How 550 Facebook Users Spread Britain First Content To Hundreds Of Thousands Of People
The Facebook profiles seem entirely ordinary. Scattered across towns in England, Wales, and Scotland – as well as Spain, Australia, and the US – they share photos of their grandchildren, missing children warnings, sad tales of animal abuse, and cute memes about hugs.
But these 559 profiles are also among the most prolific spreaders and boosters of anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, and far-right content on the internet. Each of them has liked hundreds of posts on a leading far-right political party’s page, prompting Facebook’s algorithms to push the content up the News Feeds of first thousands, then hundreds of thousands more.
BuzzFeed News has analysed more than a million likes by 350,000 people of posts on the “official” Britain First Facebook page, made over six weeks. The data gives a unique insight into how one of the social network’s most controversial pages gets promoted across the platform, who its most active fans are, and what content they share the most.
Britain First’s Facebook page is liked by more than 1.5 million people and markets itself as an official page for the far-right UK political party formed by former members of the BNP. The fringe party has no elected MPs, MEPs, or councillors, and its former leader was jailed last month for violating a court order forbidding him from entering any mosque in the UK.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/how-550-facebook-users-spread-britain-first-content-to-hundr
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