Adele Worrall is part of an army of people she hardly knows, fighting for a child she’s never met. Every day, Worrall, and more than 600,000 people like her, spend their days glued to Alfie’s Army, a Facebook group set up in support of Alfie Evans, a terminally ill 23-month old toddler at the centre of a hellish ethical battle playing out in the courts and on newspaper front pages. But it was online that Alfie's story really took hold. Across the world, hundreds of thousands of people were following in real-time. And they were doing it on Facebook.
On Monday April 23, as most of the UK press buzzed with the news about the birth of the royal baby, members of Alfie’s Army had their attention on another story altogether. That day, Alfie’s parents were making a last-ditch legal attempt to prevent doctors at Alder Hey hospital from removing the ventilation tube that had been helping their son breathe since December 2016.
While this battle was going on, a handful of group members commented on posts, suggesting that people should set off fire alarms at Alder Hey to stop the ventilator being removed. Earlier that day, around 200 protestors outside the hospital had to be blocked by police after they attempted to force their way into the hospital.
These were only a tiny proportion of the people following the small boy’s fight. The vast majority of Alfie’s Army were holding tight, willing the toddler to stay breathing after the tube was removed. The first update, posted a day later, was positive. “He’s fighting with his gorgeous features, pink lips, handsome grown up face, and odd cheeky smile now and again,” wrote Alfie’s father, Thomas Evans, in a Facebook post shared 28,000 times. His later update was less optimistic. “HE HAS NOW BEEN STARVED FROM NUTRITION FOR 23 hours,” he wrote. “How is this HUMANE and where does his DIGNITY LIE.”
Through Facebook, Worrall was watching all of this happen in real-time. Like many others, she had changed her profile picture to an photograph of Alfie, and had been sharing posts and links to donation pages, trying to encourage others to support the cause. On most evenings, she would find herself constantly checking the page for updates from the boy’s parents.
“If I see a post about Alfie or from his dad, I am going to be looking at the comments, because it's constant, all day and night,” she says. When she saw the above post she started feeling guilty when she ate, thinking about Alfie going without food. “We are constantly thinking about him,” she says, echoing the sentiment projected by the thousands of people posting on the page every day.
But to really understand why the Alfie Evans story has struck such a chord with so many Facebook users, you have to go back to January 2018, and a statement Mark Zuckerberg made about some tweaks to the algorithms that determine what appears in Facebook news feeds. “Recently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” he wrote.
To remedy this, Facebook tweaked its algorithm so it would automatically promote a greater number of posts from family, friends and Facebook groups. To make room for this, posts from news organisations and brands would be deprioritised. Instead of seeing news stories, Facebook users were now more likely to see posts shared by friends, or from groups that they had expressed an interest in.
For Facebook, this solved a couple of problems the company had been contending with. In the wake of the 2016 US election, it had received a deluge of criticism over fake news on the platform. By reducing the prominence of news in the News Feed, Facebook reduced its exposure to the ongoing fake news scandal. And prioritising home-grown content also made it less likely that people would click on links that took them away from the platform. Simple put, Facebook’s new focus on groups made the website into more of a sealed-off microcosm where people were less likely to spin off onto other websites.
Worrall hadn’t even heard of Alfie Evans until she saw her cousin sharing a post from the official Facebook page. “I become passionate about it on the group and following the posts, and thought that I could help,” she said. Plenty of other people agreed. In the 10 months that the page has been online, it has grown to more than 617,000 members. On one post with more than 17,000 comments, people from Australia, Poland, the US, Norway, South Africa and the UK declare their support for the family.
As the movement ballooned, people on the page started to offer their own, unsolicited, thoughts on how to help the child. After one member suggested the family use cannabis oil to help their son, a handful of others pitched in offering to buy some and drive it to the family in Liverpool. Others offered unfounded suggestions that the hospital had prepared a lethal injection for the child, or were keeping him in intensive care as part of a plan to harvest his organs.
In Facebook groups, the line between rumour and truth is a little more blurred than in the offline world, says Tim Squirrell, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh who studies online communities. With such a wide range of views represented, Facebook groups can be all things to all people. “You can believe whatever you want to believe,” he adds.
The Alfie’s Army Facebook group also provided a place for fringe news sites to reach new audiences. References to pro-life and conservative American sites litter the comments beneath posts, although the group’s moderators try and keep a lid on the misinformation. “Only wait to hear things directly from family and from we admins. We will bring you an update as soon as possible,” one group moderator wrote.
Stories about Alfie Evans were the second most-shared on social media in the UK, falling only behind those about the royal family, according to data from the social media analytics firm EzyInsights. The vast majority of these shares were driven by Facebook, and this is no surprise to Squirrell. “There’s a degree of rawness and earnestness that is seen as acceptable on Facebook that just isn’t the same on other platforms,” he says. Since Alfie’s story is so emotive, it easily gets people reacting and sharing posts, which make them much more likely to appear in people’s News Feeds
“It’s happening in the spheres of people who are mothers, or parents, who are pro-life and quite deeply Christian,” says Squirrell. People see a Facebook post about Alfie and they know straight away that by sharing it, they can at least feel like they are doing something to help. “There is a visceral feeling to this, and it has an urgency to it as well. “And since people on Facebook are more personally identifiable than they are on other social platforms, people sharing posts are also implicitly showing other people that they are trying to help.
But, after ten months of online campaigning, Alfie’s Army might be about to wind down. On Thursday, after a meeting with doctors at Alder Hey, Thomas Evans posted a message to the Facebook group “We are very grateful and we appreciate all the support we have received from around the world,” he wrote in a statement he also delivered in a video. “We would now ask you to return back to your everyday lives and allow myself, Kate and Alder Hey to form a relationship, build a bridge and walk across it.”
Alfie Evans died at 02:30 BST on April 28, one week after his life support was withdrawn.
On Facebook his father wrote: "My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings... absolutely heartbroken."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
