After the Southport riots last year, when around two dozen people were arrested due to social media posts relating to them, Pamela sat down with a question: in what sort of online culture were those people immersed?
“Our mentality was, if those comments had reached a criminal bar … what sort of environment were they participating in where could these things could be said?” she said.
The data team found the public-facing Facebook profiles of those charged, and 16 different groups in their broader network, interlinked via common admins and moderators running them. They examined the posts of those groups, and found that many, knowingly or not, were interacting with content which one expert said “echoed fascist methods used throughout history”.
There was a wide range of activity on the groups but most worrying were posts that followed a pattern of dehumanisation and demonisation of migrants – accounting for one-in-10 posts captured by the Guardian – Muslims and non-white people – who were often portrayed as dangerous, deceitful, criminal or culturally incompatible with UK life.
Some posts used subtle insinuations about “military-aged men” and “grooming gangs” – as a sort of coded language for the inherent threat that immigrants pose. Others simply labelled all immigrants as “illegals” or an “invasion”. Some were plain racist. Other key themes emerged: of a deep distrust in the government and its institutions, misinformation and conspiracy theories, many containing far-right tropes as well as evidence of white nativism.
Now Pamela says she has seen similar language being used by mainstream politicians.
“I’ve been watching a lot of what’s coming out of the [party] conferences in the past few weeks, and what’s struck me has been that the kind of rhetoric we are seeing in these groups is now being reflected in mainstream speeches,” says Pamela.
Most obvious are the comments coming out of the Reform conference – in particular, Pamela points to people like Zia Yusuf, who spoke about the “invasion of our country” by “tens of thousands of fighting aged males”.
Shocking, perhaps, but also maybe what to expect of Reform. What’s more astonishing is how it has bled into the discourse within the Conservative party recently.
No white faces
I almost choked on my cornflakes on Tuesday morning, listening to Kemi Badenoch respond to comments that Robert Jenrick, the shadow secretary for justice, made about Handsworth at a dinner in the West Midlands. He compared the area to a slum, and stated he “hadn’t seen another white face” in the 90 minutes he was there, adding: “that’s not the country I want to live in”.
Appearing on Radio 4’s Today Programme, Badenoch first suggested the Guardian’s recording could have been taken out of context, adding: “What really worries me is that there are a lot of people in Birmingham who are not integrating.” Pressed on whether the number of white people you see in an area is a good measure of integration, Badenoch said: “I’m making a far more important point … What I don’t want is for us to not say anything because everybody’s scared about offending someone else, and then we end up having huge scandals like the grooming scandal where I remember a parent telling me that she was arrested because the police said she was racist because she pointed out that her child had gotten into a car with Asian men.”
I asked Pamela whether this sort of rhetoric chimes with what she’s seen posted on far-right Facebook groups.
“This idea of grooming gangs, military aged men – these are the new dog whistles, and they are the tell tale signs,” she said.
Another thing the team found was how these Facebook groups drove anti-establishment ideas, and experts said that this language ultimately ends up benefiting Reform. That mistrust of institutions grew into something more insidious in the wake of the riots: with people posting in support of the Southport rioters, and taking issue with people being jailed for online offences.
In her closing speech at party conference, Badenoch also seemed to take offence at the law being used against people who have said illegal things online: “Hundreds of thousands of police hours are wasted every year on non-crime hate incidents and form filling officers chasing tweets instead of thieves,” she said.
Could the Tories be seeking to benefit from the same anti-establishment rhetoric that Reform has, now that they’re no longer in power? Judging intent is always hard, says Pamela, but the signals are clear. She points to Jenrick doing a bit with a periwig at conference, and talking about supposed links between judges who support open borders and their rulings.
“I was really shocked by Jenrick taking out the wig and undermining how judges are appointed, talking about two-tier sentencing rules and guidelines. That’s something that we saw reflected in our research as well,” Pamela says.
Illusory effect
One of the problems with the way far-right rhetoric has spread on social media is that many people – faced with the same information again and again – start to think “if I’ve seen it so many times, it must be true”.
But considering the amount of misinformation there is online, compounded with the widespread failure of social media companies to moderate this sort of content on their platforms, the danger is that people increasingly live in worlds where they believe fringe, often verifiably false views are more popular than they are. As Prof Sander van der Linden, an expert in the impact of conspiracy and misinformation and its connection to extremism put it in our reporting: “You may be able to find two people in your neighbourhood who feel the same way, but now you can connect with thousands of individuals who feel the same way as you in a matter of seconds, which leads to a misperception about what the consensus is in society.”
But what is the impact when similar rhetoric comes from the leaders of mainstream parties?
“It definitely feeds into the normalisation of this language,” says Pamela. “There is a validation when it’s put in the mouths of more serious politicians. They are getting airtime, and their quotes will be clipped and posted, put on television and will be heard, potentially, by millions.”
She adds that it’s not just Reform – with their references to “invasions” of migrants during party conference – that are guilty of this.
“We saw it even with Keir Starmer, with his speech on us becoming a nation of strangers not so long ago,” she says. The prime minister may now say he regrets those words, but “we should not forget that he said them,” says Pamela.
“The breadth of the problem seems so great, and nobody seems to be hitting the brakes on it,” she continues. “It just seems to be getting worse and worse.”
