People Tend To Overshare In Facebook Groups And Here Are 61 Of The Funniest And Weirdest Posts

These online communities can shape people’s offline behavior as well. For example, research by the Guardian revealed that a network of far-right Facebook groups is exposing hundreds of thousands of Britons to racist and extremist disinformation.

Run by otherwise ordinary members of the public – many of whom are of retirement age – the groups are a hotbed of hardline anti-immigration and racist language, where online hate goes apparently unchecked.

Experts who reviewed the Guardian’s months-long data project said such groups help to create an online environment that can radicalize people into taking extreme actions, such as last year’s summer riots.

The network was exposed just weeks after 150,000 protesters from all over the country descended on London for a far-right protest, the scale of which dwarfed police estimates and whose size and toxicity shocked politicians.

The Guardian’s data projects team identified the groups from the profiles of participants in the riots. From them emerged an ecosystem where mainstream politicians are described as “treacherous” “traitors” and the police engage in “two-tier” justice.

The Guardian analyzed more than 51,000 text posts from three of the largest public groups in the network.

This found hundreds of concerning posts that experts said were peppered with misinformation and conspiracy theories, containing far-right tropes, the use of racist slurs, and evidence of white nativism.

Even small online groups can set a tone that spreads widely.

A key element of a group’s success is the admins, and they often come from different social backgrounds.

Most of the admins the Guardian contacted would not speak on the record, but from her doorstep in a Leicestershire village, one, who moderates six groups with nearly 400,000 members between them, said far-right users were “deleted and blocked” from the groups.

However, the investigation found swathes of extreme far-right posts, including disinformation and well-known debunked conspiracy narratives, some of which were spread word-for-word or with slight variations in writing across multiple connected groups.

Group rules and moderation aren’t always enough to stop influence from spreading.

Immigrants come in for the most vituperative language, including demonizing and dehumanizing slurs: “criminals,” “parasites,” and so on.

The Guardian’s investigation into these vastly popular groups cast new light on the scale of far-right disinformation, which appears to be disseminated at an industrial scale on social media.

The content shared in the groups also raises new concerns about moderation policies, even though Meta had already announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies.

Online communities can amplify dangerous ideas even when platforms try to intervene.

Dr. Julia Ebner, a radicalization researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and an expert on online radicalization, said such spaces can act as breeding grounds for extremist ideologies and “definitely play a role in the radicalization of individuals”.

“What is new is that the online spaces amplify a lot of these dynamics,” she said.

“The algorithmic amplification, the speed at which people can end up in a radicalization engine. Then there are the new technologies from fabricated videos to deepfakes to bot automation.”