The Dynamics of Support for the Far-Right on Social Media: Britain First and Facebook

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Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of online support for a far-right social
movement. Britain First used social media to reach an audience of unprecendented
scale, rivaling that of mainstream political parties, despite its relatively
small offline presence. Little is understood, however, about what has driven
the massive recent upsurge in support for the far-right online and offline. I
examine a number of competing explanations, considering the role of the media,
elections, terrorist attacks, offline mobilization, as well as social media activity.
I constructed a dataset to measure changes in support for the group over a
four-year period and use vector-error correction time series regression to model
these dynamics. I find that changes in support for the group are driven both by
external events and dynamics endogenous to social media.

Author

• Thomas Davidson, Cornell University