Already exhausted by years of vicious online remarks about every aspect of her existence, Fraser described how she had retreated from the world, and was even avoiding socializing in case fellow school mums wrote about it afterwards. And now some unknown foe had spotted her having “a quiet coffee and gelato” with her daughter in the Italian city, and made an acerbic comment about it on the Tattle Life website. Soaking in the bath that night and feeling horribly hunted, she says she reached her “rock bottom”.

Celebrities and influencers have been complaining about Tattle Life’s existence for years, and Fraser’s dramatic new tale of persecution only adds more energy to the growing campaign against it. In February, a group of Labour MPs wrote to Ofcom implying that posts on the site were responsible for the suicide of a 16-year-old girl called Princess Bliss Dickson. Ofcom has since said it is “moving quickly” to examine if there are grounds to take action, while the Information Commission said it is also investigating.

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On one hand, then, we have the framing of the famous and semi-famous women who say they have been deeply hurt by Tattle Life: a place of unalloyed evil, seething with inexplicable hatred and contempt. But there are other stories too, and to my mind they complicate matters. One such story is also narrated by Fraser, and it starts well before that fateful night in the bath.

It can be found over on her Instagram account, where she visually depicts a life that appears to be heading towards perfection in an ever-ascending arc. Row after row of artfully composed photographs display her gorgeous existence for the admiration of passers-by. There are morning espressos in Venice, where she seems to spend much of the year; shots of her beautiful children and handsome man; selfie after selfie of her own toned body and immensely photogenic face.

Here is Liz flushed after another marathon; here she is drinking champagne and toasting the camera; here she stands on a mountain peak. Here is a picture of her brunch in Salzburg; here she is in the bath again, muscled legs stretched out glistening before her. The accompanying captions try to convey humility and likableness, and her wish to “make a small difference to some part of the universe”, but the pictures themselves scream success, money, desirability, winning at life.

Viewers are obviously supposed to covet what this woman has, for there would be little point in the laborious display otherwise. What they are not supposed to do, presumably, is imagine Fraser taking a photo of her own legs in the bath: tucking her chin, craning her neck awkwardly back and perching the phone on her chest as she tries to get the angle right, wiping the lens intermittently with a washcloth to stop it getting fogged up. The anonymous posters on Tattle Life imagine all this sort of thing and more, providing a brutally deflating commentary to the curated exhibition that is often as funny as it is biting. Egging each other on, they virtually gather to dissect, mock, speculate, bitch, and generally have a lovely time at Fraser’s expense. And they are particularly scathing about the way she likes to photograph her own legs.

So rather than a simple story of inexplicable internet harassment, what we have is a cautionary tale, featuring a co-dependent relationship between two parties: on the one hand, the influencer whose aim is to evoke a feeling of envy in others, and on the other, groups of anonymous posters who readily oblige. Of course, most influencers will furiously deny the charge, partly because being a thoroughly nice person without any rapacious superego whatsoever is a standard part of the female influencer schtick. Or as one Tattle Life commentator summed up the contradiction, as it manifests in Fraser specifically: she want us to know she is both “#hot and #humble”.

Equally, the anonymous posters on gossip sites will presumably deny they are really envious of the women they criticize. It is easy to pretend these places are just an extension of having a good gossip with friends, but there’s an obvious difference which betrays the spiteful edge. Namely, your targets can read what you are saying; and indeed, many posters on Tattle Life seem positively to want them to. As Fraser says, she is often addressed directly by posters. There is no doubt things can get out of hand in such places, with reputations seriously trashed as a result. Anonymity means tempting disinhibition, and envy doesn’t tend to know when to stop.

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In her article, Fraser says she used investigators to find out the identities of her anonymous trolls, and discovered they were “almost exclusively women, often middle class, educated and mostly in their forties and fifties”, some of whom work “in journalism or in business” and who “post photos of walks in the woods, holidays in pretty European villages, and … charity fun runs”. In other words, they sound very much like her.  A long time before the internet, Aristotle perspicuously noted that “we envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation”. Or as Hesiod put it, more pithily, “beggar is envious of beggar and singer of singer”.

Yet despite her undoubted suffering over the years at the typing fingers of rivalrous mean girls, I can’t get too worked up about Fraser’s plight in the Venetian bathtub. There is an easy enough way to stop anonymous saddos talking about you on the internet, and it involves not being a massive show-off about your life. In contrast, the story of Princess Bliss Dickson —  the teenage child of influencer Sophie-May Dickson, who took her own life in February, allegedly after Tattle Life criticism — is genuinely dark and disturbing.  It really does suggest we urgently need to change the norms governing female social media use — though in a way that has nothing much to do with gossip websites per se.

At the time of her death, Princess Bliss had her own TikTok account where she would pout and grind in a heartbreakingly self-conscious way for the camera, as girls these days often do. But unlike most teenagers, she had already been in the public eye for most of her life. Aged four, she was featured in a 2014 television documentary, getting a spray tan. The show was about mothers — including her own, Sophie-May Dickson — who would painfully tease hair weaves in their tiny daughters’ curls, dress them in elaborate frills and furbelows, and cover them in make-up and glitter. Some comic genius at Channel 5 called the show “Blinging Up Baby”.  Gleeful pieces in the tabloids followed, and a year later the mother also appeared on This Morning to discuss the excessive “pampering” of her two girls. The die seemed to be cast. From then on, Princess Bliss and her sister would be turned into living dolls full-time — and when television ceased to be interested, Sophie-May’s social media accounts would take up the slack.

Reportedly living in supported accommodation at the time of her death, the girl is said to have read critical comments on Tattle Life, both about her mother and herself, before her overdose of prescription medicine. Campaigners are implying that these must have been instrumental in her act. In advance of the release of a coroner’s report, it is hard to see how this connection can be made for sure; not to mention that it flies in the face of all professional advice about avoiding speculation in such cases.

But what we can say, perhaps, is that the role of Tattle Life in the awful saga is somewhat double-edged. Certainly, it was a place where cruel things were being said about the mother at the time, with a few strays caught by her blameless daughters too; and I wonder if posters really think about what it is like for a loyal child of a target to read this stuff. But equally, a lot of outrage was being expressed on the girls’ behalf about the circus-like spectacle being made of their young lives. And in that sentiment, at least, the anonymous posters weren’t wrong. In fact, they were drawing attention to an issue of child safeguarding few others seemed to care about.

Taken together, the Fraser and the Dickson cases demonstrate the unstable role of female gossip in the moral economy, and especially when the internet gets involved.  Sometimes — perhaps even usually — it’s just a cheap way of striking at another person who makes you feel inferior and crap about your life, with criticism and mockery employed as a kind of leveling psychic compensation. But sometimes gossip has a constructive role, a way of expressing collective moral disapproval: of chewing someone’s behavior over from every angle, and saying out loud what they are doing wrong. Tattle Life exemplifies both tendencies vividly, and you can’t lose one without the other.

The campaigners who want to see these sites banned conjure up an improbable world, where you can still have influencers and celebrities posting endless vain selfies and humblebrags to their rapt followers, but suppress the skepticism, envy, and spite of those not similarly entranced. I don’t think that’s possible. Last time I checked, Liz Fraser was still merrily posting about her fire emoji life, and says she is now writing a book about “female-female rivalry”. Meanwhile, Sophie-May Dickson was putting up pictures of  Princess Bliss’s funeral, and seems to have coordinated her outfit with the coffin (still image and video both available for clicks). With such people in the world, I predict the gossips are not going to go away anytime soon. And to be perfectly honest, I’m tempted to join them.

If the same incident replayed today — let’s imagine that the spirit of Glenn has possessed the mind of Gareth — the purification ritual would be just as intense, but its rhetorical architecture would be different. The manager would be called out for disseminating dangerous misinformation. Anti-hate NGOs and think-tanks would conduct rapid-reaction research on how many social media accounts “liked” and shared the manager’s hateful narrative. And Marianna Spring, the BBC’s indefatigable disinformation journalist, would no doubt launch a special investigation to expose all the harm caused, especially to women and minorities with disabilities.

Misinformation, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed. The difference today, as Spring explains in her book, Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, is that it’s now “turbocharged”, spreading at a rate and volume hitherto unprecedented, thanks to the internet and social media. At the same time, an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.

Spring’s book shines a vivid light onto the assumptions and biases of those who toil away in it. This isn’t, of course, the book’s purpose. Spring’s aim, rather, is to journey into conspiracyland and to speak to its inhabitants in order to better understand who they are and how they got there. Her intention is also to show that what goes on in conspiracyland can cause suffering far beyond it. Often, she steps into the centre of her own story, relaying all the voluminous hate that she herself has received as a result of her reporting. She even reaches out to several of her trolls to understand their motives.

Spring argues that disinformation (i.e. deliberate lying) doesn’t just cause harm to private citizens and journalists like herself, but threatens the very fabric of democracy. She cites the January 6 storming of the US Capitol as a primary example, even though democracy didn’t in fact die in darkness on that day — and the chance of Trump’s motley crew of mostly unarmed supporters seizing power was almost zero.

One side-effect of hate, Spring observes, is that it intimidates people and makes them fearful to speak out. She’s right, of course: many people, for example, are afraid to criticise or mock Islam because they’re worried that some Muslim believers might murder them for it, as happened to Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and in Paris in 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were coldly executed by brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Many, too, are afraid to criticise the political claims and activities of Islamists, believing — with some warrant — that to do so will incur the damaging and sometimes dangerous charge of “Islamophobia”. This point holds with even greater vehemence within the Islamic fold, where Muslims have been murdered after hateful accusations of blasphemy and apostasy have been levelled against them.

However, Spring doesn’t discuss these examples, intuiting perhaps that were she to do so it wouldn’t be good for business or her personal safety. (“How I Confronted My Jihadi Troll” isn’t happening anytime soon over at BBC Sounds.) Nor does she show any curiosity about the huge, roiling global conspiracy theory called jihadism that has directly led to the deaths of hundreds of British civilians over the last decade and a half — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Muslims and other minorities it has killed elsewhere across the globe.

The book goes on to argue that because hate undermines free speech it should be censored and that social media companies should be more vigorously pressured by governments to eradicate hate from their platforms. This is a weak and incoherent argument: even controversial ideas, such as the view that some women make poor football pundits, deserve to be protected from censorship. Of course, there are limits to free speech and there are laws that punish speech which causes direct and serious harms, such as incitement to violence, fraud, perjury and defamation. But the kinds of limits Spring has in mind are far more expansive than this and would permit the prohibition of a vast swathe of speech that is offensive but not dangerous. At no point does she consider that prohibiting such speech would itself cause serious harm to the very democratic values she claims to uphold.

Indeed, Among the Trolls is a somewhat repetitive and predictable book written in the tone of a concerned school mistress whose reprimands are more in sorrow than in anger. The conspiracy theorists Spring meets are more banal than demonic, the tech companies she presses for comment are cold and unresponsive bureaucracies, and the ordinary normies who are harassed by conspiracy theorists are all very lovely and relatable.

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These clichés of thought are dutifully recorded in clichés of prose. Popular conspiracy theories, we’re informed seven times, “spread like wildfire”, while the people who believe in them have “fallen down the rabbit hole”. One prominent conspiracy theorist, it turns out, “seemed to have gone off the deep end”, while a long-suffering son of another “had reached his wits’ end”.

Spring seems to have fallen down a “rabbit hole” herself. Recent research by academic Sacha Altay and his colleagues shows that, contrary to Spring’s narrative, the internet is not saturated with misinformation, but with memes and entertainment; that falsehoods don’t spread faster than the truth; that people don’t believe everything they see online; that they’re more likely to be uninformed than misinformed; and that the influence of misinformation is exaggerated since it often “preaches to the choir”.

Many of the popular misconceptions identified by Altay inform the overarching narrative of Among the Trolls, and while Spring tries to be non-judgmental toward the conspiracy theorists she meets, especially the “true believers”, her approach is deterministic and a little patronising. Many, she thinks, “are misguided and misled, vulnerable to the worst liars and lies”. Indeed, Spring often suggests that were it not for some wound in their lives they would have never journeyed to conspiracyland.

What this account fails to capture is not only the agency of those in conspiracyland, but also its intrinsic appeal to those who jump towards it. Conspiracy culture, for those who are part of it, offers a profound spiritual enlargement of the world, imbuing it with hidden meanings, mysteries and secrets. Conspiracies can be engaging and fun and thrillingly transgressive. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Among the Trolls.

Anyone who touts themself as a disinformation journalist will inevitability be accused of purveying disinformation. Spring’s online critics have said the same about her, and when it transpired that she had once told a lie to advance her career — she’d made something up on her CV — many sought to make a great deal of hay out of it. There are no lies in Among the Trolls, as far as I could tell, but there are several instances when Spring trades in what she herself would call misinformation. One of these concerns the racist abuse targeted at England’s black players after the Euro 2021 final against Italy, which England lost on penalties. She writes that “a mural that honoured [Marcus] Rashford in Withington, the suburb of Manchester where he’d grown up, was defaced”, strongly implying that this was motivated by racism. It wasn’t.

But the deeper problem with Among the Trolls relates to its sins of omission. It is here that the inherent political bias of Spring’s wider enterprise reveals itself. “I’m driven by exposing disinformation, hate and polarisation that cause serious harm and often reach a significant number of people,” she writes. Yet only insofar as it has a Right-wing valence, for Spring has little interest in conspiracy theories or misinformation that lean Left. This reflects a broader selectivity bias among disinformation journalists, for whom, as the statistician and writer Nate Silver has observed, the “term ‘misinformation’ nearly always signifies conservative arguments (which may or may not be actual misinfo)”.

There isn’t much self-awareness or self-doubt in Among the Trolls. Spring notes that conspiracy theories thrive because of a distrust of mainstream media. This is surely true, but she doesn’t recognise that the kind of politicised journalism she engages in helps deepen that distrust. On a few occasions when she meets the denizens of conspiracyland, she pushes them to defend their beliefs with evidence and then gently chides them when they cannot. Yet it never seems to occur to her that she, too, has beliefs or that those beliefs, which closely adhere to the official consensus that now underpins all elite institutions, require any kind of defence. Rather, she just assumes that they are true — and that any deviation from them amounts to misinformation.

Despite the best efforts of disinformation journalists, conspiracyland is here to stay: the demand for it is just too great. People want and like conspiracies — and nobody more so than those who make a lucrative and celebrated career out of finding and exposing them.