フェイスブックの極右ネットワーク――ラファエル・エルナンデスが語るガーディアン調査

I'm Dr. Eleanor Drage, the host of the Good Robot podcast. Join me as I ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism and other justice-seeking movements help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, there's a full transcript of the episode at thegoodrobot.co.uk, along with an especially curated reading list by every guest. I love hearing from listeners, so feel free to reach out on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or through my Cambridge email address. And don't forget to leave a review on whichever platform you're listening from. But for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode. I'm thrilled to be here today with Rafael Hernandez, who is an AI ethics researcher and award-winning journalist specializing in the intersections between AI, journalism and society.

and he is now doing a PhD at Cambridge, but his journalism career spans more than a decade, including roles at The Guardian and Fola de São Paulo in Brazil, where he led data and AI-driven newsroom projects and reported on technology, power, and the systems that shape what people know. We'll be talking today about his work as part of a Guardian investigation into the everyday Facebook networks where far-right ideas grow, which was named a 2026 European Press Prize laureate. Huge congratulations and welcome, Raphael. Thank you very much and thank you very much for having me. As you know, I've been a long-time listener and fan of the show, so glad to be a part of it now. Well, go on then. So what brings you to the topic of feminism, justice and technology? So, yeah, as you mentioned, I come through this from my journalism background, right?

And now turned into academic, but never really stopped being a journalist. So everything is intertwined. But, like, my routine was inside a newsroom watching tech platforms and their impacts. And then I wanted to study it rather than just keep living it, right? In terms of feminism, I'm not a feminist theorist, right? But there's one feminist idea that I lean on a lot. It comes from Linda Steiner, and she makes it for journalism specifically. She raises the point that we are trained to write as if we are nobody, no position, no mistake, just stating the facts. And her argument is that this is a weaker standpoint, not a stronger one, because you always know things from somewhere. So saying where you're standing lets people attack you, like pretending that you're sitting nowhere just hides it. And I think that's particularly useful for my position as an academic because the journalist turned researcher is that dual position

that I can live or I have lived through the things I write about, I analyze. And this then becomes a resource rather than an undeclared bias. And this is a good robot. So what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how do we work towards it? And given that we'll be talking today about communication online and radicalization, can you tell us something about perhaps communications online and what makes a technology good? So, yeah, I think I might be too much of a journalist in that because I'm always worried of using adjectives. So I don't like data of good as a property of an object. I think it's way more complex than that. the same system can be good or bad depending on what it makes visible and to whom, right? They tend to avoid both the reflexive debunk of like, yeah, this is problematic. This is what is behind the curtain. But at the same time, avoid the hype and trying to think of the things that a simple software

update, a simple change cannot fix, right? So when we think of communication, like I try to see these as technologies that mediate knowledge, mediate, put themselves in the middle of what people know. And I think it's better when it makes that process legible, right? You can tell a choice was made, you can roughly tell who made it, and there's somewhere to go to contest it. So what worries me isn't necessarily systems doing bad things, it's consequential systems that have no surface, no place, no person, nothing to argue with. And there's another test that I keep applying is what does this system, what does this thing actually solve versus the problem it creates, right? It's the whole idea of like creating a hammer and then you go looking for nails to bang against. And I think that lots of recent technology falls into that trap, right? There's no clear line of problem it solves, which doesn't automatically make it bad, but then it means that it needs to

make a case for why it was made. And that's mostly not necessarily a technical question, right? Like Facebook groups, for example, they are very old technology. They're boring. But what made them important and consequential is like the moderation policy around them, the amplification of discourses and decisions of what counts as violating cognitive policies or not. Large language models is similar to that, right? models can be very useful for their flexibility when you label data, for example, which like classifying a bunch of social media posts or identifying or tagging images, right, which is something that I've done in multiple investigations, both as an academic and as a journalist. But what makes it good is not the technology itself. It wasn't even created for that kind of application. It's that it sits inside a rigorous process that gives me some level of trust in the output, ways of validating what comes out and not just trusting whatever garbage

that might or might not come out. It's definitely not a coincidence that we do get a lot of journalists that come on the show and say good technology is auditable. And I think that's kind of a brilliant response because we need to know when something goes wrong. And that's very difficult to do if the process is obscure or the algorithms are impenetrable or the content is hidden behind a paywall or whatever it is you know we need to know and it shouldn just be journalists auditing I mean this is kind of a last resort really of journalists getting together with data experts and companies and coming out with the truth Anyway, I love that response. So thank you. And I really want to get on because we have so much to talk about today to a piece that you wrote that we talked about briefly in the introduction. and this was part of a project that The Guardian was rolling out.

They spent a year studying an online community trading in anti-immigration sentiment and misinformation with the goal of finding out how online spaces can play a role in radicalisation. So tell us about what you and your team found looking inside the Facebook networks where far-right ideas grow. what did we not know before and what do we know now? Yeah, so turning back to your previous comment yes, it was a huge team effort because doing these kind of things is getting harder and harder so a huge shout out to the whole team editors, other investigative reporters graphic designers Pamela Duncan, Elena Barisi, Pablo Gutierrez Gary Black, Robin Pinter, Peter McMullen Aaron Sharp and other people that were involved with the project and that goes to show how difficult it is to see behind the curtain on these things. So yeah, after the 2024 riots here in the UK, some people were jailed over what they posted online.

Over 1,000 people were charged in the context of the riots, roughly two dozens for online offenses. And Facebook was the platform that several of those people had in common. So that's where we started this digging, trying to understand what kind of community these people were in, what circulates there, what kind of things these people were seeing that normalized the sort of behavior of posting nasty things that made them get charged. And then from the public profiles of the people we could identify in these charts, which are all public, we found a couple of Facebook groups, and then we mapped the content that was circulating in those groups, And we found that to be a huge network of texting groups with around 600,000 members. That's double counting some of the people because we don't have access to the list of members. And then over a year, we captured over 100,000 posts and then analyzed over 50,000 that were text only to categorize.

And roughly, we found a not an organized far-right movement, but a ordinary ecosystem run largely by retirement age admins in the world's biggest platform, where you can see anti-immigrant sentiment, nativism, conspiracy theories, misinformation circulating continuously, and which experts that we interviewed said helped create the conditions for radicalization. And then an important caveat here, I did that under my hat of a data journalist, right? So I'm not a radicalization expert myself. So that side of the analysis comes from experts who do make a living on studying that, right? And one particular starking thing was that even after we analyzed all that, we saw what was going on there. We sent the groups back to Jometa, the company that owns Facebook, and they reviewed the groups. and they said that none of the content violated the hateful conduct policy.

So there was nothing that they could do. And also, I think that kind of breaks the assumption that this kind of content lives on fringe platforms like 4chan, Telegram, Parler, Getter. It's like mainstream platforms with the person who can be your neighbor, right? It's not as fringe as we once thought. Yeah, I mean, I've heard people I would have thought knew better talk about white people in the UK as natives, as indigenous, which I consistently find extremely shocking, even though it's now more common than I would have hoped. As part of this article, you traced five individuals who were members of three groups, which together had this quite substantial membership of about 267,000. And those groups all have titles that celebrated figures on the right. Maybe you could say a bit about who those figures were. and they also have overlapping members and contain very similar posts including hundreds

expressing support for those arrested in connection with the summer riots that you just spoke about now as a data journalist you are excellent at tracing the networks used by individuals who propagate far-right ideas so I know you can do the technical thing but also you're brilliant at the analytical social analysis which is an amazing set of skills to have so can you just describe to us both the technical approach that you used in a way that I'll understand in creating that network chart and the significance of what you found to you. Okay, yeah. So on the technical side, yeah, as you say, we started, we had a starting point, which were its people and like using open source investigation techniques. So basically beating the Facebook search with technical ways until we found something that stuck. we identified three groups where these people were either current members or past members or had posted on. And then what we did was sort of snowballing from there, right?

In one of the groups' posts after these were extracted, lots of other groups were posted. And then from those groups, we started seeing some mutual characteristics. So either posts that were shared verbatim across multiple of these groups, the support to people who were arrested. And I think more meaningfully, 16 of them shared at least one admin or moderator, right? These are the people who set the rules for the groups, can ban or delete, ban people, delete posts, and they basically run them on a voluntary basis. And the groups had other similar characteristics, right? Like these admins and moderators, they were mostly retirement age, and that was deliberate. You could see posts asking for people who were retirees and had time to spare to help them run the groups. And most of them, if not all of them, had titles that were celebrating some far-right figures like Nigel Farage, which was his name appeared in the largest of the groups,

and other journalists and other influential figures within the far right And one thing that was interesting there is like this connective tissue is the people not necessarily the algorithm The algorithm helps promote the content and brings some of these things there. Like, you had 40-odd admins and moderators scattered across England from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and they were actually doing the editorial layer of, like, gatekeeping that community without calling it that. And another interesting thing is that the language is tuned to the platform, right? So Facebook itself has some moderating criteria that they use and think that you should take to post down some rules of engagement there. So that means that overt racism is kind of rare, which is kind of what you would expect because there is some automated level of monitoring. Even the mods would say stuff like, you cannot post this, otherwise they are going to take the rip down.

But that doesn't mean that they can use some sort of coded language, right? Either calling people illegals or calling immigrants coming here invasion or even some are even less hidden, calling them lice. But it's not as out in the open, right? And also, this is partially my read from seeing this sort of community in the past. Like, having 16 groups is a way of also avoid moderation, right? Even if the platform decides it's not something they want in there, you have 15 other options of groups that have already taken off for you to switch. And, yeah, so that and the scale. One important caveat here is that membership does not signal anything about a person. So, like, being a member of these groups does not mean that you are racist, does not mean that you are a far-righter, does not even mean that you agree with those ideas, right? With which, like, one of the moderators that we interviewed actually denies agreeing to that. But, like, it's a fact that you are exposed to that kind of thinking.

and you're agreeing to be exposed to it I guess it's a bit like I always get upset with my parents reading newspapers they propagate you know bad ideas and many of the ideas that are in any given newspaper that I will take to my mom and be like what is this that you're reading she'll be like oh I do agree with that but she's still agreeing to be exposed to it by subscribing is that is that the idea or what does it mean to be a member of those groups? Yeah, the discourse often crosses into radical rhetoric. And if you think of how news media is thought of, like the diversity of ideas is actually a good thing, right? Like being exposed to contrasting viewpoints. But there is a line that needs to be drawn between a legitimate concern and radical comment, right? And that's the line that was often crossed there. Again, not by necessarily everyone, But that's what's being constantly exposed to that.

Lots of people were there because they had, like, real grievances, right? They were complaining about the cost of living or the decline in high streets. They feel like they are not being listened to by their governments. And that's genuine. And that is not extremism. At some point, even the line, even for those people, starts to lower as they are exposed to this kind of conflict. So what we counted there, for example, shows that two in five posts criticized the government and figures, right? So figures connected to the government. What matters here is not the criticism, right? Like we should be able to criticize our governments. That's not what I mean. It's the substance. So you're calling the police to cheer. You're calling the media control. You're calling the Royal National Lifeboat Institution a taxi service for illegals. These are all emotionally charged claims. They are unsubstantiated, right? And they're constant, like two in five votes contain that. So it's not necessarily only a critique.

It's a real critique. It's just extremist speech there without any substance. Also, like one in seven posts touched immigration and one in ten of those were demeaning. So like dehumanizing people, being outright racist. So it's fine for you to disagree with immigration policy. It's fine for you to want better border controls. It's fine for you to be disillusioned about the lack of jobs or job opportunities. But point that towards another group and assign the blame to them without really understanding what's going on. That's where it becomes a problem. The same with nativism, which was present in 1 in 25 votes. And a smaller part of the votes were conspiracy theories. And that connects to what some of the experts that interviewed say, right? So these are often harder to get behind because some of them are really, really far-fetched. So that kind of explains the fact that they are smaller, but that doesn't mean that they are not there and they're being exposed to this kind of thinking, kind of lowers the bars over time.

and what we're saying I think with the rise of fascism globally is that people are prepared to create allegiances between themselves and far-right thinkers even though they don't agree on everything even though they might think oh a lot of the stuff is too much or like oh I'd never set fire to you know a hotel with asylum seekers they still are willing to be members or to to listen. And that I find very interesting. For everybody else, it's important that we know what the far right way of thinking is so that we don't slip into it ourselves. And we can see how easy it is actually to move from one seemingly tolerable view to something that is completely racist. So one of the moderators for the groups that you were looking at said that they remove extreme content, but you found openly racist posts in there. So the assumption being that they didn't

believe that those posts were extreme. What starts as criticizing the government, as we've seen, can without great difficulty cross into radical rhetoric. So can you tell us how does this happen? How are these seemingly benign conversations on Facebook slipping into broader far-right ideology? Yeah, so the volume of the post is on institutions, and the venom, the targeted venom, is on immigration, right? And then we have conspiracies as the smallest size. And that order mattered, right? Because the conspiracies there are not the entry point. They arrive last in a point where there is some agreement already established within the group and that how it lands right And the tail there of something crossing into this radical line of thinking is not necessarily the target of the criticism right It's whether it can or cannot be checked.

Because legitimate critique means something that you should be able to show that is false. The radical version that you often see there is something that very conveniently explains everything that is going on. It's unfalsifiable, right? Everything is in this mess because of immigrants. And it's not there. It's that shallow, right? And that's what we often see in these groups. And that's something that I think very interestingly, Professor Senator van der Linden, here from Cambridge as well, who is one of the sources that helped us analyze this content, he qualified that as a known tactic, right? And historically a fascist tactic, because you have informed citizenry as an obstacle. And then people sharing this content, people engaging with it, don't necessarily know that they are running a playbook. The narrative is there, and then what you would find in practice there is politicians trying to leverage,

professional politicians trying to leverage that space and make a platform for themselves. I'm interested in this we're not far right, we're just right mantra propagated by lots of people who possibly wouldn't say that they're radicalized or have any radical views. Many of the people, for example, who participated in the Lucy Connolly riots, which was when a woman was jailed last year for calling people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers. Many of those people didn't view themselves as far right, racist or even anti-immigration. You know, the classic I'm not racist, but the majority won't be part of any far right organization or group at all, you said. So how did you see that play out in the network? Were those people visible or are they sort of invisible? Do they lurk on groups without joining? Yeah, so this discussion of being far-right or not far-right was a recurring topic.

And actually, one of the most popular posts, I can't recall whether it was the most commented on or the most shared one, was saying something like, we are not far-right, we are just British or something like that. But you would see these discussions often. And so two things happening at once. Some rejecting the term as a slur that was trying to silence them. And others just try to embrace it and redefine it, saying something like, oh, if being pro-my country, pro-Britain makes me far-right, then, well, I am far-right then, I guess. So this was a bit of a contested point there, but still not something that was, we were not talking about an openly far right group, right? And I think that the label itself kind of makes it, it's kind of a bad instrument to measure what is going on there.

Because we could be sitting here forever discussing whether this qualifies as far right, this does not qualify as far right. And that is an important and legitimate discussion. But I think in the situation we are in and the kind of analysis we're trying to do, that in the end will get us basically nowhere, right? I think that's why I was aiming at posts and trying to understand what circulates there and trying to actually describe what is going on. We were counting posts instead of trying to profile people for this project, right? Which, again, brings me back to your previous point, because the access for that is a huge problem now. In order to be able to do this kind of analysis, you need the posts, right? Like, I give them to analyze posts, I need posts. And this is getting harder and very fast. I've been doing that for over a decade now, and I've seen how the scenario has deteriorated, right? I recently worked on a report called Data Not Found, which analyzed more than a dozen social media and tech platforms in terms of the data that they made available for researchers in different jurisdictions.

And the results were appalling because I don't think any of them passed with flying callers. And that's social media data that you could extract easily from Facebook, easily from Twitter, less than 10 years ago. And now it's being withdrawn. And the access changes whenever the platform decides it changes. And this kind of investigation that I did, it's already closed to being unrepeatable. And nothing forced that except that Facebook decides to change the rules that they enforce. And that's the pattern across the whole industry. And good technology is auditable. We hear this critique from researchers all the time that they can't analyze social media networks anymore. These platforms are designed to be increasingly unavailable to researchers and auditors.

You can't have access to an API that's exclusively the domain of companies that they choose to partner with. it's outrageous and I think that should be the target of regulation to make the back end accessible to make posts permanent and public so that they can be audited and we're so grateful for the work of journalists like you and people who are willing to do that labour because it takes ages and it can be you have to be unremittingly optimistic about finding something that you can communicate to the public. So huge thanks for having you on the show and I'm excited to have you back to talk about your PhD and all the things that you're finding through that. Thanks so much for joining us, Raphael. Well, thank you very much for having me. This episode was made possible

thanks to Stifton McCartell and the Leverhorn Trust. It was written and produced by me, Dr. Eleanor Drage, And the editor of this week's episode is credited in the episode's description. Thanks for listening.