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Social media are frequently implicated in the racist and right-wing populist mobilisations that found voice in support for Brexit. However, research tends to focus on platform affordances and fails to provide a sociological account of individuals' actual experiences with these media, and how they interact with broader social and political experiences to impact attitudes. Based on interviews with newly passionately engaged pro-Brexit Facebook users, this article examines the trajectories by which individuals came to be so engaged. The findings demonstrate that the technological opportunities provided by social media were only significant in the context of offline experiences and socio-political factors. These include racist discourses that predate social media, a loss of trust in traditional media and government, and the opportunity provided by Brexit to articulate and activate pre-held attitudes.

Facebook has frequently been implicated in the 2016 'Brexit' referendum result, and support for Leave has been linked to wider nativist and populist mobilisations online. However, close-up, qualitative sociological research has not been conducted into the relationship between Brexit and social media use. This is, in part, due to the computational turn in online research, which has led to a disproportionate focus on quantitative big data analysis. This article argues for the value of close-up, qualitative enquiry to facilitate situated understandings of the reality of social media use and what it means to individuals. It outlines one such methodology developed to investigate pro-Leave Facebook users, to demonstrate how challenges posed by such research can be overcome, and the opportunities such enquiry affords for studying the role of social media in contentious politics. Invaluable insights gained include the way Facebook provides an empowering tool for making claims to political knowledge in the context of growing transnational nativist and populist grievances.

"Hall identifies the critical conjuncture between Brexit and Facebook that enabled transnational right-wing populism to engage a new audience. White and Right victimhood motivated individuals to use Facebook as a means of harnessing a sense of political control around Brexit"--

Most research into online misinformation has investigated its direct effects—the impact it may have on citizens' beliefs and behavior. Much less attention has been paid to how citizens themselves make sense of misinformation as a broader social problem. We integrate theories of narrative, identity, cultural capital, and social distinction to examine how people construct the problem of misinformation and their orientation to it. We show how people engage in everyday ontological narratives of social distinction. These involve making a variety of discursive moves to position one's "taste" in information consumption as superior to others constructed as lower in a social hierarchy. This serves to enhance social status by separating oneself from misinformation, which is presented as "other people's problem." We argue that these narratives have significant implications not only for citizens' vigilance toward misinformation but also their receptiveness to interventions by policymakers, fact-checkers, news organizations, and media educators.

Personal messaging platforms are hugely popular and often implicated in the spread of misinformation. We explore an unexamined practice on them: when users create "group rules" to prevent misinformation entering everyday interactions. Our data are a subset of in-depth interviews with 33 participants in a larger program of longitudinal qualitative fieldwork ( N = 102) we conducted over 16 months. Participants could also donate examples of misinformation via our customized smartphone application. We find that some participants created group rules to mitigate what they saw as messaging's harmful affordances. In the context of personalized trust relationships, these affordances were perceived as making it likely that misinformation would harm social ties. Rules reduce the vulnerability and can stimulate metacommunication that, over time, fosters norms of collective reflection and epistemic vigilance, although the impact differs subtly according to group size and membership. Subject to further exploration, group rulemaking could reduce the spread of online misinformation.