LONDON — Walk into Number 10 Downing Street, take the first left and straight ahead of you is the prime minister’s press office, an open-plan room of civil servants sitting in rows outside the grand corner office of Theresa May’s director of communications, Robbie Gibb.

A flat screen television sits on one of the walls, scrolling through what is being read online — the most popular conversations and shared articles, search words and trending topics.

Not far away are two or three officials charged with tackling what No. 10 sees as a rising risk, to the government politically and to the country as a whole: the rapid rise of new populist news sites pushing conspiratorial, anti-establishment content outside the channels of traditional media.

Led by No. 10 Downing Street’s Head of Digital Communications Chris Hamilton, the British government’s five-strong “rapid response unit” spread across No. 10 and the Cabinet Office is tasked with monitoring and firefighting stories set alight on social media, often beyond the radar of many of London’s politicians and journalists.

Stories going viral are discussed at an 8 a.m. prep meeting, usually chaired by the prime minister’s Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell or deputy JoJo Penn. At 8.30 a.m., the main meeting of the day with the prime minister takes place to plan the day ahead. Three times a day a media summary is distributed inside No.10, setting out what is dominating the traditional news outlets and online publications.

“Who do you ring? You don’t know who these people are" — No. 10 official

Unsurprisingly, mainstream websites come up again and again — the BBC, the Telegraph, the Independent. But increasingly a raft of “half campaign, half news websites,” barely known to anyone in Westminster, have become an issue of mounting concern in No. 10.

According to one U.K. government official involved in the briefings, the sites include publishers of viral content like LadBible and Joe.co.uk, as well as political sites like the Canary on the left and Westmonster on the right.

Increasingly, they also include a new breed of hyper-partisan news sites associated with the populist right. Some, like PoliticalUK.co.uk and Politicalite.com, have seemingly surged from nowhere in recent months to occupy a dominant position in online conversations.

The populist right-wing media is “huge” in the U.K., said Paul Quigley, CEO of NewsWhip, a U.S.-based social media monitoring company, which carried out extensive research for POLITICO.

His company has noted spikes of online interest in once-fringe figures like the anti-Muslim street activist Tommy Robinson, that sometimes eclipse the numbers for mainstream politicians such as May, former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson or Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “People are extremely engaged,” he said.

With articles that rack up thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, of clicks, likes and shares, these sites are transforming Britain’s media landscape, empowering fringe groups, amplifying the message of figures like Robinson and — some in the government now worry — putting young people at risk of radicalization.

Into this mix goes Brexit, and the increasing speculation about a second referendum — a suggestion already sparking accusations of “betrayal.” Ministers, government officials and analysts fear any successful bid to overturn Brexit would provide the populist right — and some on the left — with a potentially toxic new grievance upon which to build a movement from the ashes of Nigel Farage’s UKIP.

For May’s government, populist news sites are an increasing threat. Under previous prime ministers, like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown — or even the early years of David Cameron — a handful of newspapers and television stations served as news gatekeepers, picking out what they considered important and beaming it to a mass audience.

Some publications were hostile, of course, but they were known quantities, their editors contactable, their reporters easy to berate. Today’s news media has broken completely free of these bounds.

Since PoliticalUK.co.uk started publishing stories at the end of April, the site has amassed more than 3 million interactions on social media

News, fake news, information and disinformation now reaches voters through a collection of social media pages, messaging apps, video platforms and anonymous websites spreading content beyond the control of anyone in Whitehall — or the Élysée in France, as Emmanuel Macron is discovering.

“Who do you ring?” asked one exasperated No. 10 official when asked about these sites. “You don’t know who these people are.”

Anatomy of an ecosystem

At 12:50 p.m. on April 25, 2018, a new British political news website was registered in Scottsdale, Arizona. Within weeks, PoliticalUK.co.uk was producing some of the most viral news stories in the U.K. and had been included on briefing notes circulated in No. 10.

The website — specializing in hyper-partisan coverage of Brexit, Islam and Tommy Robinson — has no named editor and one reporter using a pen name. Its owner is anonymous, having registered the site with the U.S. firm “Domains By Proxy” whose catch line, beaming out from its homepage, reads: “Your privacy is nobody’s business but ours.”

The website itself does not provide any contact details. It has no mission statement. It has a small but growing following on Twitter but no branded Facebook page or YouTube channel.

And yet, since PoliticalUK.co.uk started publishing stories at the end of April, the site has amassed more than 3 million interactions on social media, with an average of 5,000 “engagements” for every story it has published — far more than most national newspapers.

The site looks cheap, with one simple strapline — “POLITICAL UK HEADLINES” — in the top left-hand corner, above a list of stories set out in rows of three.

The site usually publishes seven or eight stories a day, none of which attempt to hide their partisanship. “MEDIA SILENCE AS TENS OF THOUSANDS PROTEST AGAINST BREXIT BETRAYAL,” was the headline on a story Sunday following a UKIP-backed protest march against May’s Brexit deal.

“A peaceful demonstration against the governments [sic] Brexit deal took place today in London after UKIP and other political figures promoted the March [sic],” the story read. “As you would expect, the media coverage was much smaller than anti-Brexit protests, that’s the mainstream media for you.”

By Monday lunchtime, the story had picked up 20,351 interactions on Facebook, according to NewsWhip. Meanwhile, a more critical take from the Daily Mail — one of the most-read English language news sites in the world — racked up just 3,481 interactions.

Those types of numbers aren’t uncommon. In one week in November, sampled at random, the site published 36 stories, garnering 291,514 likes, shares and comments, an average of 8,098 for every article published, far outperforming populist sites on the left that support Jeremy Corbyn, such as the Canary and Skwawkbox, which averaged less than 600 social media “interactions” for each published story.

After sending an email to the address provided by Domains by Proxy but not receiving a reply, POLITICO reached PoliticalUK.co.uk in December via Twitter.

In an interview on the social media platform, the person on the other side of the conversation said he was a 20-year-old man from Essex, who writes under the pen name “James W Cooper.” He would not give his real name because of the “risk of harassment by people who disagree with Pro-Brexit stories.”

“My audience like him" — PoliticalUK.co.uk editor on Tommy Robinson

He said he left university to build up the website, which he promotes through Facebook groups he started working on four years ago when he was in school and that have since grown to have tens of thousands of followers.

His goal, he said, is political impact, but he has been able to “monetize” the site because of the number of hits it is generating. He used to be a member of UKIP before the referendum, but he’s since quit. “Don’t like the path it’s taking,” he explained.

UKIP is in the midst of a power struggle, which has seen former leaders Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall leave in protest, after the anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson was appointed as an official adviser to party leader Gerard Batten.

The PoliticalUK.co.uk editor who spoke to POLITICO said he supported some of what Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon — stood for, but not all of it. But, he added: “My audience like him.”

Force multipliers

A large part of PoliticalUK.co.uk’s success can be attributed to its place in a much larger network of sites and social media pages, and video accounts, each amplifying the next.

Like the controversial Mainstream Network, which is being investigated by the U.K.’s information watchdog for spending vast amounts of money on “chuck Chequers” advertising opposing the prime minister’s Brexit plan without revealing who owns or runs the site, PoliticalUK.co.uk has amassed an extraordinary following through a web of interconnected networks.

The site’s content is often posted by a Facebook group called “EU — I Voted Leave.” The group is liked by more than 220,000 people. It also has no named administrator. From here, Facebook itself offers “related” groups with sizeable followings, including Nigel Farage’s, with almost 800,000 likes and “Get Britain Out,” with almost 250,000.

For those in the British government monitoring developments on the internet, worries about right-wing radicalism are joining concerns about Russian interference and Islamic terrorism.

“This is a really big problem,” said Damian Collins, a Conservative MP, who has been investigating the growing influence of fake news, disinformation and social media on British democracy. “Social media is used as a cheap and effective way of influencing people by feeding them a hyper-partisan diet. These are the tactics the Russians have been deploying for some time now. We have to fight back.”

Social media is transforming the populist far-right in particular, according to analysts and government officials, who add that it is often aided by influential and wealthy supporters in the United States, like Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager.

“This is a separate ecosystem, with its own rules, its own communities and its own influencers,” said Ben Nimmo, an expert in online disinformation and manipulation at the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab. “What we’re seeing is the internationalization of nationalism.”

Right-wing extremism is a “growing threat” in the U.K.,” Home Secretary Sajid Javid told POLITICO. “The far right will go to any length to spread hate, exploit grievances, distort the truth and undermine the values that hold us together.”

Last June, an anti-Muslim fanatic named Darren Osborne launched a lone terror attack on Muslim worshipers outside Finsbury Park in North London, killing one man and injuring 12 others. The judge in his trial said Osborne had become “rapidly radicalized over the internet.” In the weeks prior to the attack, he regularly read material by Tommy Robinson and other far-right websites.

On December 6, U.K. police investigating extreme right-wing activity arrested three men on suspicion of terrorism offenses targeting “race traitor” Prince Harry: a 17-year-old from London, a 21-year-old from Bath and an 18-year-old from Portsmouth who posted threats online.

Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright told POLITICO the “rise of disinformation” was causing concern in government. “It is clear that there are some who try to use this to manipulate and confuse information to suit their own needs,” he said.

The U.K. government announced earlier this year a dedicated national security communications unit “tasked with combating disinformation by state actors and others.” Proposals on how to tackle “internet harms” will also be published in the new year, with a bill to follow in the next session of parliament.

David Toube, director of policy at the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam, said the greatest threat today, across all parts of the political spectrum, was “the growth of conspiracism, feeding into political polarization and potentially street violence and ultimately terrorism.”

‘Waste of money’

Despite the revolution going on online, much of the Westminster routine continues as usual.

Selected senior journalists and commentators are invited in for briefings at No. 10 and other major departments.

The prime minister’s chief spinner Robbie Gibb, a former BBC journalist, is in daily contact with political editors from across Fleet Street and the major TV stations. Journalists in the lobby have the chance to question the prime minister’s official spokesman James Slack twice a day when parliament is sitting.

But outside Westminster, the message is often not being heard. And the government knows it.

“There is quite a discrepancy between government announcements and what is actually being clicked on" — U.K. government communications official

No. 10’s rapid response unit, alongside Whitehall’s overarching Government Communications Service it reports into, now uses artificial intelligence to analyze social media to find out what the country is talking about, according to a response to a Freedom of Information request by POLITICO.

For Her Majesty’s Government, the picture is rarely encouraging.

“There is quite a discrepancy between government announcements and what is actually being clicked on,” admitted one U.K. government communications official speaking on the basis of anonymity.

Inside No. 10, the frequent complaint is that nothing it announces seems to register with the public at large, bar an awkward prime ministerial jig in Africa or a hand-holding episode with Donald Trump. The government is happy if its “top of the grid” announcement that day was shared 5,000-10,000 times on Facebook, the official said.

In June, the prime minister unveiled a pledge to spend an extra £20 billion a year on the NHS. The public barely blinked, according to social media data. Not a single of the 20 most viral stories about Theresa May in the months leading up to and after the NHS announcement were about the extra spending, according to social media data supplied by NewsWhip.

“No one noticed,” complained one government minister. “It was a complete waste of money.”

The only political announcement that caught the public imagination during that time was Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to create a bank holiday if England won the World Cup. The story picked up more than 100,000 interactions on the Sky News website alone.

Meanwhile, a PoliticalUK.co.uk story published a few weeks before the announcement — “Media SILENCE as THOUSANDS ‘protest’ Tommy Robinson arrest outside Downing St” — had almost no pick up on Twitter, where the Westminster crowd spends much of its time, but was shared and commented on 126,409 times on Facebook.

The loss of media control is having a real effect on the government’s ability to act, officials said.

At the height of the Syria crisis in April when the U.K., France and the U.S. weighed airstrikes on the Assad regime over its use of chemical weapons, the Rapid Response Unit noticed the government’s case for intervention was being drowned out online. The government took the extraordinary step of buying a top Google search result to get its message out, one official said.

"You can’t measure how many people are still furious, but kept just this side of being radicalized because of what you’re doing" — Government official

It is now doing the same with Brexit. According to accounts published Monday, the government was the highest spending political advertiser on Facebook in the U.K. in the first week of December, shelling out almost £97,000 on the social network seeking support for its deal taking Britain out of the European Union.

Still, many in Whitehall think the battle is lost.

What is the point, some officials ask in private, of social media buys and a five-strong unit when you’re dealing with millions of websites, bloggers, Facebook groups and YouTube channels, all feeding off each other in an ecosystem beyond state control?

“The problem is, you can’t know how many people are a little bit less angry because of your digital comms strategy,” said one official. “You can’t measure how many people are still furious, but kept just this side of being radicalized because of what you’re doing.”

This is the first in a three-part series on British nationalism and the internet. The second piece looks at the rise of UKIP's YouTubers. The third piece profiles far-right activist Tommy Robinson.