Scroll through any Facebook feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you are likely to come across an account with a union jack profile picture and a vague, generic name like Britain Today.
These accounts, numbering in the hundreds or possibly thousands, present themselves as the work of British patriots. In one typical, AI-generated video, a middle-aged man claims his local cafe has stopped serving pork, bacon and sausages just to avoid offending people. Another post from the same account includes sepia-tinted images of Victorian London, mourning a time when the city was English, first-world and beautiful. Alongside such reactionary nostalgia, it is not unusual to see memes calling Islam a cancer, decrying Muslims praying in public as an invasion of the west, or promoting the great replacement theory, which claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants.
For the past seven months, I have been investigating who is really behind pages like these. The answer often lies with young, entrepreneurial men from south Asia. They tend to have zero interest in UK politics, but the content they create frequently boosts far-right talking points in Britain and contributes to an increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and British Muslims. They are part of a booming cottage industry producing commercial AI slop.
It is notoriously difficult to determine the extent to which people are influenced by what they see online. However, after months of trawling through these Facebook pages, it is hard not to feel they have a poisonous effect. Look at the comments beneath these videos and you will see accounts calling for all Muslims to be deported from the UK, fantasising about an ethnic civil war, or commenting cry-laugh emojis on AI-generated videos of migrants drowning in the Channel.
The financial incentives for creating this kind of content are huge, particularly for creators in the global south. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we examined two very successful sloperations targeting British audiences from Pakistan and Sri Lanka. They make money from online ads that Meta places next to high-performing content. Meta shares a proportion of the ad revenue with creators and also makes direct payments to reward posts that receive high engagement.
Once you hone your algorithmic rage bait, there is very good money to be made from slop. The Pakistani creator, a devout Muslim who we are not naming for his own safety, told us he makes $1,500 (£1,119) a month from one of his pages alone. Geeth Sooriyapura, the Sri Lankan creator, claimed to have made $300,000 over the course of his Facebook career. We were unable to verify these figures, but both men were certainly making many times the average income in their countries. Their success represents the seductive promise of passive income culture, a pervasive modern gospel that says you should quit your job and make easy money online. Proponents of this philosophy also often sell courses as an additional revenue stream: Sooriyapura claimed that 2,500 people, mainly other Sri Lankans, have graduated from his content academy.
Rightwing propaganda and Islamophobia are not new, but two key structural factors have made them particularly pervasive on social media. First, the wide availability of generative AI tools. These are used at every stage of the content creation process: to brainstorm ideas, write captions, and most importantly, create compelling images and videos. This is particularly helpful if, like the Pakistani creator, you do not speak English well. In one video we reviewed from Sooriyapura’s Facebook course, he told his students that AI-generated videos can help political content go viral up to 10 times faster.
Second is Meta’s retreat from content moderation. Over the past couple of years, major social platforms have made mass redundancies on trust and safety teams that monitored and removed harmful content. This was partly motivated by pressure from the Trump administration, which believed platforms had engaged in heavy-handed censorship during the Biden presidency. Social media companies justify the moderation job cuts by pointing to their use of AI to find harmful content more efficiently. But our reporting shows there is masses of deeply offensive content on these platforms that anyone could find in a few minutes, if they bothered to look.
After we spoke to the Pakistani creator, he said it was a good thing we had informed him about the nature of his posts and he deleted many of them. Sooriyapura told us he did not encourage his students to spread violence and that he just educates people on Facebook monetisation and audience-targeting. The Pakistani creator did not cover his tracks particularly well. It took me a couple of hours and a little help from Osint Industries, a platform that collates information on social media accounts, to definitively confirm that the person who ran the Islamophobic slop account also had personal accounts in his own name sharing verses from the Qur’an. These are actions that Meta could easily have taken itself. But why would it spend good money implementing its own policies when there is so little political or regulatory pressure to do so?
When we contacted Meta in both these cases, it took down many of their pages and sent a one-line statement: We have clear community standards that prohibit hate speech, harassment, harmful misinformation and inauthentic behaviour and we have removed these accounts for violating our policies. I have been a tech journalist long enough to have been through this process with Meta and other social platforms many times before. The Sri Lanka network is, depressingly, back up and running, having faced minimal consequences after a bit of downtime. Meta can, and should, be doing more to take these kinds of accounts down. But as long as its core product is an algorithmic feed that financially rewards content provoking extreme emotions, others will always appear in its place.
