Disaster Trolls: Introducing... Disaster Trolls
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BBC
2.8 • 947 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when tragedy makes you a target? Why would anybody accuse terrorism survivors of being liars and “crisis actors”?
The BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring investigates how people caught up in the Manchester Arena bombing and other UK terror attacks, are targeted with extreme conspiracy theories, online abuse and threats. Some are even hunted down offline. It’s a phenomenon we might usually associate with the US, and the billion dollar damages ruling against Alex Jones for claiming the Sandy Hook school shootings were faked. But Marianna uncovers shocking evidence that British trolls are also blighting the lives of people right here in the UK, people who now want answers and justice.
Presenter: Marianna Spring
Producer: Ant Adeane
Editor: Ed Main
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.2 | Can you remember the worst day of your life? |
| 0:08.6 | For some of us, it's a question that's difficult to answer. |
| 0:12.8 | Maybe that makes us the lucky ones, |
| 0:15.2 | because for others, it provokes a searing clarity |
| 0:17.8 | and the memory of a traumatic experience they will never forget. |
| 0:21.8 | There's very rarely ever a day where you don't at least sort of harken back to it. |
| 0:25.9 | What I've seen on that night never goes away, mate. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm talking here about the kinds of shattering events that most of us will never experience. |
| 0:33.6 | Terror attacks, violent assaults, the murder of a loved one, |
| 0:37.4 | and for those who've lived through some of the worst and most high-profile disasters imaginable, |
| 0:42.5 | there's something that now follows close on the heels of the traumatic event itself. |
| 0:47.4 | It's something that, from the dozens of people I've spoken to, |
| 0:50.8 | seems to be becoming part and parcel of surviving a disaster. |
| 0:54.6 | We got told after the attack that apparently we were actors. |
| 0:58.0 | Who are the people telling you you were acting? |
| 1:00.3 | These people that do all these conspiracy theories. |
| 1:03.3 | These are the online trolls that find survivors after the worst day of their life |
| 1:07.3 | to tell them they're lying. |
| 1:09.8 | You know, I'm sat there, immobile in a hospital bed, |
| 1:12.5 | and you're getting messages from people saying they're going to hang you. |
| 1:15.4 | Laughing about something that is so serious |
... |
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