Abstract
Britain First built a large following on Facebook before the platform removed its pages on 14 March 2018. The page and its post-level record are no longer publicly available. I analyse an archive of 3,505 posts published between 25 October 2013 and 12 March 2018, extracted two days before the ban, which together attracted 32.8 million reactions, comments and shares. I code the text of every post for content, interaction prompts, leadership personalisation and sentiment, then estimate what predicts engagement using month fixed effects, cluster-robust inference, text-as-data methods and a matched comparison with the Labour, Conservative, UKIP, Liberal Democrat and Green pages. Engagement is extremely concentrated: the top 1% of posts attracted 62% of all interactions. Posts about Islam, immigration and crime drew 56%, 39% and 20% more engagement than posts published in the same month, and posts that asked a question (137%) or asked readers to share (116%) drew the most. Posts asking supporters to donate or join (-58%) or linking off Facebook (-51%) drew the least. Naming the group's own leaders made no measurable difference. On the average Britain First post after February 2016, 28% of reactions were angry; on mainstream party posts in the same months and formats the figure was 2 to 6%.Preprint, not peer reviewed. This version corrects statements in the first version (event windows, a table value, the shares and comments comparison) and softens causal wording; no estimate changed.Provenance and AI use. The data were collected during my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. The analysis code and drafts of the text were prepared with the assistance of an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic), which was also used to review drafts. I checked the analysis and the text and take responsibility for both. Version 2 adds this statement to the paper; the findings are unchanged.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). What Went Viral on Britain First's Facebook Page? Outrage, Questions and the Cost of Mobilisation, 2013–2018. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23257705