A Nordic noir-inspired episode, "Hated in the Nation" follows Detectives Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) and Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay) as they investigate a spate of deaths targeting the subjects of social media hatred, at the hands of Autonomous Drone Insects (ADIs) that have been deployed to combat environmental catastrophe as bees near extinction.

Informed by Brooker's experience of receiving hate mail after writing a 2004 Guardian column that disparaged George W. Bush, the episode drew comparison to The X-Files and explored themes including government surveillance and environmentalism.

Before a public inquiry, London Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) explains her role investigating the death of Jo Powers (Elizabeth Berrington), a controversial far-right journalist found dead after writing a widely condemned column that derided a self-immolating disability rights activist.

The next day, the rapper Tusk (Charles Babalola)—attacked on social media after insulting a child fan—has a seizure and dies in an MRI machine as its magnetic field pulls a metallic object out of his brain, through his eye socket.

Coulson finds #DeathTo was started by spambots posting a "Game of Consequences" video, where the most-mentioned person with the hashtag each day will be killed.

Parke interviews ex-Granular employee Tess Wallander (Georgina Rich) and learns that she was found attempting suicide by colleague Garrett Scholes (Duncan Pow) after receiving online hate.

[12] The experience informed the dialogue in the episode which compares online shaming to weather, in Brooker's words "like there's this [...] ominous ion cloud hanging over you, and rather like a mental illness".

However, the experience was prior to the formation of Twitter; Brooker said that around 2013 he sensed a change in public opinion over the identification of social media as a toxic environment.

He focused on pacing the escalation as the scope of the storyline changed from local to global, also choosing a limited colour palette to match the episode's genre.

[17][18] Emily VanDerWerff of Vox wrote that The X-Files' trope of one detective being a "believer" and their colleague a "skeptic" was adapted to Blue being "tech-savvy" and Karin being a "virtual Luddite".

[18] Alex Mullane of Digital Spy instead drew comparison to the films Minority Report (2002) and I, Robot (2004), as each features a detective investigating murder in the context of a science-fiction world.

[14] Plaugic saw the preschool teacher who sent Powers hate mail as illustrative of how people's social media presences can be "completely disconnected from their lives".

[16] VanDerWerff thought that Scholes could be viewed as a self-insertion by Brooker, the character "full of outlandishly grand ideas" and forcing others to "consider the darker side of technology".

[18] Rob Leane wrote in Den of Geek that accounts in So You've Been Publicly Shamed were relevant to the episode, such as a woman whose career was significantly affected by a viral image of her swearing beside a military cemetery sign.

[17] In Variety, Sonia Saraiya linked the themes of social media and government surveillance in that "both blur the divide between the public and private spheres", and the episode explores whether either "ends up making us more connected or safer".

[23] On the subject of environmentalism, Mullane saw the setting as a "near-future in which species are regularly blinking out of existence due to climate change" and "human indifference", among them bees.

[14] Leane found that similar bee technologies had been piloted in the real world, including the RoboBee, which is designed for agriculture or disaster relief.

[21] Allusions are made to previous episodes, largely through news tickers and trending topics on displayed social media screens.

[24][25] Trending social media topics reference a video game from "Playtest", the prime minister from "The National Anthem" and White Bear from the episode of the same name.

[14][17][18][28] Contrastingly, The Telegraph's Robbie Collin reviewed that Hawes used the runtime "to give the moral complexities of Brooker's script the breathing space they deserve".

[14][18] Agard approved of Scholes being grounded by "motivations in something personal", though Plaugic saw his character as less interesting than an unexplored potential for the episode to show how #DeathTo participants act once realising its effects.

VanDerWerff found that the "full weight" of Scholes' actions "doesn't register as much as it could", though praising the "nasty" twist and "nicely inconclusive" ending.

[19] Agard was "genuinely engaged with the story",[28] while Bramesco praised the writing for a "surprising facility for the stylized language of pulp crime novels".

IndieWire authors ranked the 22 Black Mirror instalments excluding Bandersnatch by quality, giving "Hated in the Nation" a position of 5th.