Reports exploring how social media was utilised by anti-immigrant networks to amplify fear and hostility, fuel offline attacks, support local organising efforts and shape political responses.
Shannon Doherty, Committee on the Administration of Justice:
Following the escalation of pre-existing patterns of racist violence in Northern Ireland in August 2024, there were apparent indications that these racist incidents were being fuelled by online disinformation and misinformation by bad-faith actors online. In response to this, CAJ and the Equality Coalition commissioned the rabble.coop for their human-rights informed technological expertise to undertake an initial snapshot exercise to test the hypothesis and explore the levels of coordination of racist incidents online.
Since this point our partnership has developed and formalised with the production of two significant reports ‘Mapping Far Right Activity Online in Northern Ireland: Case studies on the role of social media in anti-immigration protests and racist incidents’ (May 2025) and ‘Inciting a Pogrom: Social media and the racist disorder in Ballymena and beyond during summer 2025’ (September 2025). Both reports have become international reference points for sources such as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times and ABC News, having been the first to analyse and illuminate the trends of online orchestration and amplification of far-right messaging online in key racist incidents.
rabble.coop have been heavily engaged in the dissemination process, providing detailed presentations at the three report launches in Unison (Belfast) and Guildhall (Derry). In addition, rabble.coop have joined numerous high-level engagements such as with the All Party Group on the Ethnic Minority Community, to the PSNI leadership, the Northern Ireland Policing Board, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, the Education Authority’s Joint Consultative Forum, and a keynote presentation at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties conference into the policing of far-right activity both North and South. rabble.coop have provided regular briefings to the Equality Coalition and its associated online monitoring subgroup and his research has been the cornerstone by which we develop and make strategic interventions to tackle the growth of the far-right online and in person.
Our collaboration with the rabble.coop has significantly enhanced public awareness and institutional understanding of online far-right activity, influencing official responses to racist intimidation and violence. The reports, alongside rabble.coop’s continued analytical outputs, have strengthened civil society responses to far-right organising and provided policymakers and public authorities with clear evidence of the need for proactive intervention to address this escalating threat in Northern Ireland.
