Brexit as ‘Politics of Division’: Social Media Campaigning in the Aftermath of the Referendum

Immediately following the EU referendum, a number of new grassroots anti-Brexit campaigns emerged on social media (for example, ‘The 48 and Beyond’, which claimed to represent the percentage of those who voted Remain). This mobilisation has also spread offline, with large pro-EU marches taking place in London. Although pro-EU campaigns have existed in the UK for many years, with the European Movement active in the 1973 referendum, mass pro-EU mobilisation is a new phenomenon. We know very little about how and why people mobilise for the EU. This paper examines social media as a space for pro-European mobilisation during Brexit (Isin & Ruppert, 2015). Brexit raises not only questions about citizens’ identification – particularly among those with values attached to Europe – but is also experienced as an existential threat to rights that are linked to European citizenship. To explore social media as digital space in which claims for EU citizenship are raised, we draw on quantitative and qualitative analysis of anti-Brexit Facebook campaigns following the referendum. Firstly, the paper examines the central issues raised and the way political actors are made visible. Secondly, it explores the type and scope of content shared across media as an indicator for national as well as transnational mobilisation. Finally, we conduct qualitative analysis of comments to explore rights-claims to EU citizenship by ‘the 48%’. We argue that mobilisation on Facebook during Brexit can be understood as a form of digital citizenship through which questions of inclusion and exclusion, political rights and collective identity are renegotiated.