How I Accidentally Started a Facebook Hate Group

For some reason, I was scrolling yesterday through the old pages and groups I used to administrate on Facebook (everything from our student newspaper to a page entitled ‘If West Ham get relegated Nick Hilton will not speak for 2 days’). As I looked through these dead or dying groups, I saw the husk of one I remembered more clearly. M*A*S*H – the Greatest TV Show in History. Just that name brought memories of an experiment I conducted in 2020 flooding back to me, so I went onto my old Medium blog and re-read the account I wrote about it at the time. It made me chuckle, and so I decided that I would re-publish it here on Substack. This was written in December 2020 and I haven’t updated anything. I obviously had no idea of the things that would be coming, politically, down the line. In a way, it is a time capsule from a slightly less terrible time. But the warning signs were there. Anyway, enjoy.

There’s a meme — always good when Grandpa starts a story by describing a meme — featuring the protagonists of the film Withnail and I. In the scene, Richard E Grant says the famous line “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”, though in the meme version ‘holiday’ is replaced with whatever calamitous, hard-to-do-by-accident thing is topical. For me, the meme would read “we’ve created a hate group by mistake!”.

This story starts more than a decade ago, when, as a teenager, I got really into the hit 1970s TV show M*A*S*H. I won’t explain that any further: you know what teenagers are like, always getting obsessed with classic television. Because it was approximately 2008 (the reason it is hard for me to fact-check this will become apparent later on) almost all social interactions played out on the stage of Facebook. It was the One Ring of social media, where I had more friends and more interactions than in my real life (where I was mainly just watching M*A*S*H).

Anyhow, as history will record, I made a Facebook page called ‘M*A*S*H — The Greatest TV Show in History’ where I intended to celebrate my fixation. Of course, this was the height of lame and no-one that I knew joined the group and it went deathly quiet. I lost interest in it, as I did with most of my teenage follies. Years passed…

Then two things happened: Facebook migrated the Page to a Group, for reasons that elude me. The consequence of that was that my M*A*S*H group became less of a passive shrine and more of an active forum. The second, and much more important, event, was Netflix putting the entire run of the show on its American service. Suddenly I was inundated with Yankee boomers who were logging straight over from bingeing episodes on Netflix to rambling away about M*A*S*H on Facebook. Every day saw an influx of new members, often hundreds of them, until the group’s membership was in the thousands. The show was taken off Netflix and the growth cooled, but then the show went back on Netflix (or some other streaming service) and it began to grow again. As before, years passed.

This explosion of success in the group (which would’ve caused me some joy as a teenager) meant nothing to me as an adult, because it’d been several years since I’d so much as watched an episode of the show. But I sort of looked on with detached fascination as the group became one of Facebook’s main hubs for M*A*S*H fans, sitting in passive omnipotence as group members bickered and argued and reported one another to me, the sole admin. For them, it seemed logical to presume that I was as obsessive as they were, so my aloofness alarmed them. I let them resolve their differences without my interference, and removed all but the most basic rules from the group. Even at this point, I looked at it less as something that I was responsible for, and more as a petri dish in which bacterial cultures were spreading in disturbing, yet sometimes beautiful, patterns.

By the start of 2020, the mood in the group was different. I could see it souring and the one-word catalyst was simple: politics.

The group, by and large, were pro-Trump. This surprised me (a little) because, in case you didn’t know, M*A*S*H is a very liberal show: it’s anti-war, pro-medical science, pro-mental health, pro-diversity…etc. It’s obviously also a product of its time and I’m sure that there are elements of its depiction of race and gender, particularly, that have aged like cottage cheese on a radiator, but there’s no doubt that its legacy is progressive. Alan Alda, the star of the show and its head honcho for two thirds of its run, is the archetypal Hollywood lefty and one of the earliest male feminists in US pop culture history. So, on one level, you’d expect M*A*S*H fans to share the values of the show.

But on the other hand: Facebook. Facebook is a well known cesspit, and it’s only getting more fetid. The migration of millennials and Gen Zs to platforms like Instagram and TikTok has left Facebook to be colonised by deranged boomers. Its Messenger function still exists as a Whatsapp alternate, but otherwise it is a wasteland of semi-senile over-sharers. And no doubt there are enclaves in this territory where liberal thought is allowed to blossom (like the motivational photo of the flower in the desert) but largely it is Trumpland, Brexitland, swampland. And so the people who sought out my sweet little M*A*S*H group loved the show more for its depiction of the US military than its pacifist rhetoric, more for the presence of bombshell nurses than its proto-feminism, more for its comedy than its tragedy. And so the group became more and more Trumpy as the year progressed.

With this political fractiousness came more responsibility for me to dodge. The reported content became daily; the direct messages offering to help me administrate the group became weekly. Occasionally things would spill over from the usual ‘MAGA!’ or ‘#Trump2020’ comments into outright nastiness — racism, sexism or homophobia. Still I did nothing. I knew that I should’ve removed myself as an admin of the group long ago, especially if I wasn’t willing to do anything to stem the sewerization of its discourse more than deleting and blocking. I saw it as Facebook’s responsibility to stem the hate speech, which they would do when certain words or terms pinged some AI buzzer at HQ. But mostly it was left to me — a podcaster in London with little-to-no interest in M*A*S*H – to dedicate myself to moderating this group. And by that point, I was much more intrigued by the drama of these political arguments than I was by the photos of signed merchandise or debates over whether Trapper or BJ was a better foil for Hawkeye.

But November was creeping closer, and, as a Brit, I didn’t have a vote in an election that was evidently going to be both tight and important. I’m not someone who feels comfortable, in the self-reinforcing bubbles of Twitter or Instagram, encouraging my American followers (who are about a dozen in number and almost maniacally politically engaged) to get out and vote. But in the back of my mind, I always remembered that I had sole charge of this group, where 15,000 impressionable Americans came every day to hang out and chat. Was this the closest I’d get to putting up a Biden/Harris yard sign?

That’s the more altruistic spin on my intentions. In reality, I knew the drama that would ensue if I were to make a few subtle changes. Originally, I wanted to change the group’s name to “M*A*S*H Fans for Joe Biden!” but I chickened out a bit and instead, on November 1st, updated the page’s banner to this:

It took no-time whatsoever for the thumbs down and angry face emojis to be slammed, and the new banner condemned. So I decided to double-down on my decision and changed the group name to “M*A*S*H — The Greatest TV Show in History (Vote Biden!)”. And then, like God having created humans and given them social media, I just walked away…

Within minutes the group began to descend. At first, it was a conflict between the Trumpers who hated the fact that the page had come out for Joe Biden, and the NO POLITICS HERE! crowd who felt (correctly) like I had deliberately sabotaged the purity of the group. But that was in the first few minutes — as the day progressed, the attacks on Biden (and me) became more extreme.

I hadn’t realised how many people would publicly accuse Joe Biden of being a paedophile, nor how swiftly people would wish death upon one another for having contrasting political views. For days after these changes, M*A*S*H wasn’t discussed once; there were just thousands (and I mean thousands) of political posts. When I woke up the next morning (I had sensibly disabled viewing or posting on my wall) my message inbox was inundated with outraged members who had watched, overnight, as the group degenerated.

Part of me felt bad, because I knew that for some people the group was just a nice, friendly space to talk about a show that they loved (although there are literally hundreds of alternative spaces available for that on Facebook alone). But the experiment into the delicacy of American society fixated me; for days I did little more than read the comments, the arguments, the debates, the vitriol, as it poured in. And time after time, people called on me to do something — to delete the views of their political opponents, to somehow re-rail the group — even though it was that entitled ownership of my time and energy that had irritated me in the first place. Eventually I decided to do what all new celebrities and milkshake ducks must do in a crisis: open the Notes app and make a statement.

My statement did nothing to quell the discord, so I decided not to engage any further. I wasn’t nervous about the extent to which some of the group’s members had fixated upon me, but I was also aware that this was a privilege that stemmed, in part, from living in the UK, a whole Atlantic ocean away. If I’d been in the US, where gun ownership is such a fun part of the culture, and where all these diehard Trumpists were living, would I have been so cavalier about the whole thing? Would I have felt worried as they started talking about me by name? About where I live?

Anyway, I don’t live in the US and, as this long recitation is proving, I was not murdered. But as the discussion in the group slid ever more towards the prospect of civil war — and with the election still a few days away and no prospect of the quality of discussion improving — I decided it was probably sensible, for my sanity, to disengage. I stopped deleting any posts (Facebook was auto-deleting dozens per day, but I was left to filter the more extreme MAGA nonsense), stopped adding new members, and just left the husk of the group. Several thousand members had departed since the start of the experiment; the hardcore that remained were either veteran polemicists or disturbed voyeurs. Either way, it was their group now.

Last week I tried to log onto Facebook and found myself unable to. My account was, apparently, under review, and I had to send a passport photo of myself off to Menlo Park.

In the meantime, I had no access to Facebook or Messenger, or any sites that I used Facebook to login to. My entire history on Facebook had been erased — Thanos-style — with a snap of their fingers. A friend contacted me to ask if I was ok — was this the start of my long-awaited breakdown? — as I, and all the messages I’d ever sent, had vanished from our decade old group chat.

When I Googled the prime suspect in the mystery of why I’d been suspended by Facebook, I discovered that the demonic M*A*S*H group had, like me, been erased from the internet. This reassured me that I would eventually be allowed back into the warming Facebook bosom — after all, the fact that a page I administrated had become a hate group was presumably the fault of the racists and sexists and homophobes in the membership, surely, rather than me, the innocent administrator? I suppose I could’ve done more to clamp down on it; I suppose I could not have incited it… But to lose almost two decades of history as a Facebook user for the sake of a vague experiment that earned me a couple of hundred faves on Twitter? It felt like a heavy price.

A few days later I was allowed back onto Facebook, where I was immediately informed that the M*A*S*H group had infringed Facebook’s laws (and let’s remember, Facebook is a cesspit; things must’ve gotten really bad). The group was gone, though its deletion would be reviewed.

I hit ‘continue’ because I had to, and the group whizzed off to be reviewed by Facebook’s censors. That felt like a shame; I would’ve accepted its demise at this point. I had more than come to terms with the end of my M*A*S*H adventure — I actively craved the relief of knowing that all the damage that I had done could evaporate into thin air, as though it had never been wrought in the first place. My fear, when my Facebook account was deleted, was losing the patchy, imperfect personal history that a Facebook account represents. The ability to go back in time, if only to see how rapidly social mores have accelerated (“Christ, I said that?!” *hits delete*). But, conversely, when the M*A*S*H group was deleted, I felt delighted, for a moment, at the prospect that nothing would be left to prove how sort-of, kind-of, almost by accident, I had made a hate group. But absolution, oblivion, is pending review.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. This content isn’t available at the moment.