Far-Right Recruitment and Mobilization on Facebook: The Case of Australia

The Internet is a powerful tool for the far right.1 By facilitating communication and participation across spatial boundaries, connecting like-minded organizations and spreading their messages (Caiani and Parenti 2016), the Internet, and in particular social networking platforms, have become vital to recruitment and mobilization for the far right today. This is especially the case in contexts where the far right faces institutional or social marginalization. This chapter explores how the far right utilizes the popular social networking platform Facebook through a case study of the Australian far-right Facebook fan page network in 2018. Though significant research has been conducted on the use of social media by the far right (e.g. Engesser et al. 2016; Ernst et al. 2016; Froio and Ganesh 2019; Klein and Muis 2019), these have tended to focus on the discursive or communicative utility of such platforms.