BuzzFeed News has analysed more than a million likes by 350,000 people of posts on the “official” Britain First Facebook page, made over six weeks. The data gives a unique insight into how one of the social network’s most controversial pages gets promoted across the platform, who its most active fans are, and what content they share the most.

Britain First’s Facebook page is liked by more than 1.5 million people and markets itself as an official page for the far-right UK political party formed by former members of the BNP. The fringe party has no elected MPs, MEPs, or councillors, and its former leader was jailed last month for violating a court order forbidding him from entering any mosque in the UK.

The party’s Facebook page rose to prominence following the murder of the MP Jo Cox by the racist extremist Thomas Mair. In the hours after the attack, posts on the page were repeatedly used to cast doubt on whether or not Mair had shouted “Britain First” as he killed Cox outside a constituency surgery.

It is not possible to use Facebook to see everyone who publicly likes any given page – and this group does not always match up with who actually shares and likes posts put out by it. Instead, to look at how content actually spreads, BuzzFeed News used information available from Facebook on who liked any of the individual posts made by Britain First over a six-week period, amounting to more than 1.1 million likes on almost 2,000 separate posts.