Across all English-language content, British right-wing tabloids the Daily Express and Daily Mail published 16 of the 50 top-performing news stories about Merkel on Facebook, according to the analysis. Content on MailOnline, which has 7.5 million followers on its Facebook page, and the Express, with a million followers, gain significant traction on Facebook because of promotion from US-based conservative, alt-right, and conspiracy news sites, and their social media accounts.

The CrowdTangle browser plugin, which analyzes a link and lists its top sharers on Facebook and Twitter, showed that US Facebook pages and groups such as Conservative Country (700,000 followers), The Deplorables (450,000 members), and Freedom Daily (1.6 million followers) shared anti-Merkel content from British tabloids. (A previous BuzzFeed News analysis of content published by Freedom Daily found that it published false or misleading content 46% of the time.)

One of the top-performing stories in the Express carried an inaccurate headline that said “MERKEL'S WORST NIGHTMARE: Germany calls for Referendum as ‘people want to be free of EU’” (which generated over 185,000 shares, reactions, and comments and on Facebook and over 5,000 shares on Twitter). In reality, the idea of holding a referendum on EU membership in Germany is harbored only on the fringes of the political mainstream. Polling shows that some 80% of Germans support EU membership while 70% think a UK-style Brexit referendum in Germany would be a bad idea.

Another top-performing story about Merkel in 2016 was a misleading piece titled “Angela Merkel under more pressure over refugee policy as it is revealed migrants committed 142,500 crimes in Germany during the first six months of 2016.” The Mail story, which grossly mischaracterized crime data, was cross-posted to the Express and the website of New York–based Gatestone Institute, which has been accused of fanning anti-Muslim hate. The Mail's version generated more than 80,000 engagements on Facebook and was shared more than 4,000 times on Twitter.

Several of the stories featured in the Express and the Mail were very similar to ones that appeared earlier in right-wing German publications. For example, the piece “German asylum seekers refuse to work insisting ‘We are Merkel's GUESTS’” published by the Express, appeared days earlier on the right-wing website Junge Freiheit. The German story generated close to 40,000 engagements on Facebook and was among the 50 best-performing pieces about Merkel in German media last year.

The same headlines also gained traction on Facebook thanks to a string of UK accounts, including several associated with Nigel Farage’s UKIP, the far-right political party Britain First (1.5 million followers), and anti-EU groups such as Get Britain Out (170,000 likes).

In the English language, the anti-EU British tabloids dominate coverage of Germany and the EU, according to Wolfgang Blau, chief digital officer for Condé Nast International and the former editor of Zeit.de.

“Since the Brexit vote last June, this global reliance on UK media for following EU affairs poses an even bigger vulnerability for the EU than it already has in the past,” Blau told BuzzFeed News. “The world gets its news about Europe from one of the EU's fiercest opponents, often without even knowing so: the UK media.”

Not all the top stories about Merkel are negative. Among the most popular pieces there are articles by the New York Times and The Guardian lauding the German chancellor's liberal values. However, in both cases engagement is primarily driven by the publishers' own Facebook pages. While one of the most popular pieces in German, an article by Süddeutsche Zeitung that suggests Merkel deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, was mostly shared on Google Plus.

Those critical of Merkel’s approach to refugees are also increasingly vocal on Twitter. After the recent attack on a Berlin Christmas market, pro-Trump Twitter accounts began pumping out anti-Merkel memes and content.

“There’s a lot of evidence that there are now targeted attempts to massively attack Merkel, including with bots,” Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s Technical University, told Bloomberg. As BuzzFeed News reported last month, a number of pro-Trump troll accounts have shifted their attention to Merkel, filling social platforms with anti-Merkel messages and links to stories critical of her government’s refugee policy.