Ahead of a historic UK election, five Facebook pages secretly operating from Nigeria are using Kremlin-aligned propaganda and AI-generated racist imagery to sow 'division and chaos'.
Revelations of foreign interference in the UK election, uncovered by the ABC, have been described as "highly alarming" by the Conservative Party, which will be writing to the Cabinet Office seeking urgent advice about how to combat it.
Reform UK is a rival to the UK Conservative party, which is projected to be wiped out in the July 4 election.The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network's activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.AI Forensics is a European non-profit research organisation that published research in April about a covert influence operation called "Doppelganger", and found that Facebook ads with pro-Russian messages were targeting EU voters.
Mr Farage came to prominence after spearheading the UK's Brexit movement. His party is standing Reform candidates in some historically Conservative seats and could intensify the electoral wipe-out The Nigerian connection is significant because previous online Russian propaganda networks were found to have been operating from Africa.
The "British Patriots" page has shared a fake headline from a pro-Russian website about Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy being asked by the CIA to not embezzle money. The "BritBlend" page in a post also copy-and-pasted a video caption from "British Patriots" criticising a British parliamentarian, without sharing the video or any further context.
"If they are coordinated… this fits with previous patterns we have seen, for example the activities of the Russian Internet Research Agency in the United States."AI Forensics's Salvatore Romano said the ultimate benefactor of the division wrought by these networks was the Kremlin. "We applied new and stronger enforcement to Russian state-controlled media, including blocking them in the EU and the UK and globally demoting their posts."
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