Revealed: The BNP’s social media strategy

By Mark Hanson / @MarkHanson

It seems that BNP’s web strategists have been engaging in tactics that are not just unethical but could also put Labour doorstep campaigners’ safety at risk.

Recently, you might have received a Facebook message asking you to delete a guy called Jeff Payne from your friends’ list. Amazingly this guy is a fake profile concocted by the mad scientists at BNP HQ, purporting to be a Labour supporter. He’s joined all the right groups and they’ve gone to a fair amount of trouble to make this person seem real. He’s been making friends with lots of Labour supporters, especially in the key North West and East London battlegrounds, so that they can spy on our doorstep campaigning. It makes me wonder what they might want to do with this info. Will there be stand-offs in the street or at campaign meetings?

Speaking of underhand tactics, there’s been much chatter in the blogosphere about the fascists’ attempts to ‘game’ the social news site, Digg, in order to send traffic to the BNP site. Digg operates as a voter-led news website, where other sites appear as a newsfeed – those that have had the most votes appear on the homepage.

Digg directs huge amounts of traffic and its recommendations carry a high level of trust. However, it seems there’s been a concerted effort to submit as many BNP-related items as possible. As Datadial noted, there’s been an average of 212 submissions per month over the past year, compared to 32 for the Tories and just 7 for Labour during the whole period. Compare again to the Sun newspaper, which has only 1,000 submissions over this timeframe.

Smell a rat? Well, you’ll be pleased to know the wisdom of the crowd always wins in social media. Although there are thousands of BNP submissions, only 5 have received more than 100 votes when popular submissions garner thousands.

Gaby Hinsliff, the Observer’s political editor, spent a few days in the North West recently to take the temperature from our doorstep campaigning. Whilst there she raised the issue of the ‘Moston Martyr’, a blog and video containing a very powerful narrative from a disaffected voter in inner-city Manchester, who feels as though the political system has left them behind. The BNP has made hay with this content, circulating it around the web.

According to Chris Paul, this guy is unconnected to the BNP and as such YouTube and Blogger have pulled the blog and video from the webosphere after a stream of race-hate complaints. But what makes this powerful is the fact that there are plenty of people who feel similarly disaffected and could be capitalised upon on the net just like they can at the ballot box.

We need to counter the march of the cyber-fascists. Start by checking if Jeff Payne is one of your Facebook friends.