This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Marianna Spring is trying to be fair. The BBC’s prolific “Disinformation & Social Media Correspondent” clearly wants to be balanced in Why Do You Hate Me? USA. She investigates the conspiracy theories of the left as well as the right, and she tries to understand her subjects on a human level as she explores American division in another torrid election year.

It would be unfair not to appreciate the effort. Spring makes some observations that are evidently true. Social media can encourage polarisation, which, in turn, can fuel bitterness and paranoia. People who come to the internet for human connection can end up being more isolated than they were before.

Spring also tells some interesting stories as she travels across America, investigating mistrust and misinformation. The tale of a high school principal who was the victim of a hoax, when a racist AI-generated audio clip imitating his voice spread across the internet, emphasises how AI can encourage falsehoods on a local as well as national level. (So, if an audio clip of, say — just for example — a podcast critic screaming abuse at Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart comes to light, well, don’t believe everything you hear.)

Yet Why Do You Hate Me? USA still makes for bizarre listening. This is partly because, unlike a Louis Theroux or a Jon Ronson, Spring is so exhaustingly earnest. This, paradoxically, can make her very funny. When she explained the meaning of the word “libtard” in sombre tones, as dark music trembled in the background, I burst out laughing.

Secondly, Spring reduces everything to the dynamics of social media. “It’s social media’s world,” she says of American politics in 2024, “and the election is just living in it.” Yes, the material consequences of economics, immigration and foreign policy, and the spiritual consequences of demographic and cultural change, make no difference except in the sense of being related to social media.

One suspects that if Spring’s morning toast happened to be burned, she would wonder if it had been caused by social media hate.

Misinformation and polarisation did not spring into existence — no pun intended — at the dawn of social media. Countless people believed not only in a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, but in the idea that the conspirators were dumb enough to make a book out of their plans, before the television was invented — never mind computers, never mind artificial intelligence.

As for polarisation, well — England had a civil war when most people were illiterate. Yes, epistemic and moral disagreements can be exacerbated by social media. That is absolutely true. But social media has not caused them to exist.

There is a deep complacency bubbling in Spring’s work as well. She rarely, if ever, acknowledges that people have just cause for distrusting the political establishment or the mainstream media. In saying this, I am not attempting to excuse, say, the deranged fantasies of QAnon.

If someone lies to you about a business deal, that does not mean that it is safe to assume that they are a Satanic ritual murderer. But distrust and bitterness have at least something to do with the opportunism and hypocrisy of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the arrogant incompetence of Western foreign policy, and the toleration of politically convenient falsehoods. Two sorts of people can be wrong at the same time. The people in power tend to have less of an excuse.

Again, I have to give Spring some credit for trying. She clearly wants to tell stories, and not just to lecture, and she has at least some willingness to tell both sides. But she wants to dive into the murky depths of social media and can only scratch the surface with her microphone.

I am hooked on Kill List — a new podcast series from Wondery. Hosted by the tech journalist Carl Miller, it explores a hitman-for-hire website hosted on the Dark Web. Somehow, according to the series, a hacker gained access to the back end of the site and shared its data with Miller. He found himself in possession of a list of people who were marked for death.

Miller found that the authorities were not interested in investigating the kill list — dismissing it, perhaps, as internet nonsense. So, he took up the responsibility of contacting people on the list to warn them that they were under threat. (That should put the awkward phone conversations in our lives into perspective.)

Miller rarely fails to state the obvious. “Learning that someone wants you dead is a horrific thing to hear,” he reveals. Unlike Spring, though, he has a sense of humour. “I can’t even drive a car,” he yelps when explaining his unsuitability to be investigating violent crime.

He also does not sensationalise the risks of social media. Indeed, he is clear that most — if not all — “hitmen” on the internet are scammers. What is scariest (at least at this point in the series) are not the anonymous “hitmen”, but the people who are doing their best to hire them.

Sometimes the internet creates or at least exacerbates horrors. At other times, it just illuminates them. The internet, after all, was created in our image — often for the best and more often for the worst.