With this book, Hall intends to illustrate and analyze Facebook's effect on the Brexit campaign. Her book concentrates on Facebook users active during the period after the referendum (2017–19) who were born before 1980. Hall chooses this age group to capture those who have had the experience of “adapting to a rapidly changing world” (p. 9). The work also stands out because Hall complements quantitative work on social media, including interviews and "immersive observational research," with methodologies designed to understand users' intent and affect, along with the context of norms and rules surrounding particular behaviors in Facebook's milieu. Hall concludes that Facebook provided the agency for its users' grievances and an opportunity for Euroskeptic, right-wing Populism to take shape. Brexit, Facebook, and Transnational Right-Wing Populism is appropriate for general readers and scholars in political science, journalism and communication, and sociology, among other disciplines. Recommended. General readers through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Natalie-Anne Hall provides a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the nature and construction of the reactionary moral panics which have fuelled the Brexit campaign. In what is a crowded field, this engaging and lucid analysis of Facebook users offers original and significant insights not only on the reasons behind the Brexit vote and the current political situation in the UK but also on understanding the mainstreaming of far right politics.

Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath

In her timely and important book, Hall provides much needed sociological insight into the role of Facebook in the reproduction of far-right racist ideologies in the everyday in the wake of Brexit. Hall has pioneered a new approach to social media that combines interviews and immersive observations to illustrate how Brexit provided the impetus for individual White Britons that supported Leave to avidly engage with right-wing politics. While users think that they are sharing and finding ‘factual’ information enabling them to ‘take back control’ by combating ‘woke-ism’, Hall argues that it is Facebook’s algorithms that are in control. Not only should academics and students concerned with racism, Brexit, politics, democracy, and social media read this book, but so also should politicians and those who work in and profit from social media.

Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter

“Natalie-Anne Hall demonstrates that Brexit was not a simple event limited to one country, but points instead to a much larger political and cultural recomposition, shaped by two key processes—new expressions of political agency associated with social media and the emergence of transnational right-wing populism. This is a passionate exploration of the birth of a new paradigm of politics and society, centred on social media, affective experience, and the status of ‘truth’. Hall captures the fluidity, uncertainty, and intensities associated with the experience of digitalization of political mobilization today. Above all, Natalie-Anne Hall offers us tools to understand what is happening, and in the process, tools for action.”

Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University