Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
On June 29, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) published the results of an investigation which revealed “foreign interference in the UK election”.
ABC had been analysing five apparently unrelated UK Facebook pages, ranging from the Reform-supporting ‘Patriotic UK’ to ‘BeyondBorders UK’, which promised “Stories of Hope, Unity, Resilience and Belonging”.
These and three other Facebook sites – ‘Commonsense Britain’, ‘British Patriots’ and ‘BritBlend’ – were run by administrators mostly based in Nigeria, and ran Facebook ads paid for using Nigerian currency, ABC found. Its investigation concluded that this bore the hallmarks of a Russian operation.
Russian interference in the UK’s democratic process is nothing new. Political donations and influence aside, twitter, now known as X, accounts linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) spread fake news and promoted xenophobic messages in the aftermath of the 2017 UK terror attacks, while accounts at the extreme-end of right-wing echo chambers were routinely targeted by the IRA to gain traction via retweets, reported the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats.
In 2022, Spanish researchers published findings showing “Russia’s growing use of cyber operations combined with (dis)information to foment or exacerbate tensions between government and society and/or among different societal groups” in France, Germany, and the UK.
In 1974, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who had previously worked for Nazi newspapers, published the theory of the ‘Spiral of Silence’. This is the syndrome whereby opinions expressed by a loud minority ultimately take over and give the impression that they themselves are, in fact, the norm.
How Bots Work and How Widespread They are
Few people realise, however, how such “hostile” campaigns are conducted across the spectrum of social media, and how far the use of malicious bots, and other automated programmes, to spread these campaigns, reaches. Or what effect it can have.
A ‘Russia Hoax’ or Russian Hopes? How Putin’s Troll Farms are Boosting Nigel Farage’s Campaigns – Again
Islamophobia, the Great Replacement Theory, and GB News are key elements in the Russian propaganda networks supporting the Reform Party
Governments being shown to run such propaganda operations have, in the past, used a combination of human operatives and computer programming. In Azerbaijan, Israel, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as in Russia, student or youth groups are hired by government agencies to use computational propaganda, reported researchers for Oxford University. Young people are also employed in Russian and Chinese troll farms, while in Mexico, journalist Peter Pomerantsev found that young people acting as “cyborgs”, and “bot herders”, along with fully automated social media personas, formed the backbone of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s successful 2012 election campaign.
In the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are now “broadening their recruitment base” to deal with increased demand for cyber actions, recruiting in schools in areas of socio-economic deprivation. The Intercept reported that GCHQ “has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites…and plant false Facebook wall posts”.
CAPTCHAs (and re-CAPTCHAs) are the computer-automated tests designed to distinguish robots from humans, used for security reasons; for example, as a protection to stop the creation of fake on-line accounts. Computer scientists developed machine-learning programmes which solve them.
In tandem, “captcha farms” are multi-million dollar businesses described as “digital sweatshops”, based in economically-deprived countries, where human employees solve CAPTCHAs for a rate of $0.17 (£0.13) per 1000 CAPTCHAs solved.
