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A Facebook group that flooded social media in support of Boris Johnson during the Brexit referendum has now rebranded and is part of a multi-platform, monetised network, pushing pro-Reform and anti-immigration sentiment.
Six years ago, Fight4Brexit (F4B) was revealed to be one of several similar groups – run by real people – that encouraged its members to post en masse in support of the then Prime Minister, and to do so in deliberate imitation of automated bots because “it annoys the other side”.
The group gradually disappeared from people’s timelines after the UK elected to leave the EU, but Byline Times can now reveal that F4B has returned as part of a wider network using Facebook and TikTok to push its agenda under the guise of a fake political campaign – and that the entire scheme is run by just one man.
Lewis Morris is a twenty-nine-year-old former garden centre worker from Liverpool who, according to the electoral roll, lives at home with his mother and sister.
Morris, who has been active on Facebook since 2010, started the Extreme Weather page – posting videos and images of wild weather from around the world – in 2014. He launched F4B in 2018, then the popular Garden Makeover Ideas on a Budget (GMIB) group the following year.
Mostly innocuous, both Extreme Weather and GMIB used human interest content to grow their audience and currently have 1.7 million followers between them.
F4B was different, focusing on anti-Jeremy Corbyn memes, pro-Boris Johnson content and encouraging followers to post “I back Boris 100%” on multiple platforms because “it’s driving Remainers crazy”.
Post-Brexit, F4B rebranded as British Updates, the pro-Boris posts were replaced with anti-immigrant content; the page now has 173,000 followers. Morris also rebranded himself as a “journalist” and, more recently, a “Reform Spokesperson”.
Reform has yet to respond to a request to clarify Morris’ involvement with the party, but his name does not appear on any of their literature and his ‘journalism’ is limited to a website linked to the British Updates page.
Hosting more ads than content, the site presents paraphrased versions of anti-woke tabloid news stories without context or links to the originals.
Sharing little about his personal life, Morris’ own Facebook page, which bears the Meta blue verification tick, regularly shares memes and videos from the British Updates page and his associated website.
He also reposts content from multiple other Facebook pages, namely We Support Great Britain, We Are Proud to be British, UK Updates, UK News Updates, UK Daily Updates, and Get Labour Out, which are also owned and run by Morris and have a combined 451,000 followers.
All of these pages advertise Morris’ news website, except Get Labour Out, which links instead to a GoFundMe page, a related TikTok account with 40,000 followers and an associated ‘merch’ website.
Morris declares that the £1,398 currently raised is for a campaign to “remove every Labour MP from power for a Generation” and advises donors that their cash will be used for “demonstration materials, staffing costs, and advertising videos”. However, he does not provide any evidence that the money is used for this purpose.
Alongside reposted videos of anti-migrant protests and clips from GB News, Get Labour Out has shared six videos on both Facebook and TikTok featuring young men and women claiming they are backing the Campaign.
Stating that they will campaign until “every migrant hotel is closed”, and that “housing illegal immigrants in our neighbourhoods is endangering women and children”, the videos appear to be a calculated attempt to tap into the fear and xenophobia which is driving current protests, like those outside the Bell Hotel in Essex, that had led to a court-challenge.
While comments show Morris’ followers supporting both the speakers and their ‘campaign’, the videos all appear to be AI-generated. The faces of the speakers do not appear in any image searches, except for one man who appeared on the ‘This Person Does Not Exist’ website, and two of the featured women are wearing an identical shirt. The clips also bear the telltale smoothness of AI content.
The only real person involved in the Get Labour Out campaign, appears, from Byline Times inquiries, to be Morris himself. His GoFundMe page lists no other people, none of his posts feature pictures of him, the AI ‘campaigners’, or their bought-and-paid-for demonstration materials, despite, claims on Facebook that “they” would be at the Great British National Protest in Dover last month.
TikTok’s guidelines require creators “to label all AI-generated content that contains realistic images, audio, and video” because “it can potentially make it difficult for viewers to tell the difference between fact and fiction”.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has similar policies. Last year, it claimed it would be “rolling out” a scheme to automatically label AI-generated content. Despite this, none of Morris’ videos were labelled as such.
The growth of anti-migrant and far-right talking points online is a major cause for concern, and the campaign coalition Together With Refugees has called on the Government to end the “pernicious and insidious currents” of racism and hatred that underpin recent anti-migrant protests.
A recent report from Tell MAMA showed that, from 2023-2024, they saw a 1,619% increase in verified reports of Islamophobic hate. A separate report from the Open Rights Group (ORG) in April this year revealed that Meta’s profiling tools had allowed them to build so-called “patchwork profiles” of users likely to be refugees in order to target them with “scare campaigns”.
The report also criticised Meta’s enablement of “disinformation, voter suppression, hate and division”, despite reassurances from the platform that these are supposedly not occurring.
A spokesperson for ORG told Byline Times that “the information you discovered is shocking, but unfortunately something Meta has allowed on its platforms and monetised from for a long time.”
They continued: “Meta continues a lax approach to the moderation of paid-for hate on its platforms and a lack of contextual understanding of the environments in which it profits. Meta’s profiling and micro-targeting enables it to profit from all aspects of the global migrant crisis. Its vast surveillance infrastructure is also being used by the UK Home Office to target refugees with fear-based advertising — including campaigns designed to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats.”
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Following our request for comment, TikTok have removed the GetLabourOut account and all of its videos from the platform but declined to provide a statement.
Meta and GoFundMe have yet to respond, and Morris’ AI videos remain on Facebook, where he continues to share links to the fundraiser and his non-existent ‘campaign’.
Byline Times also reached out to Morris, but he has yet to respond.