Fact-Check Fails 1#: Peter Jukes
Byline co-founder attacks Reform party leader ahead of British election.
“Let him cast the first stone who did not believe in the Russian Army that passed through England in August, 1914, did not accept any tale of atrocity without direct proof, and never saw a plot, a traitor, or a spy where there was none.” - Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)
Introducing Fact-Check Fails (FCF), a new series documenting misadventures in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.
In a 1. July article, “A ‘Russia Hoax’ or Russian Hopes? How Putin’s Troll Farms are Boosting Nigel Farage’s Campaigns — Again”, Byline co-founder and Bellingcat pioneer1 Peter Jukes accuses Reform party leder Nigel Farage of being supported by the Kremlin in the now bygone British general election.
The accusation is based on a report by American news network ABC, claiming to have uncovered five fake Facebook pages operated from Nigeria, a common location for trolls hired by Russia.
The five Facebook accounts were named “Patriotic UK”, “British Patriots”, “Common Sense Britain”, “BritBlend” and “BeyondBorders UK”.
The three first accounts posted anti-immigrant and right-wing content, along with support for Reform. While BritBlend presented itself as a left-wing, pro-refugee organization, and BeyondBorders UK sound like one as well, but its political leanings isn’t stated.
All the accounts also made negative comments about Ukraine and urged Britain to stop funding.
Evidence for the accounts’ fakeness include their administrators being Nigerian and Facebook advertisements paid for in Nigerian currency, despite professing to be based in Britain.
The accounts also made similar, if not identical posts, around the same time and shared AI generated images.
At the time of writing all five Facebook pages have been pulled down, possibly by the trolls themselves. They held a meager 190,000 followers between them.
In his article and corresponding X thread, Jukes talks at length about how two of the five accounts “bigs up” Nigel Farage and former Tory MP Lee Anderson, but neglects to mention that at least one, likely two, left-wing accounts were part of the same network.
In another post Jukes acts like they are letting the mask slip, when the Russian accounts “can’t help” mention Ukraine. Although, given they have both right- and left-wing accounts attacking Ukraine, that is likely their main objective.
How many views the cluster of fake Facebook pages accumulated isn’t stated in either the ABC or Byline article.
However, a different Byline Times article places the number of views received by “a small group of X accounts engaging in bot-like behavior” at 150 million, citing a report by British NGO Global Witness, but given The Independent reported Nigel Farage’s videos alone have attained 39 billion views during the election, this renders the previous figure ridiculously small.
Only amounting to approximately 0.38% and even less of Farage’s and Reform UK’s total election footprint.
Jukes has already defended himself against criticism from Reform supporters, stating he never said the party conspired with the Kremlin.
Nonetheless, he never mentioned fake accounts boosting the opposite of Reform’s messaging, nor the comparatively small impact of the false accounts either.
In conclusion, ABC created a nuanced report about inauthentic social media profiles, which Jukes selectively interpreted to attack people he doesn’t like, that is a fact-check fail.
Peter Jukes was approached for comment, but did not respond.
Jukes coined the name of the now famous OSINT organization, Bellingcat. Source: Higgins, E. (2021) “We are Bellingcat”. Bloomsbury Publishing.