The Dark Net (7 page)

In March 2009, a small number of radical Islamists from Luton announced they were planning to stage a protest against the British military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan at the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who now goes by the name Tommy Robinson – read about the protest, and knew of the group, who regularly handed out leaflets near the tanning salon he owns in Luton town centre. Although Tommy had briefly been a member of the British National Party, he wasn’t particularly interested in politics, but was incensed by the planned protest. Together with some friends, Tommy decided to oppose the group and support the soldiers, to show the world ‘that Luton wasn’t overrun by Islamic extremists’.

At that first demonstration – which comprised a few dozen people – there was a skirmish, and the story was picked up by local newspapers. Tommy and his friends decided to create a new group to disrupt meetings and the recruitment efforts of Luton Islamist organisations. He phoned the few contacts he had in small patriotic and nationalists groups, including the United British Alliance. They called themselves the ‘United People of Luton’, and staged a second,
larger demonstration in June 2009. It attracted hundreds of people, and resulted in clashes with the police, and nine arrests.
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Tommy had paid a cameraman £450 to make a short video of the day, which he then posted on YouTube. ‘This time,’ he tells me in a pub just over the road from New Scotland Yard, ‘I went on to all the online football forums, chat forums, posting it.’ He instantly began to receive messages of support from across Britain. A dozen or so members of the nascent movement met in a pub shortly afterwards to discuss the future. They decided to create an online organisation – one with an international reach. Together with a friend Tommy signed in to Facebook to create a new group, calling it the English Defence League.

As a recruiting tool and organisational platform for a fledgling nationalist movement with no money, and little support, Facebook was unsurpassable. It opened up a whole new world. Within a few hours of the group being created, hundreds had signed up. ‘It went mental,’ Tommy recalls. ‘Lads from all over the country were joining.’ It was a cheap and effective way to recruit new people, communicate information about upcoming demonstrations and share stories and photos
of previous protests. ‘Queen Lareefer’ – a female supporter of the EDL in her late twenties – was initially attracted to the EDL Facebook page when she spotted a friend sharing a link to a discussion about a recent news item: ‘People were talking about the poppy burning on Facebook and I saw that someone had liked the EDL page, so I went on to it, I liked the page, I made a comment, someone replied, and I got talking.’ She went on her first demonstration the following month.

By the end of 2010, the EDL had used Facebook to organise around fifty street demonstrations across the country – some with as many as 2,000 participants. Although the group’s site states their commitment to peaceful demonstrations, their meetings were often accompanied by drunkenness, violence, antisocial behaviour, Islamophobic chants and arrests – frequently involving clashes with the left-wing street movement Unite Against Fascism. But the group’s reputation grew, and so too did the media coverage, which in turn drove more people to the Facebook page and to the EDL’s website.

While Tommy was charging up and down the country on monthly demonstrations, Paul was drifting: taking drugs and partying, for the most part. One day in the summer of 2010, he received a Facebook update when a friend ‘liked’ the English Defence League’s page. ‘I’d never heard of them until then,’ he tells me. ‘But something about the name piqued my interest.’ He wanted to learn more, so he too clicked ‘like’, and began to receive daily updates about this new movement.

Like Paul, anyone could simply click to join the Facebook group, and click to leave just as easily. But more were joining than were leaving, and many wanted to do more than ‘like’. Soon enthusiastic supporters were setting up their own EDL pages and groups, keen to
start local chapters and arrange their own demonstrations. Although the leadership decided to impose a more formal structure on the rapidly expanding organisation in 2010 – dividing up the management and administration along area-based and thematic divisions – it remained a uniquely loose, decentralised and flexible movement.

But this type of membership model has downsides. By late 2012, initial enthusiasm among the rank and file waned, as members realised long-lasting political change takes more than online chatter and weekend demonstrations. And with such a changeable hierarchy, the group quickly split into several warring subgroups and factions. By early 2013, the EDL was on the verge of implosion. Tommy (who by this point had spent time in jail for breaching bail conditions that forbade him from attending demonstrations) was exhausted, inundated with death threats and ready to quit. Then, on the morning of 22 May 2013, a British soldier called Lee Rigby was murdered by two radical Islamists in broad daylight in the middle of a busy south London street. In the weeks that followed, the group’s online support increased dramatically, and Tommy found himself all over the mainstream media. He couldn’t leave.

Soon after Paul joined the EDL’s Facebook page, he began interacting with other members and posting comments.
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His frequent, articulate and aggressive contributions were getting him noticed by the senior members who ran the page. A few weeks later he was
invited to join a secretive Facebook group of hard-core EDL members, operating under a cover name. Shortly after that, he was asked to become a moderator or ‘mod’ of a page dedicated to outing Islamist extremists. It was a big step up for Paul. Before he knew it, he was a part of something.

Whether it’s a closed or open forum, someone needs to control the chaos and regulate the tone of conversations. It’s an important role, because you have power to ban users, and delete or edit other people’s posts. By early 2012, over 1,000 people were part of the group Paul administered. Not only did Paul have a voice and a platform, but also an increasing level of power and responsibility. ‘I loved it,’ he said. ‘I’d be on there for hours – posting, monitoring, editing.’

Running Facebook groups and Twitter accounts is an extremely important position in a nationalist group. When Lee Rigby was murdered, Tommy immediately contacted the members who ran the group’s social media pages. He asked the administrator of the EDL Twitter account to put out a call to arms. At around 6.30 p.m., an announcement was made:

EDL leader Tommy Robinson on way to Woolwich now, Take to the streets peeps ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

Hundreds of people retweeted the message, spreading it to thousands of others. EDL supporters quickly started to gather in south-east London.

The EDL’s Twitter administrator is a polite sixteen-year-old girl named Becky. As of writing, approximately 35,000 people follow her regular updates about important stories, information about
demonstrations, propaganda and encouragement she posts on the EDL’s official feed. Like Paul, she was put in charge when the former EDL Twitter admin noticed she was regularly posting relevant messages and links from a personal account and invited her to help out. After ‘proving herself’ while another admin watched over her, she was made a permanent admin. It is a busy and important job, she explains: ‘Sometimes I go on it from the moment I get up, till when I go to bed.’ Even when she is out with her friends, she’s still tweeting: ‘But it doesn’t bother them. They know what I do, and they are understanding.’ She takes her responsibility seriously, carefully deciding what to post in order to strike the right tone. ‘I can’t imagine doing anything else – I love it.’

There are eight administrators that run the EDL’s Facebook page, each responsible for finding and posting relevant articles, providing advice about upcoming demonstrations, deleting inappropriate comments, answering direct messages they receive, thanking supporters and tackling trolls. ‘We get a lot of them,’ one of the admins tells me. According to Hel Gower – Tommy Robinson’s PA (although she’d be more accurately described as a ‘fixer’) – one of the most time-consuming jobs the EDL Facebook admins have is getting rid of racist invective. This job is made more difficult by the fact that the EDL’s Facebook page is also followed by a lot of anti-EDL users, people who masquerade as fans, but are only there to cause the group trouble. Each admin spends about an hour a day dealing with all this.

Because it’s so important, the leadership keeps tight control over the admin and mod functions.
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This means keeping a vice-like grip
on the passwords. In 2010, a member of a splinter group successfully convinced the admin of a local EDL branch Facebook page to give him their password. The newcomer swiftly changed the password, locked out the old admin and hijacked the page. It took two weeks for Tommy Robinson to wrest back control, but he eventually managed to obtain the new password. I asked him how.

‘A few lads went round there and got the password back,’ he says.

‘How did they do that
exactly
?’

‘We just made sure we got it back,’ he replies.

Paul began spending increasing amounts of time as the password holder in his group, sharing stories, and building up a virtual network of friends. It was as much social as it was political. There was a sense of solidarity and camaraderie that came with membership. ‘We were all against the same things, and we felt like a team making a difference,’ he says. But a virtual community can also become suffocating. The more time he spent online, the more extreme his views became. He became very concerned about Islamists, and the threat he thought they posed: ‘I learnt how sophisticated their tactics are, how they are trying slowly to steal our identity, take over our politics.’ It was also here, in these raucous and aggressive Facebook pages, that he first started to interact with Muslims directly. He found them every bit as angry as he was. Each interaction seemed to push him on, to increase the intensity and number of his attacks. And his adversaries were more than willing to fight back. ‘Scum! Subhuman scum,’ he fumes at me, recalling the ‘battles’ he has had. These online tussles were an important part of Paul’s daily routine – and consumed more and more of his time. How long did you spend on an average day on the internet? I ask. ‘It’d probably shock
me if I worked it out.’ (He later estimates it to be 90 per cent.) ‘It didn’t leave much room for anything or anyone else,’ he says, confessing that during this time he became ‘a little bit of a sociophobe’. He started speaking to his parents less and less, because it seemed ‘so mundane’ compared to the conversations he was having online. As his online profile grew, so his real-world profile diminished.

Paul and I spent some time walking around his small town. There is very little to do there. Paul tells me he’d love to get into politics, in some way, and move to a bigger city, but with little employment experience, few qualifications and no money, he realises that there’s very little chance of either happening. He tells me that not long ago he walked past a group of EDL supporters. He didn’t speak to them. Online he was becoming a respected member of the nationalist scene, with friends and supporters from all over the world. Offline he was nobody.

In early 2012, Paul decided to strike out on his own. He found the clutch of traditional nationalist parties a bit staid and old-fashioned. Rather than settle for what was there – and persuaded by his powers of rhetoric – he started a new movement instead. He spent weeks learning how to make videos, and set up a personal blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Paul took quite some time making sure the imagery and visuals were just right. ‘I was trying to create a symbol that everyone could look to – a solid symbol.’ His experience on
Facebook had persuaded him to adopt a secret, anonymous profile where he could be more honest without fear of reprisals.

Paul became increasingly embroiled in what is a running battle online between nationalists and anti-fascist opponents (‘antifa’). Far-right groups and antifa used to clash on the street – they still do – but now the battle is mostly waged online. Antifa groups monitor every move the EDL and others like Paul make online, constantly watching key accounts, attempting to infiltrate their groups, and taking screen grabs or ‘screenies’ of anything they consider controversial, offensive or illegal: which they immediately publicise and often send to the police.

The longest standing of these groups is Exposing Racism and Intolerance Online, usually abbreviated to Expose. It’s an online collective primarily based on Facebook and Twitter, with a dozen or so admins and perhaps a couple of hundred volunteers who help out occasionally. Their main activity consists of taking and saving screenshots of far-right communication and propaganda. Over the last four years Expose has amassed at least 10,000 of these screenshots, including some that first linked Anders Breivik to the EDL.

Antifa is full of a new type of citizen activist. Mikey Swales has been involved from the start. I contacted him via Facebook: ‘We’re just an ordinary bunch of folk,’ he says, ‘mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. We recognise racism, hatred and bigotry when we see it and help, with other antifa groups, to show folk out there exactly who and what make up the EDL and all their splinter groups.’ Antifas spend just as much time as Paul online. One lone vigilante uses the Twitter handle ‘@Norsefired’. He
monitors EDL activity, and publishes around one hundred tweets a day, ‘challenging, exposing and ridiculing extremist groups’. Like Paul, he got involved by accident, when he caught some slack on Twitter for being part of an anti-cuts group and found out one of the attackers had an EDL link. And like Paul, he thinks he spends too long online: ‘My ear [is] getting bent from my other half,’ he tells me via email, ‘that my spare time should be more efficiently applied to more lucrative pursuits.’ @Norsefired thinks using a pseudonym allows him to confront his opponents more aggressively. Offline, he reckons, ‘it is unlikely I’d approach a group of EDL supporters. But my Norsefired persona can be quite no-nonsense, direct, cutting.’ One of his favourite tactics is to ‘occupy’ EDL Twitter users’ timelines – using several fake Twitter accounts to befriend as many of them as possible – then posting anti-EDL stories and news items simultaneously. One Expose member, Alex, explains to me that humour is a very important part of what they do. ‘Basically,’ he says, ‘I take the piss. I have a large archive of pictures and videos I’ve made to mock the right with.’ Their diverse methods can be quite effective. When it was alleged that the glamour model Katie Price was a supporter of the EDL, Alex managed to get in touch with her and persuade her to publicly deny it.