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Five of the world's top ten far-right activists on the internet are British, a new report into online extremism has found.

Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, and Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad – are all British-born and amongst the ten most influential far-right activists online.


The findings come from a report by the political action group Hope Not Hate. The report surveys the far-right’s online elements, focusing in particular on the personalities who leverage their large social media presences to agitate and direct global swarms of followers. The report finds a growth in traffic to far-right websites and in followers of far-right social media accounts.

“It's important not to see this statistic as a skyrocket[ing] in new British far-right figures”, says Joe Mulhall, a senior researcher at Hope not Hate, who worked on the the report. He points out that several big American names – InfoWars’ Alex Jones most notably – dropped off the list after being banned by YouTube and other platforms last year. Nonetheless, he says, these figures’ Britishness is still relevant: “Beyond the fact that many of them adopted social media very early and are sophisticated in their use of it, they speak English, and so can be understood by like-minded activists across the whole of Europe.”

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Bharath Ganesh, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and an expert in online extremism, says that while the list is accurate, it does skew towards anglophone influencers. He also suggested that things would look different if the top-ten focused on figures who are popular only in the US: “I think Milo would be there, Paul Joseph Watson would be there, Tommy Robinson would be there, but I do think that some of the other names, like Carl Benjamin-Sargon of Akkad, would drop out”.

For Ganesh, the first element that explains the high number of Brits on the list is obvious: namely, that both the US and the UK are countries with high levels of penetration on social media, particularly Twitter. “Because of this," he says, “I think there has been a lot of these people who see it as a kind of opportunity: ‘I can become an influencer on Twitter around these far-right issues’.”


The other, less obvious factor, says Ganesh, is that the nature of the global dialogue between these figures drives their popularity. “Exclude Milo from this, but Paul Joseph Watson and Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins, they’re particularly useful for the far-right. They translate this idea about cultural decline and attacks on the West and the UK from foreigners, primarily Muslims, into something for American audiences as well. They are trying to bridge some of that distance.” These narratives – that there are, for instance, Muslim controlled “no-go” zones in Birmingham – confirm the worldview of a sympathetic foreign audience, and drive funding and influence. (American think tanks, such as the Middle East Forum, have given money to Tommy Robinson).

“In the UK, the far-right tends to focus on the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, which has a relatively high muslim population,” Ganesh explains. “They talk about how culture is being erased and how white people there are under threat, and they use that as an example of how this is going to come to Britain. That’s what these influencers do, but for American audiences.”

This collaboration extends to whole platforms, Ganesh says. He uses the example of Gab.ai, a free-speech absolutist Twitter-like platform popular with the far-right, as an example of what he calls “alt-tech”.

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“Right after at the end of 2017, when Twitter was shutting down a lot of alt-right accounts, Gab started reaching out to people in the UK which had been taken down, like Britain First, and then set up a whole channel called BritFam [British Family].” The aim, he says, was to “build these linkages between the US and the UK, to secure funding and secure audiences”.


This is the Twitter data that shows who's backing Tommy Robinson Twitter This is the Twitter data that shows who's backing Tommy Robinson

Mulhall agrees. He points out that, paradoxically for nationalists, these groups strive to extend their global reach: the “Free Tommy Robinson” march was timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s visit to the UK in July; the yellow vests staking out politicians in Westminster took their name from France’s gilet jaunes. The idea of a global, cultural conflict makes their beliefs more attractive: “In North America, because of their view of Britain, they see someone like Tommy Robinson as a soldier on the frontline in a war against Muslims, in a ‘clash of civilisations’. They want to hear that Europe is at war,” Mulhall says.

Looking forward to 2019, the report notes that there has been some pushback against these figures: social media companies, for instance, are increasingly removing leading far-right figures from their platforms. But these groups often manage to recover from these setbacks: “Something like Turning Point UK: it seemed to be a disaster at launch. But these groups often come back and [exert influence]: it’s a pattern,” Ganesh says.

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