Read Online The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jamie Bartlett
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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. fn3 This means keeping a vice-like gripon 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 shockme 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
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. fn3 This means keeping a vice-like gripon 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 shockme 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
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