Anadolu via Getty ImagesThis weekend, Mohammed wants to travel from Morocco to the neighbouring Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on the northern tip of Africa.
He’s a Moroccan man in his twenties and wants to emigrate to Europe – not least because he’s been seeing lots of videos on Instagram that make the trip look easy.
He contacts several of the Instagram accounts and one replies, claiming to have helped “many people” and offering him advice on how to cross for hundreds of pounds.
Except Mohammed isn’t real – he’s a dummy account I’ve set up to investigate a network of interconnected Instagram profiles that are driving the influx of migrants to Ceuta with aspirational content and offering them help for a fee.
The crisis has calmed since, but it has sparked tensions between EU nations who share open borders as well as criticism of the Spanish government.
The BBC’s Top Comment podcast has identified dozens of Instagram profiles that portray the short swim around the Morocco-Ceuta border fence as safe and easy – but in reality, people have drowned trying to make the crossing and take much longer routes. The accounts also wrongly show Ceuta as a viable route to mainland Europe.
Our research suggests that this has contributed to the influx, alongside other factors such as misinformation about changes to Spanish immigration law and allegations about weak border controls.
‘Help you enter Ceuta’
After engaging with the accounts’ profiles and posts, the BBC was added to multiple channels and WhatsApp groups. When I asked one of the anonymous accounts if they could help me cross to Ceuta this weekend, they said yes and requested “5000 dirhams upfront” (£400) for “information that will help you enter Ceuta”.
They said they had helped “many people” cross before and would give me information about the “sewer pipes” which I could use to help me reach the enclave safely.
The account confirmed lots of other Instagram profiles help people to cross to Ceuta in this way, and asked for payment “via bank account” with a specific money transfer service.
But they didn’t respond when asked whether I would get a refund if the crossing was not successful. They’ve since deleted several of their messages to the account.
The same profile giving this advice had previously told my real, BBC Instagram account that “it does not encourage immigration to Ceuta” – a message several other profiles repeated.
And it’s continuing – social media posts, actively recommended by Instagram’s algorithm, are advertising another attempt at the crossing this weekend. This risks further deaths and inflamed diplomatic tensions between Morocco and Spain.
Several of the profiles are no longer on Instagram after the BBC contacted Meta, which owns the platform. Meta told the BBC: “We have a team monitoring the situation in Ceuta in real time and removing content that violates our policies – including content that offers to provide, facilitate or seek human smuggling services”.
Why the network matters
I first noticed the deluge of content about Ceuta when I saw a viral video showing two women in wetsuits walking through the city.
While the original post in Spanish sought to dissuade migrants from arriving in Ceuta with the caption “Ceuta can’t take it anymore”, some versions shared by Moroccan and Arabic-speaking accounts either changed the caption or cropped it out, so the clip only showed the women strolling freely.
This was just one of hundreds of posts that we are calling “mirage” content, which paint a deceptive picture of a place distinct from reality.
Some videos show groups of young men and women swimming happily in the sea – even though many have drowned making the trip in recent weeks.
Others show stories of people who have succeeded in reaching Ceuta – and then claim they have gone on to reach Spain or mainland Europe, despite about 75,000 of the 78,000 arrivals having been returned to Morocco by authorities.
There were lots of similarities in the profiles sharing this kind of content. Nearly 40 of them had variations of the term Haraga and include Ceuta in their name or handle, often with a Spanish flag as a profile picture and with the calling codes for Morocco and Spain in the description.
Haraga in Maghrebi Arabic roughly translates to “those who burn” and is used colloquially to refer to migrants arriving in a new place and burning or destroying documents so they cannot be identified and deported back to their home countries.
The account history of these profiles, coupled with their posts and followers, indicated that most were being run from Morocco while a few were potentially based in Spain or Italy.
Lots of them had been set up several years before, but their content about Ceuta had gained more traction in recent weeks.
The accounts have managed to manipulate the algorithms on major social media sites by sharing emotive and hopeful content to gain more traction.
Insiders at the biggest social media companies have previously told me how posts triggering a strong reaction are more likely to go viral.
When I tried to contact some of these profiles using my own account, some of them directed me to the same WhatsApp numbers or email addresses.
My dummy account, Mohammed, was a profile set to private and designed to look similar to the accounts of younger Moroccan people who were liking and commenting on the posts advertising crossings. I followed relevant content, including several of the Haraga profiles, and soon my feed was swamped with videos and content encouraging travel to Ceuta.
There appears to be a wider trend here, where people looking to charge migrants money for advice can easily set up profiles and game social media algorithms.
While there have been Facebook groups and accounts on other major social media sites posting about Ceuta, it was on Instagram where I found the most active and prevalent group of interconnected accounts.
The new-found reach of these profiles, facilitated by Instagram’s algorithms, opens them up to a wider pool of paying clients.
It is yet another example of how gaming an algorithm can fuel real-world harm.
