Instagram Network Glamourises Morocco-ceuta Swim for Migrants in Spain

BBC's Top Comment podcast has found a network of Instagram profiles glamourising the swim around the Morocco-Ceuta border fence. Many migrants have attempted to swim from Morocco to the Spanish enclave Ceuta. This 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 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. It comes after roughly 78,000 migrants from Morocco arrived by sea into Ceuta in a matter of hours last month, 100 of whom died according to the Mayor of Ceuta.