Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland

Marianna Spring is the BBC's first disinformation and social media correspondent, appointed in 2020 to cover a beat that had previously had no dedicated journalist at any major UK broadcaster. Among the Trolls is the account of four years spent inside online conspiracy communities — QAnon networks, anti-vaccine groups, election denial forums, and the communities that formed around the COVID-19 infodemic. Spring's approach is empathetic rather than condescending: she seeks to understand why people are drawn to conspiracy communities, what needs those communities meet, and what the journey into and sometimes out of them actually looks like.

The book is valuable for practitioners on two levels. First, it provides one of the most detailed available accounts of how online radicalisation actually operates — the specific platforms, the specific narrative techniques, the specific community dynamics that draw people deeper into conspiratorial worldviews. Second, it raises important questions about what effective counter-disinformation looks like at the individual level: Spring documents cases of people leaving conspiracy communities, and the pathways out are rarely the ones that counter-disinformation professionals typically design for. Essential field reporting from the front line of the information environment.