Rachel Riley

I have in the past received thousands of abusive social media messages at a time. I used to feel that not responding to trolls or blocking them was weak, so I would call them out and try to engage in a reasoned debate. The ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’ guide from the Center for Countering Digital Hate totally changed the way I interact on social media. It showed me, using evidence, why engaging with posts by those who use identity–based hate — against women, LGBT people and racial or religious minorities — is the wrong approach.

If you told me this time last year that, come January 2019, I’d be standing in Parliament, addressing a room full of people at a Holocaust memorial event, describing the hideous abuse I’ve been receiving daily since I started speaking about the growing problem of anti-Semitism in the UK, I wouldn’t know where to begin with my incredulity. My own identity as a Jew has been a confusing one. As I often joke, my mum’s Jewish and my dad’s Man United, and we’ve worshipped far more often at the Theatre of Dreams than I’ve ever been to shul. As a child, I knew not to sing the Jesus bit in the assembly hymns but the bacon sandwiches mum would feed us meant I didn’t quite know where we fit into all of this.