online since around 2011. 

First it was UFOs, but then it turned into conspiracy theories about fabricated terror. In recent years he’s made money selling DVDs of his online shows, as well as books and tickets to speaking tours. Videos of his tours show in packed pubs, and his book alleging the Manchester Arena bombing was staged sells for £20. In it he falsely suggests that those who died are living elsewhere in hiding – there’s a table showing every victim and their alleged new location. Hall also had a YouTube channel with more than 80,000 subscribers, but the platform took it down.

One of those who had encountered Hall up close was Neil Sanders, who was invited to appear in several of Hall’s videos talking about one of his specialist subjects – mind control (the idea that the global elite are doing something far more sinister than just lying to us). But Sanders rejected Hall’s claims about terror attacks being faked.

He told me that he thought Hall was acting with sincere motives. ‘A lot of people will say Richard must be monstrous and appalling, and he isn’t. He’s coming at it from the perspective that he’s unearthed a massive fraud, so he’s wanting to uncover that for the greater good.’

Hall rejected my approaches for an interview. As a last resort, I visited the market stall where he was selling his DVDs and books. He was wearing a black T-shirt with his website’s logo on it.

For a while we went round in circles, with Hall dodging my questions about why he was promoting these theories. But afterwards he posted a video on his website. In it, he said he hadn’t put a camera outside the home of Eve Hibbert, but he admitted to leaving ‘a camera rolling’ in his van, which was ‘parked in a public place’. He claimed he had made ‘polite door-to-door inquiries in order to gather evidence, which is a perfectly legitimate activity when doing research’, and that his appeal for information from the public did not make him ‘responsible for hateful messages sent by people’.

But he also held firm to his ‘opinion [that] there has been no satisfactory evidence presented to the public which proves that the Manchester Arena incident was not staged’.

While Hall hadn’t directly responded to me, meeting him revealed a lot about what could be driving him. I got the sense he’d convinced himself of the truth of these conspiracy theories because they made him feel important.

Last year Martin Hibbert brought a case for harassment against Hall, on behalf of himself and Eve. In his defence case, Hall remained adamant that his book and videos are in the public interest and that he’s right to question whether the terror attack was staged. (At the time of going to press, a summary judgment had just been entered against Hall as the judge found it is ‘unrealistic’ for him to continue to argue that the claimants were not at Manchester Arena or not injured. The case continues.)

American alt-Right radio show host Alex Jones has also been taken to court. After setting up a website, InfoWars, in 1999, Jones suggested the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, which killed 26 people, was staged. His videos started attracting even more viewers. Jones racked up more than 2.4 million YouTube subscribers on his channel before it was booted off the platform in 2018.

In 2022 Jones was ordered to pay more than a billion dollars to families of the victims of the shooting, because of the conspiracy theories he’d spread and the hate they triggered. In one court appearance, Jones acknowledged that the Sandy Hook shooting was ‘100 per cent real’. But when broadcasting to his fans as the verdict came in, he doubled down. He was calling for donations on the right side of the screen. On the other side you could see the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. One was in tears. ‘The money you donate does not go to these people. It goes to fight this fraud,’ Jones told those watching. He later declared bankruptcy.

While I have never met Alex Jones face to face, I have met another media figure in the world of conspiracies – the editor of free UK newspaper The Light, set up during the pandemic. It seems to print over 100,000 copies a month and it had, at the time of writing, more than 19,000 members on its Telegram channels (a messaging app). I had seen copies on Richard D Hall’s market stall.

The paper and its supporters have suggested the Government, doctors, nurses and journalists are complicit in sinister plots to harm people with vaccines and the pandemic. Articles have declared ‘MPs, doctors and nurses can be hanged’. Posts shared by the paper on Telegram have featured cartoons of gallows and included the work addresses of ‘liable people to be held to account’ for taking part in plots to harm people with vaccines. Its editor, Darren Nesbit, has written articles and shared posts online with ambiguous references to ‘coming for those at the top’ and how the time ‘is coming’ for some kind of punishment.

When I interviewed him in a pub in the town of Leek, he said he’d always been sceptical of the government and corporations but for him this past decade was more than that. He referred to it as a ‘re-education’. ‘It was great to be able to go back and revisit all the things that we’ve been told, whether it’s science, history, geography, cosmology, health,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to accept what the official narrative is.’

I quizzed Nesbit on the paper’s links with far-Right and antisemitic figures, which he denied. I also quizzed him on an article in which The Light defended Cornwall radio host Graham Hart, who was sentenced to 32 months in prison for making antisemitic remarks on his show. He’d said Jews were ‘filth’, ‘like rats’, and should be ‘wiped out’. Nesbit agreed it was ‘pretty harsh stuff’ but the paper defended Hart’s ‘right to say it’.

On articles condoning ‘the use of force only to defend against aggressors’, he immediately condemned any violence, but said it would be in self-defence if there were forced lockdowns or evacuations – and then he offered some more cryptic answers about how people could make their ‘own decisions’. It was like he was playing a game. I wondered why he didn’t just disown the violent rhetoric if he didn’t agree with it.

‘I might be wrong,’ he declared.

‘So you think violence is justified?’

‘No, I don’t. But I might be wrong.’

After three hours of talking to him, I felt like I’d been in a tumble-dryer spin. He’d deny what I said, I’d present him with evidence to the contrary, then he’d just brush it off. He was adamant that if he said it wasn’t true, even when the evidence says otherwise, it wasn’t true.

At the end of our chat he said I was ‘smart, bright, full of energy’. But, days later, a poem appeared on Nesbit’s Facebook, with a photo of me. It read: ‘Her name is Marianna Spring, shilling for cash is her thing, in disinformation she finds inspiration, her eyes light up and go ker-ching.’ He claimed I planned to discredit him and the paper.

I realised I was watching him distort the reality of what had happened in real time. There was a disconnect between the way we’d left the interview and what happened next.

Weeks later, Nesbit would publish my email address on Telegram in a post he had signed off himself. It triggered a wave of hateful messages, including an email at midnight saying, ‘Tick, tock.’ This confirmed my impression of him as a very clever man who knows how to fan the flames without getting burned and is also quick to wash his hands of any responsibility for others’ actions on the basis of content The Light shares.

The disconnect between social-media and real-world personas reminds me of another conspiracy theorist. Before the pandemic, Kate Shemirani was a fan of alternative medicine. A nurse by trade, she became especially interested in this when she developed breast cancer.

She started a business and brand called ‘Natural Nurse’. Then Covid-19 gave her a voice like never before.

Shemirani insisted that the virus causing Covid-19 did not exist. She called the global pandemic a ‘scamdemic’ and a ‘plandemic’. She was one of the people who stated that the symptoms of Covid-19 were caused by 5G radio waves and that vaccines would be used to implant microchips in order to track and control people. She racked up followers on Twitter and YouTube in between being suspended for sharing disinformation. Her speeches at anti-lockdown rallies were plastered all over social media.

I remember seeing her speak in London in 2020. People gathered around the fountain in the centre of Trafalgar Square. Music was blaring out; there were posters and flags and T-shirts with slogans. Some of those flags were declaring that Covid was a hoax.

Speeches like this one were the beginning of Shemirani’s celebrity within the conspiracy world. At one rally, she suggested doctors should be hanged like Nazi war criminals for their role in the pandemic ‘hoax’. Her comments sparked outrage. She was struck off the nursing register by the Nursing and Midwifery Council in the UK. A tabloid newspaper questioned whether she was the ‘most dangerous woman’ in Britain. Was she? That’s what I wanted to find out when I arrived at her house.

Once populated by her several children, it was now home to Shemirani and her Chihuahuas and cats. Beaming with pride, she informed me that these cats were not vaccinated.

I was a villain to the conspiracy movement, so it was surprising Shemirani agreed to an interview – let alone welcomed me into her home. But her charm offensive began immediately. She was very easy to chat to, and she heaped praise on me. In our conversation, she listed conspiracy after conspiracy – I felt she was bouncing around every time I tried to push on anything specific. She told me the Government was incompetent – but was unable to explain who was really behind a pandemic plot.

I remember thinking she liked the conversation and camera and performance; I also realised she wanted me to like her. I was left with the impression that this was about power and attention – a chance to command the room.

The effect of social feedback on conspiracy theorists is crucial. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that a ‘considerable proportion’ of people explicitly acknowledge that ‘when the social engagement reward was sufficiently large’, they would be willing to share inaccurate information.

I was left asking the same million-dollar question about Kate Shemirani as with all the others. Did she really believe all of this?

Her son Sebastian contacted me by email in 2020; he has his own take. His message read: ‘I am (unfortunately) the son of Kate Shemirani, the notorious 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theorist. I’m reaching out to you because I am trying to limit her platform and prevent others from falling down the rabbit hole, because what she is doing is dangerous.’

I met Sebastian near where he was attending university in London at the time. This was the first time he had ever spoken out about his mum, with whom he says he has a distant relationship.

‘She’s got a big God complex and she loves playing that role,’ he said. ‘It gives her this confidence and it [fuels] her addiction. This is her five minutes of fame, and when it’s over in three or four years and everything she said is forgotten, she’s going to feel lonely again.’

Since that conversation, Twitter (now X) is under new ownership. Kate Shemirani was back on the platform at the time of going to press – she is a key figure in the UK conspiracy movement.

Before social media it was easier to ignore people sharing these messages – and there was not necessarily such a clear incentive for them to do so. But now conspiracy theorists have their own platforms where they can build and shape their idea of the truth.

Ultimately, it is very difficult to figure out whether any of these people really believe the ideas they promote because of the benefits they gain from sharing them. So perhaps whether they believe in them or not is the wrong question to ask. Instead, what really matters is why other people are listening.

Abridged extract from Among the Trolls, by Marianna Spring, published on 7 March (Atlantic Books, £18.99); pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk

‘The man waiting for me had a flip knife’: When the troll investigator becomes the trolled

It’s a sunny June afternoon, and I’m walking out of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House. It should be a carefree day, only I’m on high alert. For six weeks, a man has been living in a tent outside the building. He has been shouting at me and waiting for me.

He’s very tall with grey hair. He wears a fleece and combat trousers. Beside his tent are signs declaring that the BBC is complicit in protecting paedophiles. The claims he’s making go a lot further than any real examples of where the BBC has failed victims – for example, with its former presenter Jimmy Savile. The conspiracy theories scrawled on cardboard by this man are complex, confusing and unclear.

For a while, this man didn’t notice me. Then it started. At first, it was just shouting my name. Then it was shouting and walking after me as I headed home. I’d dash away, wondering if he was still following.

Next, it was waiting for me outside the revolving doors of the BBC’s lobby. He’d have his phone at the ready to film me. He’d shout and swear as I hurried inside. He never approached me for a reasonable conversation. He would shout and scream abuse.

On this sunny day, he appears again. I am deliberately taking a route I thought would avoid him. He comes up close, screaming, ‘Do you want to see my balls?’ then proceeds to declare he isn’t harassing me.

I never want to be scared of the people who troll me. I am, however, shaken by these sorts of incidents. They’re being investigated by the police, who have since removed this man from the BBC premises. They found a ‘bladed item’ in his tent – a flip knife, I was later told.

Weeks later, another conspiracy theorist turns up requesting an interview. They follow the BBC’s director general to the Tube. Security teams later tell me they stand out on the plaza, by the doors where I work.

These are stark examples of the way the hate I’ve experienced online seems to be spilling out into the real world. Between 1 January 2023 and the end of June, the BBC received 14,488 escalations regarding social media posts for ‘protected assets’ – often on-air presenters or people considered at risk of online abuse. Of this number, 11,771 relate to me. Those posts were escalated because they could be indicative of cyberbullying, negative sentiment, threats of physical harm and violent language, doxing, impersonations, giving personal details and more.

My offline encounters with hate began during the Covid-19 lockdowns, with a message scrawled in red pen on a whiteboard used for updates about mask-wearing, outside a Tube station close to where I work in London. It said Marianna Spring was lying about the vaccine. The note itself wasn’t very offensive. More concerning was the message it sent: we know where you get the Tube and where you work. I still don’t know who left that note.

After that I attended rallies where protesters told me I should be hanged for treason. Others chanted and hurled abuse, and some held up placards about me – one with just my name and my age on.

What’s been happening to me is just a small part of a campaign of intimidation being waged by conspiracy activists. They have shown they are willing to act offline. And they are persistent – they’re not giving up.