Why talk about the far-right?

I hope that the vast majority of people reading this agree that the far-right is an unpleasant subject. Believe, building this report has been a big emotional drain, especially as a queer minority myself.

However, amidst the far-right riots in the UK, it’s not something we can ignore. It’s not something happening in the depths of 4chan or fringe Reddit alternatives - it’s a real-world threat that makes many people live in fear. As a self-proclaimed scientist, the least I can do is try to understand it better.

So, I do have a few motivations for this report:

• There is never harm in understanding. Understanding at a more cultural and personal level helps us all stay more aware, safe, and mindful. This exercise also helps to take down some myths and debunk narratives.
• Understanding what key topics and channels are connecting to far-right movements can tell us a bit more about the “far-right pipeline”. This helps us identify “at-risk” individuals - either those who are risky for us because of a high likelihood of holding extreme views, or for younger people those who are being actively radicalized.
• Lastly, I want to prove just how straightforward it would be to completely remove this space from the mainstream social media - it’s literally a week’s worth of work to do so for any given platform with painfully simple and cheap algorithms.

Where do we start?

How do we quantify such a community as “UK’s far-right” online? How do we distinguish between those active and mere observers?

In my research, I use the principle of self-curation - people prefer to see the content they resonate with. While there are minorities who consume “rage-content” - things they highly disagree with just to be outraged - most users do not follow this patterns. So people, as a rule of thumb, follow content they agree with or resonate with.

Therefore we can define a community by what content they follow - i.e. a brand, an influencer, a hashtag, a creator, etc. Looking at the news, there is one community that sparks the most interest - the one cultivated by Tommy Robinson.

Tommy Robinson is a prolific British figure in the far-right and has been cited as the instigator of the ongoing Riots. He’s notably been banned from Twitter before, and a few publications like this article from The Guardian attribute him as one of the key figures igniting the fires of recent riots.

Where are the brave inciters of Britain’s race riots? From Tommy to Elon, they’re far, far away | Marina Hyde

And I’ve seen this post in particular mentioned on several occasions as THE big fire-starter. Not sure what is to unique about this post, given that Tommy likes to send his unfiltered stream of consciousness about every 30 minutes, but let’s start here!