Of the 45 people to comment on this Migration Watch meme shared by Brighton & Hove UKIP – 27 were women and most, from what I could tell from their profiles, were apparently middle-aged grandmothers. What was unusual, based on the findings of my 20 research, was how many women were sharing theories that originated with QAnon. So in selecting to focus on a meme seeded by a group on the political right (or far-right, depending on your own perspective) it should perhaps be expected to see some engagement with conspiracy theories. Other research has found that extreme political views – whether to the far-right or far-left of the spectrum – are a predictor of belief in conspiracy theories, and that motivated reasoning leads us to believe what we want to believe. This follows a pattern seen by other researchers in this field, for example Daniel Halpern and his colleagues who found women and people with politically right-leaning views more likely to share conspiracy theories. But the meme also led me to profiles that appeared to belong to UK mothers and grandmothers engaging with QAnon conspiracy theories from the US. I’d found links during the last election between the active seeding of anti-migrant, anti-immigration memes by UK users and US far-right organisations and individuals, and so I expected to find similar links through that meme. Where can one meme take you? Author provided

This was consistently one of the most active meme-seeders among the constituency party Facebook groups I follow.

So, in late August, I returned to Facebook after a seven-month gap and picked the meme that happened to be at the top of my timeline – a post from the group Migrant Watch shared by the page of UKIP Brighton & Hove. I decided to focus on one meme, and the individual Facebook users who cared enough about that issue to share or comment publicly – and see where it took me. I recently decided to explore how the upcoming US election might be translating into partisan ideas on Facebook in the UK. During the 2019 election, I noticed how memes from far right US Facebook pages were being posted and spread via people in the UK constituencies I was studying. I was struck by the rising use of memes and how a handful of core themes made their way from meme to belief. Through the 2015, 20 UK general elections, I saw the increased polarisation of those Facebook conversations and with it increased incivility, partisanship and sectarianism. I’ve focused on four English constituencies – Stoke-on-Trent Central, Burton and Uttoxeter, Bristol West and Brighton Pavilion – tracking conversations through public pages, posts and public information on people’s timelines and profiles. QAnon conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic are a public health threatįor the past five years, my research has looked at how strangers talk with each other about politics on Facebook.

Wake me up meme template