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The Unite the Right Free Speech Rally is a planned gathering of far-right nationalists, racists, white supremacists, and fascists scheduled for August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. So far nearly 700 people have indicated on Facebook that they are “going” to the event.

To find out which groups would be in attendance, I used the Facebook API to collect publicly-available data about 45,000 Facebook users that are members of 197 far-right groups. Users who replied “yes” (“going”) to the Unite the Right Free Speech Rally Facebook event were sorted according to their membership in those 197 groups. To simplify things, the groups were aggregated by type, for example “southern nationalist”, “white nationalist” or “OathKeeper/militia,” etc.

Here are the results:

Descriptions of the categories:

Southern Nationalists: Examples of this designation include KKK, League of the South, Identity Dixie, etc.

White Nationalists: This is a big category. Examples of this designation include National Socialists, Traditional Workers Party, National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), Aryans, American Freedom Party, AmRen, folkish/kinists/asatru, vinlanders, skinheads, Soldiers of Odin.

Alt-Right : These groups self-describe by name as “Alt Right”

Proud Boys & Alt-Knights : Examples of these groups include Proud Boys, Alt-Knights, Fellowship of Alt-Knights (FOAK), Based stickman enthusiast groups, etc.

Militia, OathKeepers, 3% : These groups self-describe as OathKeepers, militias, or 3%/iii% groups

Frequently Asked Questions about this data:

How come the percentages add up to greater than 100? Some people are in more than one group. In a future posting, I’ll show which types of groups have the greatest cross-over of membership. Why did you do this? Since there has been so much infighting among the different groups, I became curious about how many of each type of group were actually saying they were going to show up to the event. Which specific groups are represented? At this time I am not releasing the list of groups and events I collect data from. The list is currently growing by about 8-10 groups each day as more groups are discovered by the program.

More questions? Contact me at [email protected]