EXCLUSIVE: Reform UK’s Makerfield by-election candidate, Rob Kenyon, had a SECOND deleted social media account, and the archived posts are damning. hopenothate.org.uk/2026/05/21/r...

"The lie of evolution has done a lot of damage. […] I believe the Earth is about 2000 years old." www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtpC...

So I went on a deep dive last night into the archives of the suspended X account of Reform UK’s Makersfield election candidate, Robert Kenyon. This is what I found… bylinetimes.com/2026/05/20/r...

I had to manually go through 32,000 land registry filings for this piece and have forgotten many treasured memories in favour of weird details about London attractions owned by overseas billionaires. Please make my toil worth it by giving the piece a read.

«Channels publish at a high frequency, generally producing approximately two videos per day. The case is similar to the influence operation Shadow Play in that it rapidly produces content on YouTube and pushes narratives around specific geopolitical topics.» #infOps #China #Canada #YouTube #genAI

#London #UK 👇

Why Social Media Engagement Is Not Public Opinion My new article in Fair Observer examines how a small minority of highly active users can dominate visibility online and create the illusion of majority opinion. Read: www.fairobserver.com/world-news/m...

«The proponents of this philosophy also often sell courses as an additional revenue stream: Sooriyapura claimed that 2,500 people, mainly other Sri Lankans, have graduated from his content academy.» #UK #slopaganda #grifters #SouthAsia #platforms #monetization

«The firm then used an anonymous editor handle called VentureKit to create a fraudulent, sock puppet account, Quorum816, to add positive information about Mr. al-Otaiba on his Wikipedia page in 2020 […]» #UAE #astroturfing #reputationManagement #Wikipedia #Wikilaundering

And another, v NYTimes: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w... “It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with true believers or impose draconian punishments... They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”

«Propaganda is turned invisible—not because it’s disguised, but because the entire feed it lives in is already synthetic. […] social media rewards absurdity, confrontation, speed, and irony […]» #propaganda #shitposting #Iran #Trump #war #trolling #genAI

From saving cafes to rescuing twins: Facebook pages which appear to be run from Vietnam are using AI to flood users’ feeds with bizarre fake emotional stories about politicians like Nigel Farage and Rishi Sunak. Our new investigation 👇

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The main reason why authoritarian regimes and extremist groups invest heavily in manipulating platforms like X. This is all about influencing a small number of high-impact actors, such as journalists and politicians, who then disseminate their messages to much larger audiences.

«[…] authoritarian-minded leaders undermine liberal institutions while ostensibly working within them. Just as illiberal governments do not typically abolish these institutions, but hollow them out, X weaponised—instead of abolishing—content moderation.» #Xitter #platforms #algorithms #Muskism

#BBCNews - ‘Patriotic’ UK anti-immigration social media accounts traced to Sri Lanka and Vietnam www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

FFS!

Community-based fact-checking works Community notes reducethe subsequent spread of misleading posts by 61% and increase the odds that users delete their false posts by 94% But they appear too late to stop the viral stage of the diffusion making the effect modest. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Toad sat on the edge of his bed. “Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.” “Why?” asked Frog. “I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad.

«X’s transparency features show that 57 of the accounts had metadata indicating a location outside Israel […] In addition to the network’s coordinated posting behavior, the timeline of the accounts’ creation dates are also compressed within a two year timeline.» #Israel #infOps #ISNAD #disinfo

Free speech culture means shut up with your criticisms or disagreements with other people’s speech. Free speech culture means students should accept, passively, without dissent, whoever the school chooses to honor with a speaker gig.

After hearing so often that cancelling talks was a big national problem, I looked into the data. It's not common. Less than 0.8% chance per school. And many claims are "attempted disinvitations." So yes, the "crisis" is some students said they dislike an invited speaker and the invitee spoke anyway.

"OSINT in Unexpected Places" by @osint-community.bsky.social. Interesting discussion of opposition risk mapping for reputation management, facts as strategic resources, cryptocurrency traceability advancements, and mapping violent extremism nexuses and mobilisation triggers. #OSINT #UK #London

«There are people in Vietnam and Sri Lanka making huge amounts of money from denigrating London, spreading disinformation […] Russian state-backed, Chinese state-backed, MAGA-backed groups amplifying this […]» — Sadiq Khan at Byline Times #disinfo #grifters #monetization #ragebait #London #UK

📣 New York Times International Investigations team 💼 Open Source Intelligence Reporter 📍 Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; London, United Kingdom; Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Warsaw, Poland #jobs #OSINT #Europe #UK

Went to an interesting LSE seminar by MIT's @adamberinsky.bsky.social, on misinformation intervention studies. The field has spent long searching for a "magic bullet", when "bundled" smaller-effect interventions may do the job well enough (I suggested putting profiling and genAI to good use here). 🧵

Ziobro is accused of stealing governmnent funds as well as illegally using spyware against other Polish politicians

2/4 CTV covered a report on coordinated fake YouTube channels posing as Albertans pushing secession and even US annexation narratives at scale. This is what modern influence looks like: cheap content, high reach, and emotions first. www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

«“The people writing the notes become tired of not seeing notes become visible, so they stop writing notes. Then we enter this vicious circle of AI-generated notes that don’t get enough ratings. It’s just a poor excuse for an anti-disinformation effort,”» #USA #Iran #propaganda #factChecking #media

«This is the monetisation of outrage in its purest form: a cycle where extremist content drives views, views drive algorithmic amplification, and amplification drives profit. This experience has made one thing clear: reactive content moderation is no longer enough.» #UK #ragebait #genAI #AI #crypto

«AI does not break the mechanisms of political persuasion. It just scales them. And it scales them asymmetrically, toward the actors most willing to exploit it without restraint.» Even worse, the repetition weighting could cascade as public prompted AI itself repeats repetition-weighted narratives.

«The lack of political will to tackle online platforms would greatly help my campaign: many platforms clearly only care about fiduciary risk for shareholders, so they spend less money looking for problematic content. We have yet to see any real impact from the Online Safety Act […]» #UK #elections

«Content creators online are attracting large audiences with videos that show open drug use, crime, and piles of trash in European cities—often framed as evidence of the continent’s alleged decline. These videos frequently portray immigrants as responsible […]» #Europe #UK #platforms #monetization

«Contrary to what she writes, we do still have cars, boilers and tumble dryers, and they are being made more technologically advanced rather […] We saw all the same fuss when more efficient light bulbs were brought in and when leaded petrol was phased out, and we will no doubt see it again»

We've uncovered how a content creator in Pakistan was earning money from viral videos that stir up hate in the UK – while lining the pockets of Big Tech – all without properly understanding English.

Uh, eBay, which "Abbott" is running "for PM" in the UK? 🧐

“Whoever is doing this work is doing it to make an earning,” he told us, in Urdu. “We have no interest in news. I haven’t even looked at what is being said in the videos, what has been written and what hasn’t been written.” Expected, given the incentives and opacity. #monetization #ragebait #UK

Just set up a Schrödinger-style sealed probabilistic decay-triggered auto-spreader, so the jam is both on top and not on top.

Find young content creators → give them training → watch them produce content that promotes your brand. Sounds like a marketing playbook. And it’s exactly the blueprint of a program funded by the Russian state which trains participants, including teenagers from occupied Ukraine, to promote its war.

«One popular X account, Inevitable West - which […] appears to be based outside the UK - […] claimed "ALL of Britain backs these patriots". That post reached more than half a million users - showing how rage bait posts are prioritised by some algorithms.» — @mariannaspringbbc.bsky.social

Alan Rusbridger at London Metropolitan University, for London Met Journalism, speaking on whether facts can survive an age of information chaos. Much reference to the "flood the zone with shit" strategy, facilitated by platforms' engagement-optimising algorithms. 🧵 #journalism #media #misinfo #tech

A great talk by Dr @rogerhighfield.bsky.social OBE on receipt of the 2025 @royalsociety.org David Attenborough Award. We don’t perceive reality—we construct it. The brain is a prediction machine, constantly making its "best guess" from sensory data, and this can be hacked. #misinfo #science

At the Council for Countering Online Disinformation panel earlier this week at the House of Lords, hearing how infops can now be deployed with vastly less time and sophistication with AI, and boosted by gaming of platform algorithms, to steal attention for money—or to just directly steal money. 🧵

Our automated UK political ad posting bot account is heating up. Lots of new ads every day now. (It covers the main parties and leaders, but if there are any specific accounts you'd like me to add, just say).

Wikipedia is one of the internet’s most important knowledge infrastructures—and it’s under quiet pressure from AI. This was discussed at KCL's AI institute panel "Trust and Knowledge in the Age of GenAI: A Conversation with Jimmy Wales" #Wikipedia #commons #genAI #AI #platforms #knowledge #London

"Democracy in the Disinformation Age" focuses on infrastructure and systems failure. At Cumberland Lodge's #LondonDialogue 2026 on the topic, panelists tackled how #platforms, #AI, and #media fragmentation are reshaping trust—and who gets to define “truth”. #disinfo #democracy #dialogue #London #UK

More coverage of the foreign engagement farms grifting on UK nationalistic ragebait, by @supertanskiiii.bsky.social #UK #politics #grifters #inauthentic

«Dubai demonstrates that you can have globalisation without pluralism, modernity without democracy, and diversity without rights. You can enjoy the aesthetics of cosmopolitan life while keeping political power tightly concentrated.»