From Russia With Likes: Nigel Farage Dominates Social Media During General Election – Boosted by Bots Stoking Racism

New analysis from the Independent that shows Nigel Farage and his Reform Party have “made the biggest splash on social media of any political party or politician this election” must be considered alongside Farage’s past history of relying on inauthentic accounts and Russian backed ‘information operations’ to boost his apparent support.

The Independent analysed Farage and Reform content on Facebook from 22 May to 2 July 2024, and discovered that the new party, which is actually a privately owned company funded by rich businessmen, generated three million reactions and shares on Facebook in that period, six times more than either the Labour Party or Conservative Party or their leaders. 

The Reform Party is hovering around 18% of the vote on current opinion polls. They have, at best, a fifth of the population supporting them compared with other parties, yet have three times as much Facebook impact as their opponents combined. Something is going on. 

The Reform Party explain this as a grassroots insurgency or rebellion. But those grass roots are laced with AstroTurf apparently boosted by a foreign hostile power. An analysis of  “foreign interference in the UK election” by the Australian Broadcast Corporation found five apparently UK-based Facebook pages, supporting ‘Patriotic UK’ to ‘BeyondBorders UK’, – ‘Commonsense Britain’, ‘British Patriots’ and ‘BritBlend’ – were run by administrators mostly based in Nigeria and with Facebook ads paid for using Nigerian currency. 

Following on from analysis by ITV and Cardiff University that suspicious accounts ‘with Nigerian following’ being used to push pro-Reform UK content on TikTok, ABC’s security experts concluded that the Facebook networks they had detected “had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation”.

These pages have been subsequently deleted, just hours before Byline Times downloaded some of their content, but what were the main angles of these Kremlin-sponsored posts during a crucial general election?  

The Politics of Farage and Reform is No Joke of a Matter – The Established Media Must Learn Its Lessons and Start Holding Them to Account

The normalisation of racism and dog-whistles will only get worse if the press continues to treat Farage as an entertaining figure representing the ‘real views’ of the British people – it must stop, writes Byline Times’ Editor

Hardeep Matharu

The Reform Party Powered by Racism

While several dozen Reform Party parliamentary candidates have been exposed expressing racist views, and several have been dropped from the party as a result, the party founders Richard Tice and Farage consistently deny supporting racist views and publicly decry any expression of them. 

However, just as Farage’s Leave EU campaign did eight years ago, the party whose main point is the ‘breaking point’ of immigration, does little to distance itself from the xenophobia that flows from anti-immigrant feeling, or the racism towards British citizens that also follows. For example this, from the now deleted Patriotic UK pages:

The Great Replacement Theory it refers to – the idea that global elites are deliberately trying to replace ‘white’ populations with immigrants – is here directly tied into the impressive racial diversity in British politics. None of these four political leaders are immigrants. 

The more direct racism focuses on Muslims, portraying them (as sadly echoed by senior Conservative politicians) as radical extremists infiltrating Europe for the purposes of terror. This is exactly the ‘Eurabia’ rhetoric which inspired Anders Breivik to murder 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Brenton Tarrant to kill 51 Muslims in the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019. 

When it comes to the UK and the General Election, these Russian-backed networks are full of false claims and statistics designed to cause communal conflict.