Reader Paul Hollands spent a week on a pro-Brexit Facebook group to break out of the Remain social media ‘bubble’.
www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/facebook-turns-leavers-into-brexit-extremists-1-5322487
I have spent the last week in a pro-Brexit group on Facebook. I did this to try and break out of my ‘bubble’, but also I went in search of the reason why people voted for Brexit. I was looking for reasoned arguments for why Brexit is happening. I found none.
What I discovered was large groups of people being radicalised daily and hourly, by far-right and neo-Nazi propaganda and a ubiquitous belief in wild conspiracy theories such as the Kalergi Plan, Agenda 21 and George Soros and the new world order. Google’s algorithmic flaws ensure that they can easily find some hate speech site that confirms these darkly wild fantasies.
Anyone disagreeing with them is a libtard leftist who is an apologist for Muslim terrorism. Sadiq Khan is hated because he is both ‘liberal’ Labour and a Muslim. There is huge support for Donald Trump because he is a ‘truth speaker’.
Remainers are called lefty Nazis who have been brainwashed by EU propaganda. When asked ‘why Nazi?’, the response comes that Hitler was a socialist because his party were the National Socialists.
The most common theme and motivator (and the most frightening) is a toxic mix of ideas about Muslims. In the minds of these people, all Muslims are terrorists and child rapists, and all immigrants are Muslims.
They say that Angela Merkel let millions of them into Germany and gave them EU passports and our EU membership means that they can now come to the UK to commit acts of terrorism.
Everything from the housing crisis, lack of NHS funding and cuts to benefits, police funding and cuts to the armed forces are blamed on the hordes of people the ‘bullying and corrupt’ EU are sending to the UK.
In reality, all of these things are the fault of our own governments and well within the power of our leaders to address, but Brexiteers have accepted an essentially racist political explanation for these issues, egged on by the right-wing press.
Here is one typical comment: “Please start a petition to limit the berth (sic) rate for all, Immigrants are outbreeding us by 3 to 1, it will also reduce the population on our overcrowded island and save on child benefit Pay outs. And reduce NHS costs.”
These are groups of people whose Facebook feeds are full of bile, hatred and misery. I’m sure it makes them all deeply fearful, but it is also radicalising them. It is not too hard to imagine this degenerating into paramilitarism of the type that killed Jo Cox.