Professor Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, was interviewed on German news programme ARD about a possible right-wing social media campaign to defund the BBC.
Professor Barnett and Doug Specht have previously written an article for The Conversation about a social media campaign to defund the BBC due to what they interpret as left-wing bias. They believe the campaign was orchestrated by right-wing factions associated with the Leave campaign to attack the BBC and was designed to look as if it was a spontaneous grassroots campaign.
Professor Barnett said on the programme: “Within eight hours it [the social media account] had 20,000 followers. Now that suggests to me that this was not just one student on his own trying to show his own kind of outrage and then say here was a great popular uprising. This was an orchestrated campaign.”
He added: “No question that there is a right-wing movement, which is centred around free trade, it’s anti-Europe, it’s pro-Trump, you could say they are Nigel Farage supporters at the root of it, and they see the BBC as one of the obstacles to what they regard as the great international revolution.”
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