Disinformation

John Sydenham

Britain has numerous agencies who fight “disinformation”. These are the Research Intelligence and Communications Unit [RICU] run by the Home Office, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) run by the Department of Culture Media and Sport, the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) run by the Cabinet Office, the 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Government Information Cell run by the Foreign Office, and the BBC Disinformation and Social Media department headed by Marianna Spring. (See Big Brother Watch).

The BBC Disinformation unit is used to elevate trivial stories such as ‘COVID and 5G’ to make lockdown protestors look like idiots. It is also used to defend the BBC’s own forays into disinformation, for example when they blamed COVID on every animal in East Asia to avoid implicating the Lab at Wuhan.

The BBC are experts at disinformation. The technique perfected by the BBC is to no-platform news they dislike and publicise news they favour. This technique of “half truths” is also used by sophisticated purveyors of disinformation such as China and the Social Media companies. See Google is Your Enemy, The Far Left and AI and Staring Down the Plughole: AIs and Shadow Banning.

There are now a range of international “fact checkers” and disinformation indexes that are used to generate a world of half truths. The most insidious of these is the Global Disinformation Index which is a WEF/US/UK government body dedicated to shadow banning web sites that offend their paymasters (See You must see this evil). None of the anti-disinformation bodies in the UK are fighting this source of disinformation.

The Southport riots are a recent case of the UK disinformation services compounding disinformation. The viral fake news about the murderer of three little girls being Muslim was produced by the account of “Channel 3 News” on X. According to ABCNews, this account seems to be run by people who use an AI driven ‘User’ to garner ‘views’. X quickly tacked a “community note” on the post but it still went viral. However, the “Channel 3 Now” AI originally picked up the news from an account called @Artemisfornow run by an “influencer” who lives in Cheshire called Bernie Spofforth. She deleted the tweet but it lived on.

This version was then proliferated as further fake news (see for instance Metro).

It looks like the first tweet was just attention grabbing and the “Channel 3 Now” tweet was an example of automated, commercial, attention grabbing. The UK disinformation services saw it as a great opportunity to blame the Russians because “Channel 3 Now” had covered Russian events, being based in Lithuania (where the Russians are hated, but no-one knows this). The UK press used both the Channel 3 Now and the government fakes to attract readers. The media also saw it as an opportunity to imply that Nigel Farage was working for the Russians. What a mess.

As usual the UK Government are acting with a diffuse purpose and little control. This is on the whole a good thing because the CDU, RRU and 77th Brigade have generally targeted ordinary UK citizens and concerned journalists in a desultory manner rather than being fully authoritarian. However, this is changing as, under Labour, the attacks are becoming more serious and also involve police action.

The British State steadfastly refuses to address the biggest threat from social media, the social media companies themselves, which routinely no-platform and promote views according to their own agenda. The Twitter Files show that the US government has also been controlling the output of social media companies.

The most serious enemies of the UK are China, Russia and Iran. Other countries that manipulate UK media are legion. The most important of the “friendly” nations is the USA because it runs much of UK social media, but the EU and the Arab states are also powerful players (consider the Gaza coverage where scarcely one media outlet mentions that Hamas could surrender). Little is being done to confront these threats although RICU appears to be tackling Islamist meddling in UK media.

Apart from the social media companies, China has the greatest resources for spreading disinformation. It has trillions of dollars to invest in the West and a network of ex-patriots to implement its policies. It also has serious control of HSBC the giant “British” bank, HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. HSBC has a Chinese Communist Party committee overseeing it’s Chinese Investment arm and supports the takeover of Hong Kong by China. Any media company taking out large loans from HSBC is at risk of its CEO being given hints by the Chinese about being “fair” to Chinese interests.

Chinese disinformation on COVID was considered by the International Federation of Journalists and this ranged from outright fake news to more subtle press releases about how much help China was providing. The campaign by China was very successful:

China achieved increased approval despite the fact that major security agencies such as the FBI have decided that COVID came from a lab in Wuhan.

China has directly invested $2.8 billion in European media between 2008 and 2018 (Bloomberg). However, most investment by China occurs through offshore holdings and a web of intermediary companies, so the true scale of the investment is not known. Just the direct investment of $2.8bn could finance a controlling interest in ten newspapers each with the influence of the Telegraph. The most powerful control comes from loans to media companies (which can be withdrawn at will) and these are largely secret or their source is obscure.

China can also exert direct control through adverts and paying for articles. The Telegraph carried the China Daily (ie: China)–sponsored “China Watch” supplement for which it was paid an estimated £750,000 to £800,000 ($1 million to $1.1 million) (Freedom House).

In the UK China directly influences the press with paid content from Huawei that continues to appear in the Economist, whilst the Financial Times carries “China Watch.” The Daily Mail and General Trust, a company with multiple widely known print publications, is a member of the Belt and Road News Network [a propaganda organisation] led by People’s Daily (although it also does regularly publish stories that criticize the Chinese government). Sky TV airs “China Hour,” a program that is coproduced with the state-run China International TV Corporation” ( Freedom House).

In central Europe China has purchased major news media and this has resulted in such influence that “Discourse on China in the Czech Republic and Hungary is heavily politicized and stereotyped.” (See Central Europe for Sale: The Politics of China's Influence).

Advantageous news coverage has also been imposed as part of China’s “Belt and Road Intitiative”. Italy signed up to the scheme and gave China’s state news agency, Xinhua, access to its ANSA news service with “ANSA running 50 Xinhua stories a day on its news wire”.

In France “A major dissemination strategy of Chinese state media is paid content in local outlets, with major outlets across the political spectrum publishing state media content including L’Opinion, Le Figaro, Jeune Afrique, Le Parisien, Le Monde, and Les Echos during the coverage period. TV channel TV5Monde has had a content promotion agreement with CCTV since 2014 and is a member of the Belt and Road News Network. (See Freedom House)”

The government should be tracing the finances of the UK media, and especially of UK journalists to discover the extent of China’s influence.

The effect of TikTok should also be closely investigated. The US social media companies use algorithms to promote a woke agenda. China will undoubtedly be using similar algorithms to promote China’s interests.

China uses advertising to advantage. As an example, during the COVID pandemic “Science”, the respected scientific journal, hosted multiple pages of glossy adverts for administrative states in China etc. and during this period dismissed the possibility that COVID originated in a lab as a “conspiracy theory”. As anyone who knows the scientific press will testify, multiple glossy pages of advertising are extremely hard to obtain. Few owners would have turned down such a cash injection. It can be seen that the method favoured was to no-platform news that China did not want.

Russia has been unable to exert much influence in the Western media. In the days of the Soviet Union it primarily used university socialist societies to create favourable political forces. Although Russia is undoubtedly a player, most of the accusations of Russian influence have been found to be untrue. In particular there was no huge Russian intervention in the UK EU Referendum (a few thousand twitter posts from Russia at most (<0.1% of Referendum posts). People forget that Russia was neutral and did not support Brexit. The “Russian involvement in Brexit” myth is an example of a successful disinformation campaign by Remain that was not challenged by any anti-disinformation agency.

There were tens of millions of posts by Twitter users on the Referendum, especially by the Irish. For some reason hundreds of thousands of tweets of Irish meddling in favour of Remain were considered acceptable even though many came from the Irish European Movement, financed by the Irish State. There was also massive social media company intervention in which Leave supporters were shadow banned and ejected from social media without explanation. (Aggressive security checking resulted in my being ejected from Twitter twice during the Referendum without cause or explanation and I have not been ejected from Twitter/X once since 2016). The Irish and Social Media Company interventions in the Referendum have been totally suppressed by the media.

The claims that Russia supported Trump in a media campaign have more evidence but the attack was small. Russia is very unsophisticated compared with China.

Disinformation largely uses the BBC method of half truths - suppress your opponents and publicise your friends. This makes it difficult to stop.

Postscript: The Southport killer is now known to have been a sympathiser of Al Qaeda and had been making ricin (a deadly poison) for a terrorist attack (allegedly :).

I was kicked off ‘X’ twice during the Southport riots for posting accurate information about the UK migration crisis. It seems that X is also greatly influenced by government agencies. I did have 7 years without being kicked off between 2017 and 2024.