Laura Kuenssberg has stopped reading online comments and almost removed herself from social media altogether, after she was subject to vitriolic abuse.
The BBC’s political editor said she used to be a keen proponent of social media but has now seen another side of it.
“I’ve tried to pull back and I’ve thought about coming off it all together," Kuenssberg, who is the first woman to hold the position, told author Tom Baldwin in an interview for a new book. “Partly, that’s because it’s uglier out there now; it’s like a playground where people want to shout each other down.
"I don’t read the comments people write about me – it’s not worth it.”
Her comments were made to Mr Baldwin for his book Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy which was published last week.
Kuenssberg used to espouse social media’s ability to sever barriers between journalists and the general public.
In 2008, Baldwin writes, she “made a formal submission to the BBC’s board of directors about why reporters like her should be using Twitter. Six months later, she won the right to start tweeting without having each one of her 140 characters approved by her bosses.”
“What I was excited about was the opportunity for punters to be part of politics,” Kuenssberg recalled. “The whole idea was to allow the voices of people outside this weirdo palace of Westminster to be heard. I thought the whole social media thing might be really positive… The atmosphere now is so grim, it’s easy to lose sight of the way grassroots campaign groups have been able to grow online.”
Kuenssberg is by no means the only political journalist to have raised alarm bells about online abuse. The New York Times' White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman, said last week that she was “taking a break” from Twitter due to increasing “toxic partisan anger”.
The political reporter, who has broken some of the biggest stories about Donald Trump’s presidency, had been on the network for nine years and would fire off many tweets a day.
“Twitter is now an anger video game for many users,” Haberman wrote in a piece for her newspaper. “It is the only platform on which people feel free to say things they’d never say to someone’s face. For me, it had become an enormous and pointless drain on my time and mental energy.”
She added: “The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight. It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious”.
