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Nigel Farage's Eurosceptic Brexit Party is less than a year old, but it's already winning the online battle for the EU elections.

New data from 89up, a London-based online content and social media consultancy, shows Facebook posts linking to the Brexit Party website have generated more shares than every other party combined. The company crawled a database of 1.5 million public Facebook pages to see how often pages were linking to political party websites, and how many shares those posts generated.


The Brexit Party generated 125,035 shares; the next closest were the Conservatives on 26,400. UKIP, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party all had less than 6,000 shares, while Change UK had just 56. 89up emphasised that only shares from the 500 most recent posts from public Facebook pages are included in its analysis, and that some posts, particularly for established parties, fall before the EU election cycle.

Examining Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party’s official Facebook pages, which boast a combined follower count of almost a million, also reveals consistent, massive online engagement. Take, for instance, the coverage of Nigel Farage’s recent appearance on The Andrew Marr Show.

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On Sunday, an edited clip of Farage’s testy reaction to Marr’s questioning was posted on the politician’s official Facebook page, under the header “We are not just fighting the political class. We are fighting the entire BBC too.” Since then, the video has had over 44,000 Facebook likes, comments and shares, and more than 457,000 views. A video of a Brexit Party rally in Pontefract was similarly popular, garnering more than 15,874 likes, comments and shares, and nearly 100,000 views

These two pages – plus, occasionally, the pro-Brexit campaigning group Leave.EU – propel the majority of interactions. A closer look, however, also reveals a large network of Facebook groups faithfully resharing most posts. Some of these groups, like the “Jacob Rees-Mogg: Supporters' Group”, “I’m a Brexiteer”, and “Anti Eu - Pro British”, have significant online followings. (The latter, for instance, which also shares articles from the right wing news website Breitbart, has 132,996 followers.)


Across Europe, the EU elections have have grown into a key battleground for the far right: data revealed by Politico shows that far-right parties in France and Germany outpaced mainstream political groups on Facebook when it came to winning engagement from users.

On this front, the UK represents something of an anomaly, drawing significant engagement from both ends of the political spectrum, possibly because of the ongoing struggle around Brexit. The Liberal Democrats, for instance, see reasonable engagement on their Remain backing posts. And the Brexit Party’s online posts, on Facebook at least, regularly dwarf those of established parties, with posts consistently bringing in thousands of likes. “What Farage has done is building a movement off the power of these social networks and their algorithms,” says Mike Harris, founder of 89up.

Facebook posts with Brexit Party links have been shared 125,035 tomes; the Conservatives 26,400. Under 6,000 shares come from UKIP, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party and Change UK had just 56 WIRED

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On Wednesday, the political news outlet Guido Fawkes reported that the Brexit Party had passed its goal of 100,000 registered members.


The party didn't exist until January 20 but its growth has been massive. Its Twitter account was created in February; it now has over 100,000 followers, and piggy-backs off Farage's 1.3 million. A pinned post of its election broadcast has 463,000 views and more than 22,000 interactions.

Its Facebook page, which was created on the same day as the party, now has more than 100,568 people who like it. In contrast, the Liberal Democrats' Facebook page which was founded in November 2007 has 191,310 people who like it. Labour has 1,034,796 likes, while the Conservatives have 652,167.

The Brexit Party’s online success extends to its advertising strategy, which is reaching audiences not typically considered Brexiteers. The group Who Targets Me, which monitors the use of political advertising on social media, released figures showing that the Brexit party spent £26,776 on 35 ads last week – its highest spend so far. Co-founder of Who Targets Me, Sam Jeffers, expects the weekly spend to double or triple in the coming weeks.

These ads, which often attack rival MEP candidates who support a second Brexit referendum, have attracted young audiences, which is unusual for a pro-Brexit party. “Most of the pro-Brexit ads we have seen have been delivered to people who are usually over 35 if not over 45, because there is a kind of crossover point where support for Brexit begins,” Jeffers explains. “But these couple of ads do look like younger people are seeing them, and so whether they're actually targeted in some way, or whether that's just because maybe some of those ads are on Instagram – so they just naturally deliver to a younger audience – is hard to say.”

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Using Facebook’s ad transparency tool reveals that an appeal to support the party by Brexit Party candidate Anne Widdecombe, for instance, cost between £1,000 and £5,000 to run and had 100k-200k impressions. The ad’s two largest demographics were men between 18-24 (12 per cent) and 25-34 (14 per cent). Similarly, the viewership of the Question Time exchange, which has garnered between 10,000 to 50,000 impressions, is dominated by younger men: 25 per cent of viewers are men aged 25-34.

The extraordinary level of this online engagement is inextricable from the populist nature of Farage’s message. “Polarised content does brilliantly, hence Farage has significantly more reach than any of the main political figures of the UK,” says Harris. "His content will receive significant numbers of shares, comments (both positive and negative) and likes and negative dislikes, and will have more organic reach than content from mainstream political parties that people like to see in their timeline but don't like or comment on it because they passively agree with it."

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