Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror season 3, episode 6, "Hated In The Nation," is actually based on a real-life event that happened to him back in 2004. The dystopian Netflix series features numerous unsettling stories about technology's impact on humanity and how it will ultimately lead to its downfall. In "Hated In The Nation", Brooker includes one of his own experiences where technology impacted his ability to navigate the world when he received negative feedback for a controversial editorial.
After Netflix acquired the series, they released a powerful follow-up to Black Mirror season 2 with six episodes that are unforgettable for individually unique reasons. "Hated In The Nation" follows Jo Powers (Elizabeth Berrington), a journalist who insulted a disability rights activist and finds herself the subject of death threats from across the nation. After she is found dead, even more people become the center of various controversies that causes the hashtag #DeathTo to start trending everywhere in the Black Mirror universe. The hashtag is a call to action for people worldwide to seek out the person whose name is trending and kill them. Every day there is a new name of someone who is deemed the most hated person in the nation at that moment.
The plot of "Hated In The Nation" serves to critique cancel culture and bring attention to the real death threats that people can experience for anything they say or do, no matter how big or small. It's also reflective of a moment in Brooker's personal life. While the concept is shrouded in deeply controversial topics, it is still an important dialogue on the mob mentality that can build online, especially in the world of journalism where opinion pieces and editorials can be misinterpreted or contain a controversial opinion that provokes an outcry from the public and, sometimes, goes entirely too far.
Prior to becoming the creator of Black Mirror, Brooker worked in print journalism as a social critic who wrote editorials on several different subjects. In the year 2004, he wrote an article critiquing the United States' presidential election between republican George W. Bush and democrat John Kerry. On October 24, 2004, the editorial released and revealed that Brooker had called for the assassination of Bush by referencing infamous assassins in history, including the man who killed President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth.
The article was first published through The Guardian, but was swiftly removed due to the controversy. Shortly after, Brooker issued an apology, but he could never recover from the comments he made in the piece. In the aftermath, he received death threats from people across the world. Despite the fact that Twitter—which is often the source for these criticisms in recent years—did not exist at the moment, the abundance of hate he received through email was enough for him to transform his unsettling experience with death threats into what would become "Hated In The Nation". At that moment, Brooker felt as though he was one of the most hated people in the nation for his opinion; this episode showcases how disturbing it can become once a popular Internet hashtag is involved.
Charlie Brooker's series is no stranger to critiquing controversial technologies and people, especially considering episodes such as "The Waldo Moment" and "The National Anthem". Given this, it comes as no surprise that "Hated In The Nation" premiered at the time that it did. Brooker released his editorial during the 2004 presidential election. Black Mirror's season 3, episode 6, "Hated In The Nation," premiered at the height of the highly contentious 2016 presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.