Tommy Robinson is escorted by police during a protest in London, England on April 1, 2017 Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Tommy Robinson may have headed up the English Defence League, but the high-profile #FreeTommy online support campaign is far from English. Instead, the campaign is being fuelled and driven by the international far right, according to analysis of change.org petitions and Twitter activity by anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate.

Researchers checked half a million tweets using the hashtags #FreeTommy and #FreeTommyRobinson between May 25 and June 11, in the lead up to the June 9 Free Tommy Robinson demonstration in London. Only 40 per cent of the tweets using those hashtags came from UK users while 35 per cent of posts were from the US with the remainder split between countries including Australia, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand and Netherlands.


Separate research at the end of May from US-based Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard – which tracks Russian Twitter bot trending patterns – found the hashtag #FreeTommy charting at number two, #TommyRobinson at number three and #FreeTommyRobinson at number four.

Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – pleaded guilty to obstructing court proceedings in Leeds on May 25 after live streaming Muslim defendants in a grooming trial, placing the trail in jeopardy. Robinson’s solicitor said his client had “deep regret” for what he had done – but #FreeTommy has since become a cause célèbre for far-right figures active on Twitter, including Katie Hopkins and Raheem Kassam in the UK, and Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones of Infowars in the US.

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The 17,000 accounts that have used the three hashtags are far more likely to follow US-based right-wing Twitter feeds than UK based – 65.7 per cent follow Donald Trump’s personal feed, 48.1 per cent follow the official president of the United States account and 43 per cent follow British far-right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. US accounts like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump Jr follow, with the next British figure – Nigel Farage – coming in twelfth on the list.

Hope Not Hate also analysed 61,000 signatures on a Change.org petition created at the time of Robinson’s arrest. Only 68.1 per cent of the signatures were from the UK, with 9.7 per cent from Australia, 9.3 per cent from the US and the rest from Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand, Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland.


This level of support from the international far right was reflected on the ground at recent Free Tommy Robinson demonstrations in London – addressed by Geert Wilders, founder and leader of the Islamophobic People’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Flemish nationalist Filip de Winter, Swedish far right politician Kent Ekeroth, Jerome Riviere from France’s Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) and Siegfried Daebritz from the German anti-Muslim street movement PEGIDA in June.

A repeat demonstration followed in July and included Debbie Robinson from the Australian Liberty Alliance, with messages of support from Wilders and US alt-right figures like Jack Posobiec, Joy Villa and Steve Bannon. Both events were organised by former Breitbart UK editor Raheem Kassam and financed by Philadelphia-based Conservative think tank the Middle East Forum, which has also been paying for Robinson’s legal campaign.

“US funding and support for Tommy Robinson is no surprise,” says a spokesperson for Hope Not Hate. “[Robinson] has long-received support from notorious anti-Muslim extremists in the US. They have used social media manipulation to propel their aims and act as enablers of his message. This messaging is amplified in turn by an online troll army drawn from both the alt-right in the US as well as ‘identitarian’ spheres of the far right in Europe. We need to wake up to the threat posed by monied far-right figures determined to stoke conflict across Europe, using figures like [Robinson].”

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As one of the campaign’s organisers, Kassam says he is happy with the international coalition of support. “Despite the historical unreliability of Hope Not Hate information, I am delighted we seem to have succeeded in internationalising the Free Tommy campaign, as the left often does with its global causes and heroes,” he explains. “Any claims that this is somehow a bad thing is surely nativist, jingoistic, and xenophobic by the left’s own standards.”

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Concerns over international interference in national debates has mushroomed since the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence identified Russian involvement in the 2016 US presidential election. In July, the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham announced that some social media information was accessed and supplied from other countries, including Russia, during the EU referendum. As a result, during Ireland’s referendum on legalising abortion in May, Facebook briefly debuted its Page History feature, allowing users to see how many people manage a specific page and where those managers are located.


While the majority of Yes voting pro-choice pages were managed from Ireland, the majority of No voting anti-abortion pages were managed by a combination of Irish, British and US users – with one, Save the 8th - managed by 14 people located in Hungary, the UK and two other countries not listed by Facebook, but no-one actually living in Ireland.

Both Facebook and Google banned foreign ads discussing the Irish referendum – with Google ultimately banning all ads two weeks before the vote as it struggled to ensure election integrity.

In the ICO’s interim report on fake news, personal data and foreign involvement in UK votes Denham made a series of recommendations including a statutory code of practice, compulsory audits of political parties and organisations and a need for social media platforms to urgently roll out planned transparency features. Denham’s final report is due in October.