Sonia van Gilder Cooke

time.com

November 16, 2011

Before he became the new face of right-wing extremism in Europe, Anders Behring Breivik was just another guy airing his anti-immigration views online. On Monday, Breivik, who admitted to a killing spree in Norway in July, which left 77 people dead, faced his first public-court hearing. While Breivik may have acted alone, he was far from alone in cyberspace: he had spent much of the time leading up to his attack at his computer, chatting with some of the millions of nationalists who support right-wing groups on social-networking sites. After this summer’s tragedy, researchers wanted to find out more about these people. But how to find them? Easy — just log on to Facebook.

“We realized that it wasn’t that difficult to get to them at all,” says Jamie Bartlett, the lead author of a recently published report on European digital populism by British think tank Demos. Facebook’s stash of personal information is so encyclopedic, says Bartlett, that the researchers could simply use the site’s advertising tool to pinpoint their desired demographic with scientific accuracy — the way marketers have been doing for years. Bartlett’s team found half a million fans of right-wing groups across Europe and then targeted them with ads, but instead of linking to a new band or diet product, the ads invited users to complete a survey that asked questions about their education level, attitudes toward violence and optimism about their own future.

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