BRITAIN FIRST AND THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY: SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOVEMENT-PARTY DYNAMICS1

Thomas Davidson and Mabel Berezin2

FORTHCOMING IN DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF MOBILIZATION. PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION.

Social movement scholars have recently turned their attention to the interactions between political parties and social movements, but little is known about how social media have impacted these relationships, despite widespread adoption of these technologies. We present a case study of the relationship between Britain First, a far-right anti-Muslim social movement, and the U.K. Independence Party, the Eurosceptic political party that spearheaded the Brexit campaign. The movement appeared marginal in the press but it dominated social media, using this presence to support to the party. We examine the dynamics of the relationship between these groups from 2013 until 2017, drawing upon data from social media, newspapers, and other online sources, and focusing on interactions between elites and rank-and-file supporters. Our findings illustrate how far-right groups have used new technologies to generate an unprecedented amount of popular support and to attempt to influence the political mainstream.

A number of western democracies have recently experienced a resurgence of right-wing political activity in both the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary sphere (Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn 2016; Mudde 2016; Muis and Immerzeel 2017). In Germany, the unprecedented electoral performance of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been coupled with the rise of the anti-Islam PEGIDA protest movement (Stier, Posch, Bleier, and Strohmaier 2017); in the United States, the right-wing campaign and then presidency of Donald Trump, which have been marked by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, have also been accompanied extreme right protest activity by white nationalists and the “alt-right,” including violent protests such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville (Nagle 2017); and in the United Kingdom, the electoral breakthrough of the radical right U.K. Independence Party, which pressured government to initiate the Brexit referendum (Bale 2018), occurred as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movements have protested across the country and developed large followings on social media (Allen 2011, 2014; Bartlett and Littler 2011; Jackson and Feldman 2011). In parallel to the resurgence of the extreme right, both institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics have increasingly been taking place in online, as political parties and social movements adopt social media technologies. While these technologies were initially lauded for facilitating progressive movements that aimed to deepen democracy (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Mason 2013), they have recently been used to

1 We would like to thank Tim Bale, Kathleen Blee, Michael Macy, John McCarthy, Emily Parker, George Ross, Michael Schwartz, members of the Social Dynamics Lab at Cornell, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We also want to thank Dawit Mekonnen, Jiangjie Man, Jing Xia, Manuel Arturo Abreu, Ryan Enderby, and Weiran Song for their invaluable research assistance. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2016 Annual International Conference of Europeanists in Philadelphia, the 2017 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, and the 2018 Young Scholars in Social Movements Conference at the University of Notre Dame. All errors are our own. 2 Thomas Davidson is a doctoral candidate and Mabel Berezin is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Direct correspondence to: Thomas Davidson, [email protected]. 2 Mobilization mobilize the radical right and other anti-democratic groups (Tucker, Theocharis, Roberts, and Barberá 2017). Scholars of social movements have drawn attention to the need to understand the relationships between movements and parties (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), the study of which has become an important area for contemporary research (Heaney and Rojas 2015; Schlozman 2015; Skocpol and Williamson 2012). In particular, adopting social network theory has enabled social movements scholars to consider how different movements are connected to one another and to other types of organizations (see Diani 2003). These interactions can occur at the elite level, as individuals act as brokers between movements and parties (Schlozman 2015), and at the grassroots level, as rank-and-file activists and partisans interact (Heaney and Rojas 2007, 2011). We aim to build upon this work by examining the interactions between radical right parties, movements, and their supporters in the age of social media technologies. We conduct a case study of the interactions between the far-right anti-Muslim movement, Britain First (BF), and the right-wing Eurosceptic party the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). We combine data collected from newspapers, social media, and other online sources to study their relationship and its dynamics, both at the level of movement and party elites and their rank-and-file supporters. We use these fine-grained data to reconstruct the relationship between BF and UKIP over four years, from late 2013 to mid-2017, a period that included two general elections and the Brexit referendum. Our study aims to address the following questions: To what extent are extreme right movements interacting with mainstream political parties? What can social media data tell us about these interactions? Who is associated with both groups and how do they differ from other movement or party supporters? And how and why did the relationship between UKIP and BF change over time? Our results show how a one-sided relationship at the elite level belied a substantial connection between BF and UKIP’s rank-and-file supporters, including many people who were active in support of the agendas of both groups. From UKIP’s initial electoral breakthrough in 2014 until the Brexit referendum in 2016, we observed frequent interactions between their supporters. Many promoted the cause of leaving the EU and attempted to connect this to grievances towards Islam. Following the success of the Brexit referendum UKIP went into decline, effectively ending their relationship and prompting BF’s leaders to consider turning towards electoral politics. UKIP has since adopted Islam as a key issue, suggesting that BF’s support may have had some influence on the party. Our study makes a contribution towards understanding movement-party relationships in the age of social media and the nature of the relationships between different types of organizations on the radical right. Furthermore, we demonstrate how data collected from social media, in combination with other sources, can provide a valuable resource for scholars of social movements. We conclude by generalizing from our case study to help understand similar developments in other countries and contexts, focusing in particular on the United States and Germany.

DYNAMICS OF MOVEMENT-PARTY RELATIONSHIPS

In contrast to prior scholarship that considered noninstitutionalized social movements and institutionalized political parties in isolation, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly argued that it is necessary to study political parties and social movements in tandem because “the two sorts of politics interact incessantly and involve similar causal processes” (2001: 6-7). Movements and parties often enter into relationships that are mutually beneficial: social movements can provide mass support for parties during elections, helping to mobilize people to vote (McAdam and Tarrow 2010; Schlozman 2015), and political parties can legitimate movements and help to enact policy in support of their goals (Kriesi 2004, 2015; McAdam and Tarrow 2010; Schlozman 2015). They can also have hostile relationships, including competition and takeovers (Schwartz 2010). These relationships can fluctuate Social3 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction considerably over time due to changes to the political opportunity structure that can enable and constrain both movement activism and the fortunes of political parties (Kriesi 2004; McAdam 2010; Meyer and Minkoff 2004; Tarrow 1998). Longitudinal studies emphasize how changing environmental conditions affect the ebb and flow of mobilization (Koopmans 1993; McAdam 2010). For example, civil rights protests were most frequent in the presence of Democratic incumbents, while the passage of legislation, one of the central goals of the movement, dampened protest and weakened the movement (Meyer and Minkoff 2004). Similarly, the election of Barack Obama stifled the Democrat-leaning anti-war movement which had thrived under George W. Bush’s presidency (Heaney and Rojas 2011, 2015). Movement activism can also provide new opportunities for political parties by reshaping prevailing narratives (Gaby and Caren 2016) and by putting new issues on the political agenda (Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, and Su 2010). Movements can also directly influence the composition of parties and their agendas. For example, the Tea Party movement was able to engage in collective action to push the Republican Party to adopt its agenda and to elect candidates to office who supported the aims of the movement (Skocpol and Williamson 2012; Vasi, Strang, and van de Rijt 2014). Importantly, movements and parties should not be considered as distinct entities, since the boundaries between them are “fuzzy and permeable” (Goldstone 2003). Drawing upon social network theory, Mario Diani has argued that a social movement consists of “a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations” (1992: 8). Similarly, formal party organizations are typically embedded in dense networks of ties to interest groups, advocacy organizations, and the media (Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009). Movement participants can also be members of political parties, and vice versa (Morales 2009). The two can even merge, such as when movement-parties form (Schwartz 2010). When considering these movement-party connections it is important not only to consider those between elites and organizations, but also those between individual activists and different political groups (Anheier 2003; McAdam and Tarrow 2010; Osa 2003). People may have stronger loyalties to the party or the movement and attempt to exploit the other to their advantage, but they may also maintain loyalties to both. In their studies of the relationship between the Democratic Party and the post-9/11 anti-war movement, Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas (2007, 2011, 2015) coin the term “movement-partisans” to describe the “coordinated, though informal, network of activists and organizations that simultaneously maintain loyalty to and involvement within a major political party and a social movement,” which they also refer to as “the party in the street” (Heaney and Rojas 2007: 453). The movement-partisans are the people who reside at the intersection of the movement and the party; outside of this intersection, the mainstream of the political party tends to reject the movement and the radical wing of the movement rejects party politics. Movement-partisans “use social movement tactics to advance the electoral prospects of the party and/or use the party to make progress on movement goals” (Heaney and Rojas 2011: 47). By connecting movements and parties, movement-partisans can act as brokers, facilitating communication between the two groups, indirectly connecting others who only engage with one of them (Diani 2003; Fernandez and Gould 1994; Gould and Fernandez 1989). We build upon this work by examining the extent to which movement-partisans connect contemporary radical right movements and parties, exploring how social media both enables these connections and renders them visible to researchers, and assessing how the dynamics of movement-partisan activity relates to that of elites.

MOVEMENTS, PARTIES, AND MOVEMENT-PARTISANS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Mass media is widely considered to be an important resource for social movements, as coverage can provide the visibility that is necessary to raise popular awareness of their 4 Mobilization existence and objectives and can help them to recruit new participants (Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993; Koopmans 2004; Rohlinger 2002; Seguin 2016). Recently, social media technologies have provided new opportunities for movements to connect to people in an unmediated way, allowing them to directly communicate with large audiences. Beginning with the Indignados, the Occupy movement, and the Arab Spring, social media technology has received a great deal of academic and popular attention (e.g. Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Mason 2013). While there is debate surrounding the extent to which online social networks facilitate offline collective action (Gladwell 2010; Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich 2014; Morozov 2011), mounting scholarly evidence indicates the value of these technologies to contemporary movements. Social media provides an efficient and low-cost way for activists to communicate with each other and organize (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Castells 2012; Hanna 2013; Tufekci and Wilson 2012), to appeal to others for support (González- Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, and Moreno 2013), to frame their demands (Earl 2010; Earl and Kimport 2011), to form collective identities (Bennett and Segerberg 2011), for protest opportunities to diffuse (Della Porta and Mattoni 2014), and for movements to sustain themselves in times of abeyance (Caren, Jowers, and Gaby 2012; Earl and Kimport 2011). Social media technologies have also become an integral component of electoral politics. Political parties are now using social media sites to communicate with their supporters, to persuade constituents to vote for them, and to encourage people to turnout in elections (Aldrich, Gibson, Cantijoch, and Konitzer 2016; Enli and Moe 2013; Gainous and Wagner 2014). For example, 51% of a representative survey of British social media users reported using the technology to receive or send political content around the 2015 general election, 83% of them stating they received this content via Facebook (Miller 2016). There is evidence that political engagement is associated with offline political activity: experimental research demonstrates that political messages sent on Facebook can increase turnout in elections, affecting both the people who receive the original message and their network neighbors as the message diffuses (Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle, and Fowler 2012). Survey evidence from Germany, the UK, and Italy suggests that engagement with parties online also increases people’s likelihood of offline political engagement (Vaccari 2017). Both social movements and political parties are now using social media technologies to directly engage with the public en masse. Social media users are able to “follow” or “like” as many people and organizations as they choose, although they have limited attention to devote, forcing movements and parties to compete for their time. Studies of Facebook (Bond and Messing 2015) and Twitter (Barberá 2015) show that people often engage with many political actors on social media, although they tend to follow those with similar ideologies, resulting in polarization (Barberá 2015; Conover, Ratkiewicz, Francisco, Gonçalves, Flammini, and Menczer 2011; Del Vicario, Vivaldo, Bessi, Zollo, Scala, Caldarelli, and Quattrociocchi 2016; Del Vicario, Zollo, Caldarelli, Scala, and Quattrociocchi 2017). Social media can therefore provide a valuable window into the interactions between individuals and groups (Segerberg and Bennett 2011), allowing us to observe how people are connected to both movements and parties (Heaney and Rojas 2007), and in turn how these organizations are connected (Breiger 1974). The fine-grained nature of social media data also gives us the ability to track these interactions over time. For example, a person’s prior interactions with political parties on social media—particularly support for opposition parties—predicted their participation in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (Budak and Watts 2015). Furthermore, social media not only enable us to observe the form of people’s interactions, but also their content. Through the public comments made on social media we can study discussions about political issues in a natural setting (c.f. Gamson 1992), allowing us to observe how frames are “shaped, deployed, and reformulated in conversation” (Mische 2003: 258). In the analysis below we make use of these rich interactional and conversational data to study movement-partisans on social media. We combine these data with newspaper data and other online data to understand how their activity relates to that of movement and party elites. Our study details the dynamics of the relationship between Britain First and UKIP over a Social5 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction four-year period including a series of major national elections and the Brexit referendum. We examine the extent to which extreme right movements and their supporters are engaging with mainstream right-wing political parties, the role of the movement-partisans and their activities on social media in this relationship, and the consequences of these interactions for both groups.

CASE STUDY: BRITAIN FIRST AND UKIP

Britain First (BF) is a far-right protest movement that campaigns against the professed threats of Islam, multiculturalism, and immigration to the British people and British culture. The group was formed in 2011, led by James Dowson, an evangelical Protestant minister and former member of the far-right British National Party (BNP), and Paul Golding, a former BNP councillor. BF initially focused on criticizing its founders’ erstwhile party and mobilizing in Northern Ireland, following Belfast council’s proposal to limit the flying of the Union Jack flag. It maintained a website devoted to campaigning against “anti-Christian discrimination,” against pedophile “grooming gangs” purportedly run by Muslims, and for the restoration of capital punishment.1 After Islamic extremists murdered a British soldier in London in May 2013, Islam quickly became the movement’s bête noire (Allen 2014). BF soon became the leading political organization campaigning against Islam following the collapse of their rival the English Defence League (EDL) in late 2013 (Allen 2011; Busher 2015; Busher and Morrison 2018; Davidson 2013) and the electoral collapse of the BNP (Goodwin 2014). BF has organized dozens of demonstrations across the UK, most controversially “mosque invasions,” where its activists entered mosques to harangue worshippers, and “Christian patrols,” which involved its activists driving armored ex-military vehicles through neighborhoods with large Muslim populations. BF framed its grievance against Islam as a cultural issue, claiming not to be racist but to be defending British culture and values (Allen 2014). Although its demonstrations have been relatively small, rarely attracting more than a hundred attendees, it managed to build up a large audience on social media. The movement and its leaders have been most active on Facebook, while also using Twitter, YouTube, and its website to promote its views, attract supporters, and fundraise. BF used its Facebook page to share a mix of extreme anti-Muslim content, images and videos from their protests, and an eclectic assortment of relatively innocuous content including pictures of Princess Diana, the Queen, cats, and castles (BBC 2015). Much of the innocuous content can be considered to be “engagement bait” (Facebook 2017), content designed to attract interactions from users. For example, someone may see of these posts and “like” the movement’s page, subsequently causing the group’s more extreme content to be shown on their social media feed. Some of the content shared by BF went “viral,” spreading widely through the social network, allowing the movement to rapidly gain large numbers of online supporters (Hope Not Hate 2014), a tactic that was pioneered by movements on the left (see Gaby and Caren 2012). This approach enabled BF to build up a massive social media following that soon eclipsed that of any other political organization in the UK. By spring 2014 the movement’s online following had surpassed the major political parties in size, and at its peak in October 2017, it had attracted almost two million Facebook followers. Although there appears to be some deception in the group’s online content, we do not consider them to be an “astroturf” movement as there is no evidence of financial motivation for support or covert sponsorship (Walker 2016). Rather, we consider them a hybrid movement, where a small core of activists engages in radical actions offline and a much larger group of supporters engage with the movement online. In addition to their protests and online presence, BF has been registered as a political party since 2014 and has made a series of forays into electoral politics, although none of them have been successful. As of early 2018, BF’s activity has sharply declined, as its leaders have faced legal issues and it has been banned from all major social media platforms. 6 Mobilization

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) was founded in 1993 as a single-issue pressure group to oppose the Maastricht Treaty and the U.K.’s membership in the European Union. The group initially intended to pressure the Conservative Party, but over the following decade it formed a party organization and began to develop a more comprehensive program. Its first electoral breakthrough came in the 2004 European Parliament elections, when it won 16% of the vote and twelve seats, with a Eurosceptic platform including a strong emphasis on immigration. The party performed poorly in the 2005 general election but gained increasing support under the leadership of Nigel Farage, a former commodities broker and founding member of the party. Under Farage’s leadership it pushed for a referendum on EU membership, asserting that leaving the EU was the only way to control immigration (Geddes 2014). UKIP won 23% of the vote in the wards where it competed in the 2013 local elections and 27% of the vote in the 2014 European Parliament elections—more than both the ruling Conservative Party and the opposition Labour Party (Clarke, Whiteley, Borges, Sanders, and Stewart 2016; Ford and Goodwin 2014). In the 2015 general election it won 13% of the national vote (Webb, Bale, and Poletti 2017) and had its first MP elected to the House of Commons, although Farage failed to win a seat and briefly resigned from the party before returning to the leadership position. Its electoral gains put pressure on the Conservative Party, contributing to Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to announce the referendum for Britain to leave the EU (Bale 2018). Following the surprise success of the referendum in June 2016, the party has experienced turmoil and instability, suffering a significant decline in support. Its vote share fell to 1.8% in the 2017 snap election, and it has experienced several tumultuous leadership transitions. Both organizations are hostile towards the EU, take a hard stance towards immigration, and draw upon populist and nationalist themes in their communications. Survey evidence suggests that many UKIP voters would support the extreme right, should the opportunity arise: “UKIP draws upon the same source of social and political attitudes among the public as the BNP” (John and Margetts 2009: 508). Similarly, an online survey of EDL supporters— whom we expect share many affinities with those of BF—found that they expressed a preference for the BNP and for UKIP at a much higher rate than the general population (Bartlett and Littler 2011). We therefore have reason to expect that a significant contingent of BF’s supporters may also support UKIP and vice versa. Despite these affinities, UKIP has actively attempted to distance itself from more extreme groups and has expelled party members who have acted or talked out of line (Ford and Goodwin 2014; Ford, Goodwin, and Cutts 2012; Goodwin and Milazzo 2015). The party’s constitution banned current or former members of the BNP, EDL, BF, and a number of other groups from joining the party (UKIP 2018: 27). Despite any affinities between them, UKIP supporters may therefore be dissuaded from associating with BF. While a number of events have drawn some attention from the media to ties between the two groups, as we shall discuss in detail below, little is known about the extent of their relationship or about the existence of any movement-partisans.

DATA AND METHODS

To study the relationship between these two groups over time we collected data from social media, newspapers, and other online sources. To collect social media data, we used the Facebook Pages Application Programming Interface (API).2 We wrote a custom script in the Python programming language to extract each public post made by UKIP and Britain First on their official public Facebook pages. These posts include text, images, and videos that are shared by the groups. Along with the post, we collect the exact time it was made, and the user engagements with the post. User engagements consist of likes, which people can use to express their agreement with a post; comments written directly in response to the post or to other users’ comments; and shares, where they share the post with their online friend networks. We also obtained these data for the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and the Social7 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction

Liberal Democrats, the three largest political parties in the UK, and use them below for purposes of comparison. We collected these data from the date each Facebook page was created until July 2017. We also collected newspaper and online media data to study how the media discuss these groups and to review party and movement elites’ statements. We used LexisNexis to find articles in major national newspapers that mentioned either group. While prior work has shown evidence of bias in media coverage, our aim is to use these data to get a proxy for the amount of attention either group gets in the media, rather than to identify protest events that may or may not be covered (Earl, Martin, McCarhty, and Soule 2004). Data are from seven national newspapers in the United Kingdom that span the ideological spectrum: The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Independent, The Times, and The Telegraph, along with their Sunday editions. To find articles mentioning UKIP we queried LexisNexis using the terms “UKIP” and “UK Independence Party,” with and without periods. For articles mentioning Britain First we used the query “Britain First,” but since LexisNexis makes case insensitive queries, the results often consisted of unrelated articles, for example those mentioning the first time a certain event happened in Britain. We therefore filtered the results to retain those that contained the exact string “Britain First.” In addition to the social media and newspaper data, we also used Google Trends to find the volume of web searches that were made about each group in the United Kingdom during the period studied. We used Google’s aggregated search data, which include different variations of searches for the groups, e.g. searches for “UKIP” and “UK Independence Party” are both included in the results. These data provide an indication of the relative popularity of either group over time (Stephens-Davidowitz 2014). We also used a combination of manual collection and web scraping to gather press releases and other materials from the websites of UKIP (www.ukip.org) and Britain First (www.britainfirst.org) to gain additional material these groups self-published. We also used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (www.archive.org/web/) to retrieve some previously deleted articles from their websites. To study the relationship between the two groups over time, we combine descriptive analysis of time-series data with a close reading of media coverage and other primary materials relating to either group, along with a computational text analysis of the comments written online by their Facebook fans. There are two outcomes of interest our analysis. The first is the relationship between the movement and party elites, which we measure via the statements made by both groups and newspaper articles. While we cannot get a precise quantitative measure of their relationship over time, we can use these data to understand the dynamics of their relationship. The second is the number of active movement-partisans, which we can measure quantitatively using the data collected from Facebook.3 We define the movement-partisans as the users who are active on both the UKIP and Britain First Facebook pages in a given week. We construct time-series to measure the activity of these users over time, such that movement-partisans(t, t+k) is the set of users whom we observed commenting on both BF and UKIP in the interval between times t and t+k. We consider the people who were not in this intersection to only be supporters of one or the other group. This series, depicted below in figure 3, shows us the number of active movement-partisans over a four-year period. We conduct a computational text analysis of comments written on Facebook to understand how movement-partisans compare to supporters of either group. We conduct three different comparisons. First, for the users who do not meet our definition of movement- partisans, we compare the comments made on BF to those made on UKIP, which provides a baseline for the differences between the two groups of users. Second, we compare the comments on BF’s page made by movement-partisans with the comments of non-movement- partisans, or those who only commented on the BF page. Finally, we repeat this with UKIP, comparing the movement-partisans’ comments on UKIP’s page to those made by other UKIP supporters. This shows differences in language usage between the movement-partisans and other users, which provides insight into their attitudes, opinions, and objectives. 8 Mobilization

To perform this analysis, we begin by constructing lists containing all comments made for each group of users. For each list we then conduct standard text normalization techniques, splitting each comment into a set of word tokens, removing punctuation, setting tokens to lower case, and stemming them to reduce different word forms to a common root (e.g. “immigrant,” “immigrants,” and “immigration” are all reduced to the stem “immigr”) (Grimmer and Stewart 2013; Martin and Jurafsky 2009). To give a concrete example, after normalization the sentence “I’m voting for UKIP!” becomes a list of normalized tokens: [“im”, “vote”, “for”, “ukip”]. This helps to remove some noise from the natural language so that we can more directly compare the semantic content. We then use the weighted log-odds ratio metric with an uninformative Dirichlet prior proposed by Burt Monroe, Michael Colaresi, and Kevin Quinn (2008) to study partisan differences in language. 4 The model computes a log odds-ratio for each term, from which we can derive a z-statistic, which indicates the statistical significance of the association between a given term and a particular group. This allows us to conduct pairwise statistical comparisons between different sets of texts, such as comments made by BF supporters compared with those made by UKIP supporters. Importantly, the method enables us to account for differences due to word frequency and the relative size of the texts, which would otherwise bias the results. For robustness, we take twenty random samples of text from each set of comments, sampling approximately 10% of the comments in each draw, and only consider terms where a statistically significant association (p < 0.05) between a word token and a particular group occurred in 19/20 cases (Schofield and Mehr 2016). These results give us insight into the differences in the language used by movement-partisans and other users, helping to understand why they were active on both the movement and party social media pages. We use the results of these analyses to guide further qualitative analysis of the comments, using keywords associated with particular groups of users to surface illustrative examples that help to provide more context.

UNDERSTANDING THE MOVEMENT-PARTY RELATIONSHIP

UKIP and Britain First in the public sphere Britain First has received scant attention from major national newspapers compared to UKIP. The upper panel in figure 1 shows the number of times each group was mentioned each week in national newspapers from October 2013 through to July 2017. The black line shows the number of times UKIP was mentioned. There are large spikes in attention to the party around the 2014 local elections, the 2015 general election, when it had its first member of parliament elected, and in June 2016, when the Brexit referendum occurred. UKIP received markedly less attention in the 2017 general election, consistent with its post-Brexit electoral decline. Turning to BF, the light grey line shows that the news coverage pales in comparison with UKIP. Only 498 articles mentioned BF, compared to the 34,538 articles that mentioned UKIP in the same interval. Furthermore, the majority of its coverage (68%) consisted of critical articles in the left-leaning The Independent and The Guardian (these publications accounted for 42% of all mentions of UKIP). The only notable spike in attention to BF was in June 2017, when politician Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by a far-right extremist, who shouted the group’s name as he attacked her, an incident we discuss below.

Figure 1. Attention to UKIP and BF in the media and online Social9 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction

The lower panel in figure 1 displays the Google search volume for each week for the same period. The highest search volume is given a score of 100 and all other points on both lines are scaled relative to it. Consistent with the previous results, we see that UKIP received a high volume of searches around the 2014 local election and 2016 general election. Compared to the media attention, however, there were relatively few searches around the 2017 general election, suggesting that the media still paid attention to the party even after voters had jettisoned it. For BF we find a similar pattern as in the newspaper coverage, with much lower search volume than UKIP over the period studied. This shows that relatively few people were actively searching for information about BF on Google. Both of these plots show that when we consider public attention devoted to the two groups, BF is extremely marginal compared to UKIP: it received few mentions in national newspapers and far fewer Google searches. While attention to the party is nonetheless highly volatile and centered around periods of electoral activity, attention to the movement is consistently low, with the exception of a single incident where the group was associated with the murder of a politician. 10 Mobilization

An altogether different picture emerges when we consider social media. Figure 2 shows the monthly number of comments made on the official Facebook pages of BF and UKIP, along with the three largest political parties in the UK—Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats—for purposes of comparison. This provides a proxy for the amount of engagement users are having on Facebook with each organization.5 The plot shows the period from 2009, when political parties began to use the social media platform, until July 2017. By spring 2014, BF’s user engagement already dwarfed that of the political parties. A report published by countermovement Hope Not Hate contained internal BF data, which showed that by April 2014 the far-right group was attracting thousands of new “likes” each week, sometimes gaining tens of thousands in a single day. The number of people who interacted with their content was even greater, with 2.2 million people either commenting, liking, or sharing BF’s posts in a 28 day period (Hope Not Hate 2014). Our results show that the major parties were only able to attain more engagement than BF in the months of the 2015 and 2017 general elections. In June 2017, the month of the Brexit referendum, Facebook users wrote over a quarter of a million comments on BF’s content, more than double that of any of the political parties.

Figure 2. Monthly comments written on Facebook pages of BF, UKIP, and major political parties

While some of people may have inadvertently liked the group due to its engagement baiting, the large number of people commenting on the group’s posts showed that many were actively participating in discussions. Our data shows that in less than four years, Britain First’s posts were commented on over six million times, more than three times as many as any of the political parties over their entire lifetime on social media and only slightly below the total for all of the other major parties combined. Although not all of these comments indicate support for Britain First, as some are written by other users who oppose them, the observed numbers are likely an underestimate of the overall reach of the group. Each time someone interacted with a BF post on Facebook, the BF content had the potential to be shown to their online friends, exposing many others to the content even if they have not directly sought it out. Although these data are not publically available, the small window the Hope Not Hate report provides suggests that BF only needed be liked by hundreds of thousands of people to be able to reach millions more (Hope Not Hate 2014). Social11 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction

If we look at the political parties we see that there is relatively little engagement until around the beginning of 2013, when UKIP begins to get more attention than the other parties. The party received over one hundred thousand comments on its Facebook page in May 2014 when it performed well in the local elections. In the 2015 general election, the Conservatives, Labour, and UKIP all generated a similar amount of engagement, despite Conservatives spending approximately £1.2 million on Facebook advertising, far more than the £16,455 and £91,322 spent by Labour and UKIP respectively (Moore 2016). This activity declined after the election and UKIP’s engagement dropped even further after the Brexit vote, while the Labour Party experienced an uptick in activity associated with the party’s leadership election, when tens of thousands of new members joined the party in support of Jeremy Corbyn (Richards 2016). By the 2017 general election, Labour and the Conservatives experienced a similar amount of activity while UKIP’s engagement with social media users was far lower than in previous elections. Britain First appears to be extremely marginal based on news coverage and even web searches, but they have been tremendously successful at using social media, building the largest online following of any political group in the UK. To understand how BF’s online presence affected its relationship with UKIP, and the extent to which the groups were connected, we now undertake a close examination of three distinct phases in the party- movement relationship: hostility, unreciprocated support, and disaffiliation.

From Hostility to Accommodation: October 2013 – May 2014

In late 2013, when BF began to ramp up its activity on social media, the movement was hostile to UKIP. On December 15th they asked BF supporters whether they should run in the upcoming European Parliament elections, writing “Many feel let down by UKIP these days and most have no desire to go back voting for far right racist cranks, so what is to be done?” 6 Many supporters commented in favor of this, although some suggested that this would weaken the right by dividing the vote. Over the following weeks, BF continued to claim UKIP was “weak” on the issue of immigration and was “going all PC on Islam,” issuing a series of statements critical of the party’s leader, Nigel Farage. BF also complained that its members were banned from joining UKIP. Following this string of criticisms, BF wrote a long statement in mid-January of 2014 calling for unity among different groups on the right, including UKIP, the EDL, and the BNP, while still insisting that only BF represented the true interests of “patriots.” As depicted in figure 3, which shows the number of unique movement-partisans observed over time, there was very little contact between members of each group around this time: from the end of October 2013 until mid-March 2014, an average of 32 people commented on both groups each week.

Figure 3. Number of active movement-partisans over time 12 Mobilization

As the European Parliament elections approached, the movement began to warm to the party. After protestors blocked UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage from entering some meetings, BF posted on their Facebook page that they would “deploy armoured patrol vehicles and ex- military volunteers to protect” him, claiming that although they were still rivals, BF would “put principles and country above politics.” This post received over 4,000 likes and over 900 comments: the majority of people appeared to support BF’s decision to defend Farage. Around this time the number of people interacting with both groups began to rapidly increase, with over 500 movement-partisans active in the final week of April and an average of 554 active per week in May, representing around one-fifth of the users who regularly commented on UKIP’s page. The party made no attempt to engage with BF despite the offer of support and the growing number of its supporters who were engaging with the movement.

Unreciprocated Support: May 2014 – June 2016

By the spring of 2014, BF had managed to build up a Facebook following that surpassed that of all other political organizations in size and was adding 8,000 new followers per day (Waterson 2014). However, their attempts to contest elections failed, as they gained just 0.13% of the vote in the European Parliament elections. UKIP, on the other hand, won an unprecedented 27%, more than any other party. In the following months BF posted on its Facebook page to applaud UKIP’s newly-elected Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) for turning their backs to the EU flag in the European parliament and to congratulate the party on the election of their first Member of Parliament (MP), Conservative defector Douglas Carswell, who won a landslide majority in a by-election in October 2014.7 Both movement and party put forward candidates in the Rochester by-election in late 2014, triggered by another Conservative defection to UKIP. This resulted in controversy when UKIP activists posed for a photograph with the BF candidate and deputy leader Jayda Fransen, which BF shared on Facebook. A UKIP spokesperson responded to media attention stating, “We have no connection with Britain First and reject any association with them.” However, our data show that 21% of the likes this photo received were from individuals who had previously commented on UKIP’s Facebook posts, suggesting that, at the rank-and-file level, there were indeed many people who associated with both groups. BF dismissed UKIP’s rebuttal as “political bluster” for the sake of the media, proclaiming “UKIP at the ballot box, Social13 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction

Britain First on the streets – a winning combination” (Rickman 2014). They decided not to include their candidate on the ballot to avoid taking votes from UKIP, but continued to canvass in Rochester, expressing support for the party while also protesting the construction of a “mega-mosque” in the area. Fransen gave an interview to a local television channel on the day of the election, calling for people to vote for UKIP, and drawing attention to the their shared objectives, stating that “a UKIP victory results in a Britain First victory” (KMTV Video News 2014). UKIP won the by-election with 42% of the vote, electing its second MP. In the span of a year, BF went from actively contesting elections in competition with UKIP to openly supporting it. It appears that the movement leadership decided that supporting the party would be a more effective strategy than challenging it. After a brief decline over the winter, the rate of movement-partisan activity rapidly increased as the May general election approached. BF continued to support UKIP in electoral politics into 2015, despite further rebuttals from the party. Golding issued a statement on Facebook that BF would not run in the election to avoid taking votes away from UKIP and because they recognized they did not have sufficient support. Their earlier idealism gave way to pragmatism; as Golding wrote, “Let’s face reality: the only patriotic party that has a chance of doing well in this election is UKIP.” He asserted that UKIP could rattle “the establishment” and represent “the ‘Silent Majority’ who are sick to death of immigration, political correctness and E.U. meddling in our affairs.” When Farage was accosted by a group of protestors, BF once again promised to deploy activists and vehicles to defend the party from “left-wing hooligans.” The following week a group of BF supporters stormed a meeting held by the activists allegedly responsible for the incident. A UKIP spokesperson denounced BF, stating that “on the fringes of our politics are nutters and we don’t want them anywhere near us,” but BF again brushed aside the rebuke, claiming the party was “playing the political game” (Cusick 2015). In the final weeks of the election campaign, BF posted hundreds of messages of support for UKIP on its Facebook page. The number of users who commented on both groups’ Facebook pages reached its zenith in the days before the election, with almost a thousand movement-partisans observed in a single week, suggesting that many of the rank- and-file UKIP supporters were ignoring the party’s criticisms. The party won 14% of the national vote and had its first MP re-elected. UKIP’s electoral performance, combined with the ongoing refugee crisis and a spate of horrific terrorist attacks in Europe, both of which further stoked public anxieties about immigration, put pressure on the government to address the EU issue (Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley 2017). After Prime Minister David Cameron failed to negotiate a solution, he announced a referendum to leave the EU in February 2016, with the vote to take place in June. UKIP was shut out of the official Vote Leave campaign because the Conservatives wanted to avoid making it a referendum on immigration, but Farage travelled the country campaigning on behalf of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign. While Vote Leave focused primarily on economic arguments, the Leave.EU campaign framed the referendum as a way to control immigration (Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley 2017). At the same time, BF ramped up its social media activity, publishing hundreds of posts urging its supporters to vote to leave the EU, which were then shared hundreds of thousands of times. Some of this content related to economic themes, such as the UK’s financial contributions to the EU and the purported burden on the National Health Service, but it largely focused on the migrant crisis, the threat of terrorism, and the spectre of Turkey—and its predominantly Muslim population—joining the union. They also campaigned in the streets, canvassing in a number of cities across the country. The tone of the campaign got more negative as the referendum approached, and UKIP began to also evoke the same fears as the movement. A week before the vote, Farage unveiled a poster depicting a large line of refugees, captioned with the title “BREAKING POINT,” which was paraded through London emblazoned on a fleet of trucks (UKIP 2016). That afternoon, Jo Cox, MP for Batley and Spen, was murdered as she left her constituency meeting. Witnesses heard her assailant shout “Britain first, keep Britain independent, Britain will always come first” as he shot and stabbed her (Cobain, Parveen, and Taylor 2016). His 14 Mobilization remarks drew extensive media attention to the movement and to the vitriol with which the referendum campaign was being conducted. Subsequent investigations showed that he was a member of neo-Nazi groups but did not appear to have any associated with BF. After a three-day pause the campaigning resumed, and BF posted voraciously on their Facebook page. Figure 2 shows that in the week of the referendum nearly three-hundred thousand comments were made on their Facebook posts, more than triple that of any political party and far higher than the roughly fifty thousand that UKIP received. The number of movement-partisans had also steadily increased in the build up to the referendum, following a dip in activity after the general election. On Friday, June 24th, the referendum results were declared, showing a narrow victory for the Vote Leave campaign, as 51.9% of the population voted to reject the status quo. After initially conceding defeat, Farage gave a defiant victory speech, declaring that the vote marked Britain’s “independence day” (Withnall 2016). He declared that the victory had been achieved “without a single bullet being fired,” despite the murder of Jo Cox, while Britain First framed the event in militaristic terms, celebrating by sharing a number of images evoking remembrance of war dead and a montage of Winston Churchill’s funeral. This marked the end of a successful campaign for both party and movement.

UKIP’s decline and BF’s disaffiliation: June 2016 - July 2017

Despite the success of the referendum, UKIP fell into disarray and BF began to question the one-sided alliance. After steering the party from electoral insignificance to fulfilling its raison d’être, Farage resigned as UKIP leader, stating that his “political ambition has been achieved” (Mason, Booth, and Gentleman 2016). He spent the following months supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In a speech to supporters in September 2016, Golding recognized that not only Farage, but UKIP itself, may have served its purpose. He lauded Farage as “a national hero” but predicted that UKIP would “slide into insignificance,” leaving Britain First as the “last man standing” in opposition to “militant Islam” and mass immigration. Following Farage’s resignation, the party indeed appeared to be collapsing. UKIP’s new leader Diane James quit after just 18 days, citing a lack of authority. Days later a senior UKIP MEP and potential leadership nominee was hospitalized due to a brawl with a colleague inside the European Parliament. By November, Paul Nuttall, a UKIP MEP and deputy leader under Farage, was elected to take over the party, providing some temporary stability. Turning to the Facebook data we see that there was a sharp decrease in movement- partisan activity during this period of instability, as the number active plummeted to less than one hundred and remained at its lowest since BF first began to offer support to UKIP, suggesting that they were abandoning the party. The Stoke-on-Trent by-election in January 2017 presented an opportunity for UKIP to reassert itself since the constituency had voted heavily in favour of Brexit. Nuttall stood as the UKIP candidate for MP. Despite their earlier criticism, BF encouraged its supporters to vote for UKIP, but we do not observe any notable change in movement-partisan activity, suggesting that the rank-and-file were no longer interested in the party. Ultimately the Labour candidate won, and in the months following this defeat, Carswell, UKIP’s only remaining MP, left the party. Amid the disarray, Prime Minister Theresa May announced a snap general election to take place less than two months later on June 8th. UKIP put together a manifesto that framed the party as “the guard dogs of Brexit” and proposed to reduce net migration to zero. They also began to take a stronger stance towards Islam, as they proposed to combat Islamic extremism in schools and prisons, to ally more closely with Russia to fight Islamist terror, to monitor schools until “such time as the Muslim community is better integrated,” and to ban the wearing of the niqab and burkha in public places (UKIP 2017). Voters continued to abandon the party in local elections held in May 2017, as UKIP lost 145 councillors across the country and only won a single seat. Nuttall lamented that the party was a “victim of its own success” (BBC 2017). A few days after the election BF shared a Social15 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction message on their Facebook page that echoed Golding’s earlier statement: “UKIP is dying, the rest are traitors! Britain First is the last man standing! Time to take our country back!” The party’s polls continued to decline as the general election approached, and figure 2 shows that there was a negligible amount of engagement with their Facebook page compared to prior elections. Despite the party’s pivot towards Islam and harder line on immigration, BF apparently abstained from supporting UKIP during the election campaign. It instead focused on attacking the Labour Party. In the month before the election we only observe a handful of movement-partisans active, far fewer active than in previous elections. On election day, UKIP suffered a severe defeat: they received just 1.8% of the national vote, 593,852 votes in total, compared to the 3,881,099 the party received in 2015. Nuttall, who stood in the Boston and Skegness constituency, won just 7.7% of the vote, and resigned as leader the following day. By the end of July, the party had also lost its grip on Thanet council, the only one it controlled in the country. BF posted a poll on their Facebook page, asking “Should Britain First go ‘political’ due to the demise of UKIP?” Their supporters almost unanimously agreed. Shortly afterwards Golding published a video on YouTube, arguing that the election verdict was the “last nail in the coffin” for UKIP. He stated that BF would compete in local elections in 2018 to try to obtain political representation. By this point few movement-partisans were active, as the numbers had plummeted after a brief increase around the general election. It appears that neither the BF leadership nor its rank-and-file following online had any interest in affiliating with UKIP. We now turn to our analysis of the comments made on Facebook by the movement-partisans and other supporters to understand why the former were affiliating with both groups and how they differed from the latter.

What Were the Movement-Partisans Talking About?

To better understand the relationship between BF and UKIP, we now turn to the comments written by their supporters on social media. We focus on the period from May 2014 until June 2016, when the movement-partisans were most active, to gain insight into why they affiliated with both groups. To get a sense of how BF and UKIP’s online supporters differed we begin with a comparison of the comments made by non-movement-partisans. The x-axis in A1 (see Online Appendix) indicates the logarithm of the average frequency of each word across all twenty samples from the comments; more frequent words are further to the right of the graph. The y-axis indicates the average z-score associated with each word across all samples: scores greater than zero indicate that a word is used more frequently by people who comment on the Britain First page, while negative scores indicate that a word is more closely associated with UKIP supports. Words are sized relative to the z-score and are shown in color if there is a statistically significant association with either group (p<0.05, z >= |1.96|) in 95% of the random samples evaluated. Words that appeared in fewer than 95% of samples are not shown. At the top of the graph we see that the terms “vote,” “eu,” and “ukip” all appear to have sizable, statistically significant associations with the UKIP-only commenters. This shows that, compared to the comments made on Britain First’s Facebook page by non-movement- partisans, UKIP supporters were much more likely to discuss voting, the European Union, and the party. For example, one user stated: “I shall NEVER vote anything but UKIP as long as we are in the EU. I don’t want a referendum - I want OUT.” 8 The next most strongly associated terms are “parti” (the stem for “party”), “labour”, and “nigel” (i.e. Nigel Farage), followed closely by terms relating to the Conservatives like “tori” (stem for “Tory”), “cameron” (i.e. David Cameron), and “conserv” (stem for “conservative”), as well as the terms “referendum” and “immigr” (the stem for the issue of immigration). Many supporters criticized the mainstream parties and expressed their support of UKIP due to the party’s tougher stance on immigration. For example, another user wrote: “Who in their right mind will vote for a Labour party committed to more immigration, these idiots along with their 16 Mobilization

Tory counterparts are obsessed with cramming more and more people into this country, let’s have a referendum on immigration.” It appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, that rank-and-file UKIP supporters tended to talk about their own party, the Conservatives, and the EU and the issue of immigration much more than BF supporters. Turning to the portion of the graph below zero on the y-axis, we see the words used more frequently by BF supporters. The most strongly associated words are “muslim,” “they,” and “them,” showing that they focused on the issue of Islam, and in particular, directed their grievances towards the Muslim “other,” whom they tend to refer to using third-person pronouns (Cleland, Anderson, and Aldridge-Deacon 2018; Modood 2005). For example, one user asks “Are the Muslims going to be allowed to take over our country altogether because they won’t stop until they have and we’re letting them get away with it”? A number of these commenters even appeared to call for violence: “They breed like ants. No wonder they are taking over. Our grandchildren will live in a Muslim state if something doesn't change! Make them live by our laws or get rid of them!”; “Muslims don't work they are bottom feeders, scum of the earth. Push them into the sea”; “Send the [British special forces] they will sort them out! What a wonderful world we would live in if Muslims were wiped out.” The terms “christian,” “religion,” “islam,” and “god” all also feature prominently, along with the word “should”, suggesting that many BF supporters had a prognosis for how their grievances can be solved (Snow and Benford 1988). Figure A2 shows the results of the comparison between the language used by BF supporters and movement-partisans. The latter are significantly more likely to use the terms “cameron,” “eu,” and “ukip”; they are much more likely to discuss the Prime Minister, the EU, and UKIP than other BF supporters. Some of these users directly called for others to support UKIP: “Join UKIP help us get out of EU and close borders.” Many others voice their support for the party and its opposition to the EU: “UKIP getting us out of the EU is our only hope”; “Politicians in this country are a bloody disgrace. Only UKIP seem bothered with the English population and what is best for us and not EU or the rest of the world.” These comments suggest that the movement-partisans were attempting to raise awareness of UKIP among other BF supporters. A number of these movement-partisans also discussed Islam in connection with their support of UKIP, evidence of frame bridging (Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). One user wrote that “the Labour Party is becoming ever more under Islamic influence ... I will be voting UKIP. And voting OUT OF THE EU,” while another voiced their support for the UKIP leader, “they will try to destroy Nigel Farage because he is the only one that is not afraid to speak his mind and wants out of the EU and to send terrorists and Muslims back to where they came from.” Along with other terms related to the EU, UKIP, Labour, and the Conservative supporters, we also see the words “our” and “we” and “them” and “they” appear more frequently in the comments made by the movement partisans, suggesting that the movement-partisans are attempting to frame issues in terms of in-group and out-group differences (see Wodak 2015). For example, one movement-partisan writes: “With Muslims coming in and the Muslim birth-rate higher than our own we WILL LOSE our country to them. They need to be stopped and sent back! ALL OF THEM!” The terms most strongly associated with the BF-only commenters (shown in red) are “your” and “you.” Close inspection of the comment threads suggests that this is the result of frequent arguments between BF supporters and opponents, who come to the page to challenge them. For example, one user wrote to a purportedly Muslim critic, “[if you] can’t respect the laws and culture of our country … don’t come here and inflict your religion on us!” Another tried to deflect the critique that BF is racist by using the same line of argument as the social movement organization: “Last time I checked Islam was a religion not a race. Make sure you know your argument before calling people racist.” Religion and terms related to Christianity also feature prominently among the BF supporters: “Keep up the great work Britain First. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you and lead you and yours and protect you all” is a typical example of a comment where the user evokes religious sentiment in their support of the movement. These users mentioned Muslims more frequently than the movement- Social17 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction partisans, suggesting that the former were more committed to BF’s central issue while the latter tended to be opposed to immigration more generally. Figure A3 shows the comparison between movement-partisans’ comments on UKIP’s Facebook page and those of other UKIP supporters. This plot is sparser than the previous plots because fewer comments were made on UKIP’s page and therefore fewer words were observed in sufficient samples and the z-scores for words are smaller. Again, the terms in blue are those more strongly associated with the movement-partisans. The most strongly associated terms include “out,” “vote,” and “get” (commonly used in the phrase “get out”), along with “nigel,” “cameron,” and “muslim.” The movement-partisans more frequently discussed the vote to leave the EU, evoked the party leader, and mentioned Muslims than other party supporters. For example, one movement-partisan voiced their support for UKIP and opposition to the Conservatives: “Give me a ballot paper right now. Get us out Nigel, and let’s get rid of that spineless turd Cameron.” Others mentioned Muslims and Islam as a key motivator for leaving the EU. For example, one user declared, “Go Nigel time to get out of the EU, I think that’s what most people want. Looks like the EU is failing with all these Muslims coming in,” while another announced that, “Nigel is the man get them Muslims out of my country VOTE UKIP…” The words most strongly associated the other UKIP supporters (in purple) are “polici” (stem for “policy” or “policies”), “support,” and other politics-related terms like “local,” “tax,” and “issue.” For example, these users discussed public services (“I’m a UKIP supporter, but can anyone tell me what UKIP policy is regarding privatisation of public services?”), the NHS (“If the EU did not demand so much money off us the NHS could have some more.”), and trade policy (“Everyone should be able to trade with whoever we like, not be dictated to be the EU.”). This is not to say that none of the UKIP-only supporters are also hostile towards Islam, but that such comments are less frequent. For example, 1.1% of their comments contained the term “muslim” compared to 1.5% of the comments made by movement-partisans (although this is still far less than the 5.4% of comments containing the term among BF supporters). In summary, the first set of results shows that UKIP and BF supporters devoted most of their online discussion to the same topics discussed by the party and movement elites: the former tended to discuss issues related to the party and the EU, and the latter talked much more about Islam. While not unexpected, this result serves as a good validation of the approach and helps to contextualize the next sets of results, as we compare each set of supporters’ comments to those made by the movement-partisans. The second comparison provides evidence that the movement-partisans tended to be engaging with BF supporters to discuss the EU and to promote UKIP, some of whom attempted to connect these to the issue of Islam. Movement-partisans tended to frame the issues in Manichean terms, suggesting a stronger commitment to a more hard-line view, although they seemed to be more generally opposed to immigration in general, referring to Muslims less frequently than other BF supporters. The people who only interacted with BF seemed to be more focused on religion, particularly on Christianity, and were more frequently arguing with other users. Finally, the comparison of UKIP supporters’ comments to those made by movement-partisans provides evidence the latter were more likely to issue direct appeals for others to vote and to connect the issue of Islam to the EU, while other UKIP supporters were more likely to be engaging in substantive discussions related to political issues. Overall, this analysis provides strong support for the claim that the individuals who engage with both BF and UKIP online are movement-partisans seeking to promote the interests of both groups. This small group of users tended to be much more focused on the issue of leaving the EU than other supporters of either group and frequently made attempts to connect this to their opposition towards Islam.

DISCUSSION 18 Mobilization

We have shown how Britain First, a movement that appeared to be marginal in media coverage and on the Internet more broadly, and that rarely mustered more than a hundred supporters to attend its demonstrations, managed to build up an enormous following on social media. BF’s leaders continually attempted to cultivate a relationship with the more moderate UKIP, both pledging their activists to protect the party and encouraging their online supporters to vote for it. Despite the party’s dismissals, hundreds of people were using social media to actively support both UKIP and BF. The relationship evolved in three distinct phases. The movement began by showing hostility towards the party, viewing it as a rival, before embracing it as a way to achieve common political objectives. Not only did BF’s leaders repeatedly promote the party and its central issue—leave the EU—to their social media audience, but the movement-partisans frequently discussed the issue with other BF and UKIP supporters and also made attempts to connect it to grievances against Islam. This support eventually waned as UKIP experienced electoral decline following the Brexit referendum and BF pledged to replace the party. In the following section we address three key issues: First, what can the movement-partisans tell us about the relationship between the groups? Second, why was the relationship unreciprocated at the elite-level? Third, what were the consequences of the relationship for UKIP and BF?

What can the movement-partisans tell us about the relationship between the groups?

Our analysis of data from social media reveals that many supporters of UKIP were also involved with the far-right Britain First movement. These movement-partisans potentially played a key brokerage role, as they were able to “connect actors who are not communicating because of some specific political or social barrier” (Diani 2003: 107), in this case the party’s formal politics and its public criticisms of the movement. The movement-party relationship may have been one-sided at the elite level, but looking at the rank-and-file we have shown that there were frequent interactions in both directions. The movement-partisans were most active from spring 2014, when UKIP made a major breakthrough in the European Parliament elections, until the summer of 2016, when the Brexit referendum was concluded. During this period thousands of people engaged with both groups; at the height of their relationship roughly one in ten of those we observed interacting with UKIP’s Facebook page were also active on BF’s, with one in five active on BF around the 2015 general election. After around two years of significant activity, the movement-partisan numbers rapidly declined following UKIP’s disastrous performance in the 2017 general election. Our computational text analysis provides a number of insights into the different groups of users. In the first comparison of UKIP and BF non-movement-partisans, we saw that the former tended to discuss the EU much more frequently while the latter focused on Islam, consistent with our expectations. When we compared the movement-partisans to other BF supporters, we found that the latter tend to mention UKIP and the EU much more frequently, providing evidence that they were attempting to promote the party and its main issue to the movement supporters. Our analysis revealed that a number of these individuals explicitly linked support for UKIP and opposition to the EU with grievances against Islam, evidence that rank-and-file supporters were mirroring the movement elites’ discourse and engaging in frame bridging that linked movement and party goals (Snow et al. 1986). Furthermore, we observed that the people who only supported BF tended to talk about Muslims more than the movement-partisans, supporting Heaney and Rojas’s (2011) claim that the latter are not necessarily the most extreme members of the movement. The movement-partisans’ comments on UKIP’s page showed that they tended to talk about voting and about the need to exit the EU more than did other UKIP members, who discussed a more diverse set of political issues. Here they also evoked the ostensible threat posed by Islam as a motivation for leaving the EU, further evidence of frame bridging. Not only were the movement-partisans committed to both movement and party, as they attempted to use the movement to improve the electoral prospects of the party and to use the party to help promote the movements aims (Heaney and Social19 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction

Rojas 2011), but their commitment to the issue of the EU and their sense of collective identity may have been stronger than that of those who only affiliated with one of the groups. While more in-depth work is necessary to understand these individuals’ attitudes and preferences, our study shows the value of social media data to both identify movement-partisans and to gain an understanding of their motivations by analyzing their public utterances online.

Why was the relationship unreciprocated at the elite-level?

UKIP repeatedly rebuffed BF in spite of the movement’s “proactive electoral mobilization” (McAdam and Tarrow 2010) in support of the party and its platform in a number of crucial elections. To understand why the party did not endorse the movement’s support, it is useful to consider David Art’s (2011) distinction between extremists and moderates. Art argues that there is typically a tension in radical right parties between extremists, who adhere to biological racism and racial supremacy, and moderates, who do not posit any racial hierarchy but put forward more culturalist arguments about the problems of mixing and integration. This tension has had real implications in the British context: the extreme right BNP’s failure to make an electoral breakthrough and subsequent collapse has been attributed to a combination of external hostility and internal factionalism between moderates and extremists (Art 2011; Goodwin 2014). Both UKIP and BF have recognized this issue and have attempted to control more extreme elements to avoid this problem. In the mid-2000s, UKIP’s membership included many people sympathetic to the BNP, some of whom were willing to make an electoral pact with the party, but Farage resisted and dislodged this faction (Ford and Goodwin 2014). As discussed above, members and former members of the BF and other extremist groups were constitutionally prohibited from joining the paper. Nonetheless, a number of UKIP’s rank- and-file, elected councillors, and even MEPs have publicly expressed racist and xenophobic views (Deacon and Wring 2015: 173-175). BF has attempted to distance itself from extremism and accusations of racism, instead promoting a moderate narrative of patriotism and cultural, rather than biological, difference.9 However, studies of the party’s ideology and the content it disseminates suggests it also draws upon more “primordialist” (Wimmer 2008) conceptions of the nation that emphasize blood and ancestry (Allen 2014). As we have shown above, the movement’s online supporters frequently espouse extremely hateful views about Muslims, including calls for violence. This finding illustrates how the openness of social media technologies can make it difficult for both parties and movements to conceal or suppress some of the more extreme views and tendencies of their members (Davidson 2013). While Britain First’s large online following and its emphasis on leaving the EU are clearly an asset that could be valuable for UKIP, any association with their extremism could be used by the party’s opponents to delegitimize and tarnish the party. UKIP has received positive coverage in the media, which helped to attract public attention to the party’s message and to increase public support for the party (Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley 2017; Murphy and Devine 2018); The Times even named Nigel Farage “Briton of the year” in 2014 (Deacon and Wring 2016). Coverage of Britain First, on the other hand, has been overwhelmingly negative. We expect that this perception of a hostile environment stopped party elites from forming an overt alliance with the movement, despite its potential benefits.

What were the consequences of the relationship?

UKIP did not endorse the movement’s support yet BF nevertheless provided them with a valuable resource. BF used its page and other social media accounts to broadcast its support for UKIP to an enormous online audience, encouraging people to vote for the party and generating support for the case to leave the EU. As we saw in the week of the referendum, BF was far more active in promoting the cause on social media than UKIP, engaging nearly six times as many people. Political parties do not generally have mass bases of support to draw 20 Mobilization upon and must remobilize supporters around elections (Schlozman 2015), making BF’s attempts to mobilize its large support base a potential asset to the party. Not only did BF have a larger audience than UKIP, it framed the issues of immigration and the EU in more extreme terms, in particular by connecting them to the issue of Islam. The movement recognized that they were discussing issues that the party was not, evident in their early accusations that the party was “going all PC on Islam.” There was evidently a large demand for anti-Muslim material on Facebook, as many of BF’s posts were liked and shared tens of thousands of times and almost two million people liked the group’s page. We have shown that both BF’s leaders and supporters outlined direct links between these issues, such as by arguing that leaving the EU would reduce immigration and hence alleviate the purported threat posed by Muslims. The movement-partisans also played an active role in connecting these two issues, expressing the need to leave the EU in their discussions on BF’s Facebook page and linking the issue to Islam in their comments on UKIP’s. This frame bridging, and its amplification through BF’s emotive use of nationalistic and religious imagery and expressions (Snow et al. 1986), may have helped convince a segment of a skeptical population on the importance of leaving the EU. Although we are unable to directly measure their causal effect, by introducing the issue of Islam to large numbers of UKIP supporters, the movement-partisans had the potential to reshape the “discursive field” (Bail 2012; Gaby and Caren 2016) by articulating a demand among supporters for action on the issue (De Leon, Desai, and Tuğal 2009; Veugelers 1999). While large social media followings may not translate into large numbers of people engaging in offline (or for that matter online) collective action, we do not know the political effects of repeatedly exposing these audiences to extremist fringe material that until recently did not penetrate the mainstream (Bail 2012). Nonetheless, there is suggestive evidence that BF may have had some effect on UKIP and its supporters, as the latter has increasingly adopted the former’s anti-Muslim stance. Following the referendum, UKIP began to pivot towards the issue of Islam. Since their disastrous performance in the last general election, they have shifted further in this direction. Anne Marie Waters, an anti-Islam candidate, came second in another leadership election in late 2017; her supporters were branded “Nazis and racists” by Farage (Belson 2017). The winner of that contest resigned months later and the current party leader, Gerard Batten, has stated that Islam is a “death cult,” has supported a ban on building mosques, and has spoken at a rally in support of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, whose brief incarceration because a cause célèbre on the right (Walker 2018). The party has debated loosening its membership criteria to allow members from banned groups and has allowed a number of prominent far-right activists to join (Oppenheim 2018). It appears that extremist factions now dominate the party. While it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to directly measure the effect of movement and its supporters’ actions on the party, UKIP has shifted markedly towards the positions of the BF. As for BF, recognizing its inability to seriously contest elections, its leadership decided to support UKIP to help push for tougher policies on immigration and an end to the UK’s membership in the EU. The party’s strong performance in the 2015 general election helped to position immigration as a central issue in British politics, paving the way for the success of the Brexit referendum. BF’s support for UKIP throughout this period also helped the movement to gain attention in the media, although most of the coverage was negative. The electoral decline of UKIP presented a further opportunity to BF, which appeared to intend to fill the niche left behind by the party; however, the movement has since been plagued by difficulties. Twitter banned them shortly after President Trump retweeted a series of anti- Muslim videos shared by BF’s deputy leader Jayda Fransen (Dearden 2017). Facebook followed suit a few months later, claiming BF “repeatedly posted content designed to incite animosity and hatred against minority groups” (Facebook 2018). The movement’s channel on the YouTube video-streaming service was also removed. Golding and Fransen have faced a number of legal challenges and were both jailed in early 2018 for religiously aggravated harassment. While social media technologies enabled the movement to build a large online Social21 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction following, the absence of a corresponding mass offline base of support made the movement vulnerable to this external repression (Tufekci 2018). It remains to be seen how the movement, which is still active online, will be able to adapt to an environment where it no longer has such easy access to tools to reach the masses.

CONCLUSION

We have shown how the one-sided nature of the movement-party relationship at the elite-level belied the frequent interactions between rank-and-file supporters of either group on social media. The “digital traces” of these interactions (Golder and Macy 2014) that we analyzed provide a valuable window into interorganizational interactions that are otherwise difficult to observe (Segerberg and Bennett 2011), in this case making visible the disjuncture between the proclamations of elites and the activities of supporters. These interactions peaked around key elections and the Brexit referendum, suggesting that movement supporters were mobilizing online in support of the party. Our results indicate that the boundaries between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics are blurring online. The ability for masses of supporters to directly communicate with one another in digital spaces opens up opportunities for the rank-and-file to engage in framing from below, articulating and spreading discourses that the elites may not be willing or able to engage in (Davidson 2013). While the UKIP leadership, at least until recently, avoided bringing Islam into their discussions of immigration and the EU, we have shown that their supporters were more willing to entertain the topic. Further work is necessary to understand the role played by movement-partisans in these online discussions and the extent to which they are able to influence other social media users. Future studies should examine the extent to which social media actually causes new connections between these groups or whether it just renders these connections visible. Our results also have important implications for the study of the interactions between radical right movements and parties. Despite UKIP’s efforts to distance itself from extremist organizations and their supporters, we find significant overlaps in supporters online. On any given day, a significant proportion of UKIP’s Facebook audience also interacted with Britain First. This is consistent with prior research showing that a substantial number of the people who support UKIP are also receptive to the messages of extremists (John and Margetts 2009). UKIP began to focus on Islam during the 2017 snap-election and has continued to take a harder stance on the issue, suggesting that the movement and its supporters may have had an effect on the party. Although Britain First claimed to be “on the streets” supporting UKIP “at the ballot box,” it appears that “on Facebook” is a more apt characterization of their support. Radical right movement-party relationships are not unique to the British context. In Germany, the PEGIDA movement, which has led street demonstrations against Islam and has campaigned against the resettlement of refugees, has built a large Facebook following and has supported the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) (Schwemmer 2018). Unlike the case studied here, the AfD embraced the support of the movement and they have even held joint rallies (Ellrodt and Remter 2017). Analysis of their Facebook pages shows evidence of large numbers of active movement-partisans (Stier et al. 2017). The party has also built a large social media following, with much more activity than the other large parties, and won an unprecedented 13% of the vote in the 2017 national election (Davidson and Lagodny 2017). In the United States, anti-Islam fringe groups have successfully managed to influence mainstream media coverage (Bail 2012) and the recent emergence of the “alt-right”—a loose collection of groups and individuals who have shared extreme-right content on websites like 4chan and Reddit—illustrates how far-right groups have also leveraged social media to expand their reach and develop new forms of viral content (Hine, Onaolapo, DeCristofaro, Kourtellis, Leontiadis, Samaras, Stringhini, and Blackburn 2017; see Nagle 2017 for a popular journalistic account). An analysis of millions of comments posted on Donald Trump’s Facebook page during his presidential campaign showed that the language used by his 22 Mobilization supports became more extreme over time and that many people posted similar material to self-identified members of the “alt-right” (Morgan 2017). President Trump has even re- tweeted a number of tweets written by white supremacists (McCaskill 2016). Future work should endeavor to address these different cases in a comparative fashion to examine why the right appears to have been particularly successful at spreading its message on social media and to better understand the effects of the interactions between movement and party supporters, on the right and more broadly, on important outcomes like elections, policies, and mobilization. Furthermore, it will be necessary to understand the international connections between these different groups, as illustrated by Farage’s support for Trump and Trump’s re- tweets of content shared by BF.

NOTES

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Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. 28 Mobilization 1 A version of their website from June 29th, 2011, which discusses these campaigns, is saved on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20110629011438/http://britainfirst.org:80/. 2 As of summer 2018 applications must now be reviewed and gain permission from Facebook to use this API. It is unclear whether such permission will be granted to researchers. For current information on the API see: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/pages/. 3 Following the recommendation of two reviewers we examined two subsets of these users to assess whether they could be “bots” or “fake” accounts. We are confident that the majority of the users observed are legitimate, although we cannot rule out the possibility that some of them may be fake and/or automated accounts. See the Online Appendix for further details. 4 We use Jack Hessel’s Python implementation of the algorithm, which can be found here: https://github.com/jmhessel/FightingWords. Graphs of the results are based on code provided by Alexandra Schofield. 5 The pattern is consistent if we consider other metrics such as likes or shares, although the absolute numbers tend to be higher. We focus on comments because they are a more meaningful form of interaction, given they require users to write something in response to a post or another user, rather than to simply click a button. 6 Britain First’s Facebook page has since been deleted so these statements cannot be accessed via hyperlink. Where possible we reference media coverage or link to other online sources. Please contact us if you are interested in accessing the original data collected from Facebook. 7 Carswell had in fact previously held the seat and his defection from the Conservatives triggered the by-election. 8 Minor spelling and grammar mistakes have been edited in these comments to improve their readability. 9 Their website prominently featured a page titled “Britain First and ‘Racism,’” which depicted their ethnic minority supporters accompanied by text claiming that “Britain First is home to thousands of patriots from ethnic minorities from all over the world who share our defence of British values and our opposition to global Islamic jihad.” Much of this information has since been deleted from their website, although earlier versions can be found by entering the link into the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine (original link: http://www.britainfirst.org/racism/).