Me and my trolls

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Internet trolls are harassing and bullying people like never before. That’s according to research carried out in the UK which found abuse rising as the world spends more and more time online thanks to the Covid pandemic. But who are the people behind these often anonymous attacks? How do they get involved in persecuting people they don’t even know? And what can their victims do about it? British Journalist, Sali Hughes, has been a target herself. In this edition of Assignment, she sets out to discover how trolls justify their actions, and what motivates them. She speaks to other women who have suffered online abuse and hears about the devastating impact it can have. And, she goes face to face with one of her own former tormentors to make a sobering discovery: those provoking conflict in cyberspace include the most normal people in real life.

Producer: Paul Grant

(Image: Anonymous internet-user in a mask. Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC World Service, Welcome to Assignment.
0:09.0	Several months ago, two bloggers who were unknown to me
0:11.7	contacted me and said a site dedicated to gossip about
0:14.9	and the hatred of so-called Instagram influences was making their life a daily misery.
0:20.5	They were contacting me because they said that I too was the victim of bullying and dishonesty in the same space.
0:26.0	This is me.
0:28.0	In an Instagram video I made last autumn after I discovered that Internet trolls were targeting me on the so-called
0:34.7	dragging website.
0:37.3	They were rude and vindictive talking about my children, making accusations about my career
0:41.9	that were not and are not true. They
0:44.3	criticized my parenting, mocked my marriage and made personal insults about my
0:48.2	husband, the kindest and most decent person I know. They do...
0:52.4	Dragging sites are a relatively new type. decent person I know. I know. They do...
0:53.0	Dragging sites are a relatively new type of online forum, where people with a social media
0:57.9	presence, so journalists influences celebrities have their work in private life speculated about
1:03.7	dissected and trash.
1:05.6	So let's bring her down for the sheer sport of it all while disingenuously
1:09.3	telling each other how righteous we are.
1:11.4	They are not righteous. They are internet trolls and bullies.
1:18.1	I still feel sick hearing that video which I posted in September last year, but at the time I felt I had to do something to defend myself and call out the faceless people who were attacking me and lying about me online.
1:32.0	I'm Sally Hughes, a writer and journalist here in the UK, and for
1:36.6	this week's assignment I want to find out why Internet trolls so obsessively follow people
	...

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