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 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.
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.
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.
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 network of Instagram accounts make the trip seem easy
Part of the exchange between our dummy account and one of the accounts, under a pseudonym, claiming to help Moroccan migrants reach Ceuta
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”.
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.
