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1 month ago
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Online disinformation campaigns, including Iranian bot farms promoting Scottish nationalism and biased algorithms depicting London as “an overwhelmingly dangerous” city, are seeking to undermine British democracy, a senior Labour MP has warned.
Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said online disinformation about the UK was being promoted by Donald Trump and other US and UK politicians, adding that Britain was “constantly suffering from disinformation campaigns from both state and non-state actors”.
Thornberry said it was time to challenge tech companies over “the threats that social media pose to our society”. The committee has written to X, Meta and TikTok calling on them to give evidence on the threat posed by foreign disinformation targeting the UK.
“We must start a proper dialogue with social media companies about the ways their platforms are being used to spread lies from abroad and undermine our democracy. And we need to do it urgently,” she said.
Thornberry accused Reform UK, whose MPs have repeatedly described UK cities as crime-ridden and dangerous, of repeating false claims that are then amplified, while biased algorithms promote “strife and far-right messages”. Reform politicians were “raking in tens of thousands of pounds from X” and rewarding sites that sowed anger and spread disinformation, she added.
Last week the Reform mayoral candidate, Laila Cunningham, said London was “no longer safe” while the party leader, Nigel Farage, said London was “in the grip of a crime wave”, despite a fall in multiple crime types including murder. Trump has claimed the UK capital has “no-go zones” and that its mayor, Sadiq Khan, was moving the city “towards sharia law”.
Analysis of Reddit by Dr Mark J Hill of King’s College London found the number of posts claiming London is “dangerous” and “lawless” rose from 874 in 2008 to 258,444 in 2024. He found evidence of new accounts which appeared to use AI generated profile pictures and post solely about crime in London.
“We are seeing lies that start in bot farms and are then disseminated on social media sites become statements of fact from the likes of the US president, and increasingly from politicians here at home,” said Thornberry. “That’s so dangerous for our democracy.”
The prime minister, Keir Starmer, launched a formal investigation into foreign election interference in the UK in December after Nathan Gill, Reform’s former leader in Wales, was found guilty of accepting bribes to promote Russian interests in the European parliament.
On Tuesday, the foreign affairs select committee also heard evidence that bot accounts based in Iran were fomenting support for Scottish independence, in an attempt to destabilise the UK.
After internet shutdowns inside Iran following escalating anti-government protests, 1,300 fake profiles seeking to influence discourse on Scottish independence, Brexit and institutional collapse went dark, according to Cyabra, a Tel Aviv-based disinformation detection company. The UK Defence Journal reported that a second internet blackout had resulted in the bots being silenced again.
In his evidence to the committee, Vijay Rangarajan, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, argued that the UK did not currently have sufficient safeguards against an algorithmic bias. If a social media company decided to amplify or suppress political discourse “they probably could”, he said, adding: “I do not think anything in our current legislative toolkit would enable us … to take any action against that, and that really is a concern.”
