No brand is a stranger to verbal abuse on social media, but few know how deep the problem is rooted in human behaviour and which platform features exacerbate certain elements of those actions. Our guest this week is Claire Hardaker, forensic and corpus linguist and senior lecturer in linguistics and english language at Lancaster University. In this episode, she explains the psychological factors that drive verbal abuse, how to tell trolling apart from genuine criticism, and where big tech's response is satisfactory, or not. Plus we discuss our best possible solutions for dealing with it - and, spoiler alert, it isn't providing government I.D.

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