A growing number of people around the world are finding meaning and a sense of belonging in online groups. According to the YouGov survey, in 11 out of 15 countries studied, the largest proportion of respondents reported the most important group to which they belong is a primarily online one.

This report seeks to open a conversation about the role and impact of online groups and the factors that make some of them successful communities. It draws on interviews with 50 leaders of Facebook Groups in 17 countries and with 26 global experts in online community building, along with a literature review, internal Facebook research, and a parallel YouGov survey of 15,000 Internet users in 15 countries.

Key findings:

• Online groups are a still fluid form of human organisation that in many cases attract members and leaders who are marginalised in the physical societies they inhabit, and who use the platform to build new kinds of community they could not form in real space.
• The flexible affordances of online platforms have enabled new kinds of leaders to emerge in these groups with unique skills in moderating often divisive dialogues, sometimes among millions of members.
• The leaders of many of these groups run them as a labor of love; they are neither trained nor paid, the rules that govern their internal operations are often uncodified, and the hosting platform - in this case Facebook - holds significant power over their operations and future.
• More research is needed to understand whether and how these groups will operate as genuine communities over the long term, especially given the tensions that derive from conducting public life on a private platform such as Facebook, and how such groups and their leaders can be supported to ensure they provide maximum voice, participation and benefit to their members.