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Charlie Brooker has revealed a very personal connection to his new series of Black Mirror, which started streaming on Netflix today.

The series finale, Hated in the Nation , looks at the possible future consequences of spilling hate online, if advanced technology gets involved.

Brooker has himself faced the vitriol of the anonymous internet mob, after he wrote "Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?" in a satirical article on then US President George W Bush, for The Guardian in 2004.

The flippant line led to an avalanche of angry emails; Twitter had not yet been invented.

(Image: Netflix)

Brooker told the BBC : "That experience definitely fed into that episode, which we call Hated in the Nation, as it deals with people getting trolled on Twitter."

"My own incident pre-dated Twitter, and my vilification was done by good old-fashioned email, but some of the characters in Hated in the Nation say things that I was experiencing at the time.

"The whole thing is terrifying."

(Image: Netflix)

Brooker's fear and horror at the memory comes across strongly in Hated in the Nation, where the outcome of a cruel hashtag leads to huge and heart-stoppingly horrifying events.

Black Mirror has gained a reputation for predicting the future , with an episode showing the Prime Minister forced to have sex with a pig pre-dating David Cameron's Pig Gate, and a cartoon bear running for office in The Waldo Moment predicting Donald Trump's current shenaniganes.

"But I hope I'm not a prophet," Brooker adds. "Because Black Mirror is really based upon my incessant worrying about everything.

"The thing that really keeps me awake at night, and has done since I was a child, is the thought of nuclear war. I really don't want to create an episode on that."