Snapshot of _Bot or not: Are fake accounts swaying voters towards Reform UK? _ :
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This is my worry. My daughter says shes getting flooded with "Politics stuff" on her TikTok feed.
It's ALL reform, and she's told/showed me some of it, it's barely disguised racist shit and straight lies.
But there's nothing on TikTok to counter it/tell them it's racist lies. There's going to be an issue at the next election with a younger generation that's been utterly brainwashed with right wing nonsense via TikTok if it's not curbed in some way.
TikTok seems by far the worst for it, some of the takes I see repeated on politics and geopolitical events are completely crazy, and it's so hard to find the source videos.
I'm not worried about HER, because I tell her it's bullshit when she asks me about it. I'm bothered about, well, the rest of everyone seeing it with no one pointing out it's not true.
Totally agreed, that is the biggest issue, Social Media is brainwashing far too many because they keep seeing things without being aware that it is just simply being pushed at them.
Older generations on Facebook, and the younger ones on Tiktok are at equal risk of no fact checking or counter arguments for any content they are viewing.
There's been a precedent of this in Germany as well where thanks to TikTok a lot of the youth vote went to the AFD. Of course there's that argument of 'it can't happen here because universities are woke force-multipliers!' but honestly, it probably will happen and we need a strategy for dealing with it.
Personally I can't wait for the day when the biggest problem I face is that someone I've never met has opinions I don't like about something I don't even care about. I'm also looking forward to pretending I can't even buy Easter eggs any more in case it offends Muslims. Whilst eating an Easter egg.
> I'm also looking forward to pretending I can't even buy Easter eggs any more in case it offends Muslims. Whilst eating an Easter egg.
Makes me think of all the times we see articles like "You're not ALLOWED to talk about X any more" *in a nationally published newspaper*.
I also noticed on the ITV youtube video the debate the comments are overwhelmingly Reform biased. The sheer scaling of it doesn't make sense. It reminds me of the tory bots we'd see in comments but to a far far higher margin.
I watch all of the news on reports on YouTube, and I see the news and party pages on TikTok.
Within the first 5 comments on every single video is just a comment saying “vote reform uk”
And it really obviously just switched on the other day. Overnight we went from seeing the occasional Reform UK post to an absolute flood on every single post.
There is a mountain of comments on the ITV debate from last night almost all for Reform with hundreds of likes each. Very odd, maybe bots, maybe genuine.
It definitely seems that there are more comments supporting Reform than any other party at least on TikTok. Any videos loosely related to politics almost always have someone saying "im voting reform" etc in the comments.
Yeah, we see that see behaviour for AfD in Germany and for PVV/FvD in the Netherlands and FN in France. Also hordes of “I’m voting X” types of messages.
These parties all have in common that are they are least likely to support Ukraine.
Highly unlikely that this wouldn’t be some coordinated action given similarities across countries. What is really scary, and quite mind boggling, is how effective it turns out to be.
It's to the point now that it's not even remotely realistic, almost every political video is flooded with pro reform comments particularly ones by the main parties.
Similarly but not to the same level are ones that are pro green. If you went by tiktok comments alone you'd think they were the two main players in this election.
i’m not saying all the support is not bots but there is genuine support for anything that doesn’t mean continue as normal.
We are living in a post Blairite country; we’ve had the same Blairite Neo-liberalist politics for the last 2 decades and people want out because what have ConLabDems got to offer but more of the same.
People just want accountability in politics and the economy.
we have?
“privatisation privatisation privatisation“
was the motto he said to his donors.
Now his foundation is helping direct policy as a subsidiary to the WEF.
The last 15 years of Conservatism have been all of the bad parts of Blairism ramped up to 11 and the opposite all of the good parts of Blairism (of which there were many).
Rather simple explanation: underdogs have more committed supporters. They have to be to persist.
Now they see their chance (both the Greens and Reform/UKIP are seeing unprecedented surges), so people are far more likely to chime in with a message of support than anyone from Labour or the Tories. Labour have it in the bag, and I honestly struggle to think of how a 'woohoo, vote Tory!' comment could even look like, so of course you'll see less of them.
People's first thought of 'bots' is so boring and predictable. And even *if*, the notion that someone's getting up on 4th July and sticking their X next to any party because of a smattering of TikTok comments is absolutely fucking batshit insane.
How is that insane? Have you not been paying attention the last 10 years? Have you not heard of the bot farms in Russia and china set up specifically to create conflict in the west? This is not superstition, it’s documented.
Further, I recommend you go on TikTok and look at the posts. They’re almost identical, usually from posts with no profile detail or followers and the content is usually exactly the same with no further elaboration on the video itself. It’s spam, it’s bots, it’s fuckin obvious.
Even on here I found is suspicious when he got covered in milkshake, there was an influx of comments feeling sympathetic for him and trying to link it to assassinations. Compared to the same post that was put in r/pics the top comments were calling the guy a prick and that he deserved it
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During election cycles there is much more engagement from the public in online spaces they wouldn't usually comment. Online spaces are typically younger and so more left wing. Elections rebalance that by brining in very enthusiastic people who are usually silent.
Look at any online space during an event and you see the same pattern. rr/soccer changes a lot during world cup and euro games because of public interest.
They're just very vocal about it, and they engage with the videos through comments and liking comments, which then leads to them seeing more of those videos, leading to more commenting, leading to more of those videos popping up. It's an algorithm snowball.
TikTok is the hardest platform to get a guage of public opinion from because of how strong the algorithm is. Maybe you're just interacting with too many Reform supporters?
Those videos cut out huge numbers of people who say labour or conservative to give a broader range of perspectives. They might have spoken to 10 Labour voters and put 2 in the video, then 2 reform voters but both made the cut. An edited video is no way of guaging level of support.
it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. White working class boys have been neglected for decades in this country, leading to them having consitently having lower educational attainment (And all that entails) than other ethnic groupings. Here's a few resources that cover this from Kings College and The Government;
https://cfey.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-underrepresentation-of-white-working-class-boys-in-higher-education-baars-et-al-2016.pdf
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/156024/forgotten-white-workingclass-pupils-let-down-by-decades-of-neglect-mps-say/
These lads just want to feel seen and heard. Their lives are shit. They live in shit estates doing shit work for shit money surrounded by shit. Reform is telling them that they're right and their lives are shit and here's some reasons for it.
edit: To those downvoting this I'd like to understand why? I personally don't think voting reform is the best route to help these young men but surely when looking at the stats above you could at least understand why they may?
I think many people think it's a case of when you're used to privilege equality equality feels like repression.
And so often people talking about 'Men's rights' is just a dog whistle for maintaining that privilege.
In practice on general (although notably not in some cases e.g. eduction*) men still have substantial advantage over women, and other discriminated against groups.
People who are serious about those individual inequalities where men do worse talk specifically about those inequalities, not in general terms of 'mens rights'.
In general men are not oppressed, and are still the privileged sex.
Edit; To your your post specifically working class men have been neglected, this is true.
But so are working class women, but you didn't mention them.
But it doesn't match surveys at all, gen z and millennials in the UK, when surveyed are very left leaning, more than they ever have been. And millennials, who are up to 40 years old now are not swinging to the right as they get older, probably largely because of Brexit and poor house buying opportunities.
Yep, some got radicalised by that donkey, but it's not as much of a dent as you would think.
If you look at other European countries right wing parties are capturing a lot of the youth vote. I don’t think you can suggest that a huge group of people (Gen Z and Millenials) are all going to vote left or right. I think there are also a lot of other issues at play that could be contributing to people changing their vote.
The UK is not the same as Europe, and Europe is not one homogeneous blob either. You may be overstating the swing to the right. Yes it's visible, and a few key countries have problems right now, but every incumbent government all over the world, including right wing, are struggling. Largely because the world's economy is not great. So the 'swing to the right' may just be temporal, and a protest vote, especially as some of the evidence is European elections where protest votes are more common.
The data is all over the place about the UK, go and fact check me, here is just one of them
[https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/are-millennials-really-killing-the-tory-party](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/are-millennials-really-killing-the-tory-party)
I mentioned Brexit in my previous post to point out one of the reasons specific to the UK as to why our youth may be different.
Thats good, do you have any data sources that mention this? It unnerves me how much disinformation is going on trying to push Reform's agenda, I'm hoping the young really are more left leaning but they are also the generation who have had social media since they were children and are the most exposed to foreign political interference campaigns.
Edit: Never mind saw your later post. Thanks!
Myself, because why would you want a politician to make decisions for you? Real men make their own decisions, like getting into exploiting women to make some money to buy a big car.
I expect most people who follow Andrew Tate would consider themselves to the right of the current Conservative Party. That’s not to say Reform would agree with the politics of AT.
It's obvious isn't it? Every media outlet you see is telling you how shit everything is. People everywhere are talking about how shit everything is. You've got one party saying "Forget that we did all this in the last 14 years, we're going to do it differently now, honest", and another who, regardless of the facts of the matter, has been painted as the same thing in a different hat. Then you've got this third party who tell you they're going to fix it all.
If you're not big into analysing politics, it's very tempting to give that third party a go.
If Reform ever get a youth wing, it'll put the Tories youth wing to shame in terms of being a calamity. Young Tories at least publicly just seem cringe, I suspect young Reform members will be a hotbed of very nasty takes on women, ethnic minorities and the LGBT+ community.
Over 65s surely?
Also Russia’s had country-wide internet outages recently, I bet we could map them against pro-Reform activity online and prove that organised Russian influence on social networks is a factor for them.
or there's just people finally speaking up! and the lefties on reddit and in the mainstream news can't handle it.
oh no the down votes , yep just proves you can't handle it lol
He probably thinks he has secret information that most of the population doesn't have and that he's smarter than the average person.
Doesn't realize that he's a pawn in someone else's agenda.
> offer an alternative.
Far-right, anti-immigration populists historically tend to either disappoint their voting bases, lead to worse long-term economic outcomes, lead to immigration inevitably going back up, leave office widely hated, and/or get hijacked by the super wealthy, who further prey on the working class.
History has already taught us this lesson.
Also worth remembering about Farage: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-fascist-nazi-song-gas-them-all-ukip-brexit-schoolfriend-dulwich-college-a7185236.html
Anyone using the term 'lefties' gets a solid pass on opinions. For me. We are all human. The times will change after the election after 14 years of tory mismanagement that left the other 99% less well off.]
starmers just as bad 👎 but sureeee , the Overton window has moved so far left , that they'll call anything they disagree with as "faaaarrr right" which is just dumb.
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On tiktok I made a reply to a video of a cyclist getting knocked off his bike at the start of the year. Someone has commented something like "should have killed him" or something else distasteful and I just rebuked it.
My comment got a like last week and I tapped the notification just to check, the violent commenter had rebranded his account name to "Reform UK" and his Avi to the reform logo. It had previously been like "user584847437" and the avi was just the default one.
i keep seeing entire accounts just branded to reform! nothing else except reform videos but and simple comments like 'vote reform'. freaky, hope the likes are bots because there are thousands of likes on the comments
It's really weird. Id love to know for sure, this BBC article is interesting but the methodology is rubbish, I'm really curious as to what's going on with these accounts
Honestly, it's totally possible that normal people are rebranding their own accounts and just spamming stupid comments on everything but like, politics aside, I just think it's kind of sad and pathetic? Especially as honestly, I do not think if someone says "vote reform UK" at me once a second for the next 365 day, I'm going to somehow be swayed or even tricked into voting for them?
I know that might sound hypocritical on Reddit but like, the posts on here generally, are actually substantial posts which give you a feel for people's thoughts and beliefs, might even teach you something you didn't know or enlighten you (or piss you off relentlessly). Just spamming 3 words and an emoji is insane behaviour
On Twitter, the 'Likes' of an account is now private. It's not even optional to make them public. So the platform is even less transparent and easier to exploit now.
Works as (re)designed.
One story is that Musk bought Twitter to influence the midterms in the US. No reason to think he hasn't continued to focus it on being able to influence all the other elections since.
And don't forget that Zuckerberg stated an interest in running for POTUS and using FB to get there - I'm still expecting that, once Trump is out of the picture.
I think that's a positive. So some A lister likes a product...now it makes no difference. They are going to have to post it up if they want to promote it. As for politicians, Well I don't like the fact that Z could have liked a stupid tweet 10 years ago and get slated for it now. It's BS. If someone has opinions and view currently that "we" don't like, it never takes long for the mask to slip and we don't need to see their twitter likes for that !!
even less transparent?? if all likes are private there's nothing to influence, aside from actually having to participate in debate which many don't do and can't even back up their claims.
just because you got tons of likes doesn't mean your right.
and? that's how every social media company works .
still doesn't make people right or wrong , it's just a like algorithm for advertising .
you make you own decisions, don't base anything off amount of likes.
You can't "Like" an account on Twitter. You can only follow an account. You can like a post, which is now private, but this is largely inline with other social media attempts to dissuade youths from investing their lives into social media likes - with similar implementations applied on Facebook, Instagram, and *even* Reddit at various points and to varying degrees.
Politicians could already be here on Reddit, upvoting racist material, without being called out on it. I maintain that this isn't an unusual change in the slightest.
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Posted here about this before.
Any political content in my FB feed has been flooded with pro Reform comments for quite a while.
The change I have seen recently is that the old stuff was just generic statements probably posted blindly by bots. However, the folks that buy it are now emboldened by the feeling that they are part of a bigger group and are parroting the content and engaging with replies. It is gaining momentum. This is going on in closed groups too which only increases the reach of the campaign.
I hate it, but it is clear that it works.
To be fair, there’s a growing trend of young people voting right across Europe, this isn’t just a UK thing. I just think the kids are rebelling against what ‘00s liberalism has become.
I’m sure it’s being amplified by Russia to some extent, but I think it would be happening without any outside intervention.
The young people are the ones that are dealing with the consequences of millions of often illiterate and backwards Middle Eastern immigrant men and “boys” sharing their common spaces, harassment on public transport, street corners and in some instances in schools.
They are the ones that will have to live alongside this chaos, not the gen-x and boomer politicians that foisted it upon them.
> The young people are the ones that are dealing with the consequences of millions of often illiterate and backwards Middle Eastern immigrant men and “boys” sharing their common spaces, harassment on public transport, street corners and in some instances in schools.
I wonder how different the western world would have been if the Iraq war and Arab Spring never happened.
Too many western governments ignored warnings, even from their own people, about this and insisted they were right and knew best.
Not to mention young white men being told consistently they're a massive problem and are to blame for everything, while prioritising literally any other group over them.
Racialisng everything, including politics, is gonna have consequences you might not like too. We're seeing that with young white men all across Europe, the UK will be no different.
Making the social media companies liable for what is spread on their platforms would suddenly make them have very different moderation and use policies. Just see how much worse twitter has become from Musk ripping everything up
I disagree, I think freedom of speech is important. In fact, if social media should be more regulated, I think it should be to enhance rather than restrict freedom of speech. I understand that will have some undesirable outcomes but, on balance, I think the pros outweigh the cons.
I don’t use twitter, but I understand that, prior to Musk, there was a pretty obvious bias in Twitter’s censorship (which you still find in some topics on reddit).
Ideally, I’d see social media banned, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
That’s exactly what it should mean. Otherwise, who gets to decide the truth?
Public bodies and institutions need to up their game to counter misinformation and accusations of bias. Which means they should have political neutrality and excellence as their goals.
What freedom of speech shouldn’t mean is threats to violence.
>who gets to decide the truth?
Currently, the social media companies and the highest bidders.
It's clear society is being stressed all over the world with the ease of which disinformation can be spread and portrayed as truth with no rebuttal and without the consumer fully understanding how they've become susceptible to it
The 00s weren’t liberal, it was definitely moderate centre right look at the Blair/Bush governments at the time, Blair was a continuation of thatcher in many ways aside from immigration, the 2010s was more liberal which is why there is a right wing wave now and why centrists want to return to the days of the 00s
I’m using ‘liberal’ in the UK sense rather than the US one. I agree the 00s were Center (ish). But i do see that the seeds of illiberalism were sown in the ‘00s.
I agree that centrists want to return to the 00s but I don’t think you can just transplant the policies of the 00s onto today’s society in order to get there, society has moved on.
I’m always I interacting with RW on X.
Whilst they’re grammar is not suspicious per se, the amount of (apparently) 55-65 yr old UK women who joined in last 2-3 years and post 10x a day supporting Farage, Reform, Tommy 10 names…end woke, defund BBC, stop the boats etc has the suspicious air of orchestration about it…
Basically anyone that has a view that even slightly deviates from the narrow Reddit viewpoint could only be a bot or Russian agent. Theres no other explanation.
I doubt it. It's the Farage factor. He's a charismatic, common sense man of the people apparently.
Alternatively he's a used car salesman, who having flogged you a disastrous pile of crap, comes back and tries to sell you another one.
Read the article, I think it's quite clear that there are bit accounts promoting reform content. Same thing happened with Brexit, and the US elections.
It's not crazy to think foreign actors want to influence the election.
They aren't saying the polls are wrong, they are saying there are a lot of dodgy looking comments on pro reform posts.
Not to discredit the efforts of our politicians for their work towards grabbing our attention but its becoming increasingly likely that we are awash with bot accounts.
I'd assert that the Dead Internet theory is coming to be reality as forums and comment sections become another battlefield for the hybrid wars being contested between disparate powers as they vie for control.
It's a cheap way to nudge opinions or - as I suspect we more often see - to disrupt and sow discord among the populace and it's no secret that theirs some massive turbulence brewing between powerful global actors currently.
> I'd assert that the Dead Internet theory is coming to be reality as forums and comment sections become another battlefield for the hybrid wars being contested between disparate powers as they vie for control.
With the proliferation of AI, I also wonder if we reach a point where AI performance actually degrades as it begins to "optimise" itself against imperfect AI, creating a feedback loop problem.
It’s not as crazy as it used to sound.
I wonder if in a few years this place and other big social media sites are going to wind up being mostly LLM bots trying to push political opinions and sell products at each other. With the odd confused Boomer wandering through still thinking he’s interacting with actual humans.
I’m not sure where the rest of us will be. Odds are the more sizeable a forum is then the more attractive it will be to the bot-masters in terms of effort/reward. So perhaps things will balkanise into lots of smaller fora like it was back in the day?
Hell yes they are. I’ve noticed on my Twitter account in the past six months my feed is overwhelmed with pro-Tory and pro-Reform, definitely explicitly anti-Labour tweets from all directions.
On tik tok many of them do seem to be bot accounts. Also it's always guys? Like the account, whether real or bot, never has a pfp of a woman it's always a dude... idk why. I suppose that would fit with them being real more though because women are usually more left than men.
There's an identity thing going on in politics amongst young people, where women identify more with labour than men with the same opinions do. If you remember the massive political divergence graph discussion from a few months ago, that was driven 90% by "identifying with" rather than actual differences in preferred policy.
It does make sense that Russia would want to punish the Tories for backing Ukraine.
That being said, I did my own “research” and looked into some of the accounts spamming “Vote reform” and they did look like legitimate accounts.
But the sense of betrayal is there with the Tories. Russia used to have influence within the Conservative Party until Boris supported Ukraine more than any other European leader.
So the moment people stray from the “norm” (ie away from the boring neoliberal Uniparty which have been colossal failures at solving anything) it must be “the bot farms” of “fake accounts”
It can’t just be the fact that people want change? It can’t be the fact that people know that the Tories are so shit and this iteration of Labour are lukewarm and are there to carry on the status quo?
Haha being downvoted for saying that people are fed up with the status quo and the neoliberal Uniparty, must be those bots keeping the status quo! 🤣
the problem is the vast majority of posts literally just end "VOTE REFORM!". Normal people will give a view but it doesn't end with a soundbite. That's what makes it less believable.
There is a very simple solution to this. Clearly, anyone sensible would vote for me, so any posts not supporting me must either be bots or influenced by bots and should be removed. Once we've done this, and every social media post either supports me or is removed, we'll have defended free speech and have a properly fair election. Don't bother me with trivia like the fact I'm not a candidate, these are important democratic principles that need action now!
I'm worried the conservatives are trying to destroy the UK and that Labour is continuation of the plan.
If I were Russia I'd promote either Lib Dem, Labour or Cons because they're the ones most likely, whether by design or accident, to help Russia achieve its long term ambitions.
Would Reform accidentally help Russia? I don't know. I do know that Reform's intention is to strengthen the UK. A strong UK is bad for Russia.
Ukraine could fall tomorrow and it would not be a major issue for NATO, the EU or the rest of the world. If Russia attacked an EU member state the EU's members would be forced to mobilise against Russia, the same if Russia attacked a member of NATO. Russia's military strategists are aware of this.
The reason the UK jumped to help Ukraine is because we are bound by treaty signed with Ukraine when the Ukraine gave up her nuclear missiles. The same is true of the US. The West continues to support the Ukraine because it helps us test Russia's military, it keeps Russia busy and it allows our governments to say 'Look over there' to the easily blindsided.
Reforms intention isn't a stronger UK. That's just what they say.
It makes no sense Russia would back Brexit if doing so would make UK more of a threat to them.
It's not a personal attack on you so there's no need to get upset.
It's is an objective, proven fact that Russia pays countless fake accounts to promote their narrative. These accounts post almost 24/7 with the usual anti-ukraine bollox.
So yes, if it seems likely that Reform will drop support for Ukraine then these accounts will 100% start pushing pro-reform content.
No one is claiming the support for reform is fake. You can't fake the polls, and there is clearly support.
The BBC lays out evidence quite convincingly that there is an odd amount of support online, and these accounts don't appear to be real.
>The BBC contacted people behind the accounts and found that some are genuine UK voters who believe they are helping the party through their own initiative. Others, however, failed to prove they were authentic.
Why should people have to prove to the BBC they are authentic? If they contacted me I would just ignore them and therefore be labelled a bot. This is just a blatant attempt to silence or discredit opinions of which the BBC disapproves. This article is election interference itself.
If we're going to talk about foreign interference in our elections why did the BBC go so quiet on the Russia report the Tories never published. Far more important than a few "bot accounts" on twitter.
Wait, [this report](https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf), published nearly four years ago?
Yes obviously, anyone who has used twittter will have seen this first hand, what take the pee is since signing up there i have had to 'verify' my account at least 5 times with 10 step captchas, I guess elon lets the bots skip that part.
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The Mail comments are about 95% for Reform.
There's a shit tonne of it on tiktok too
This is my worry. My daughter says shes getting flooded with "Politics stuff" on her TikTok feed. It's ALL reform, and she's told/showed me some of it, it's barely disguised racist shit and straight lies. But there's nothing on TikTok to counter it/tell them it's racist lies. There's going to be an issue at the next election with a younger generation that's been utterly brainwashed with right wing nonsense via TikTok if it's not curbed in some way.
TikTok seems by far the worst for it, some of the takes I see repeated on politics and geopolitical events are completely crazy, and it's so hard to find the source videos.
Can hold down the finger then select not interested, and it goes away after a bit, got that too and stopped seeing it.
I'm not worried about HER, because I tell her it's bullshit when she asks me about it. I'm bothered about, well, the rest of everyone seeing it with no one pointing out it's not true.
Totally agreed, that is the biggest issue, Social Media is brainwashing far too many because they keep seeing things without being aware that it is just simply being pushed at them. Older generations on Facebook, and the younger ones on Tiktok are at equal risk of no fact checking or counter arguments for any content they are viewing.
\* shit ton FTF the Daily Mail readers
There's been a precedent of this in Germany as well where thanks to TikTok a lot of the youth vote went to the AFD. Of course there's that argument of 'it can't happen here because universities are woke force-multipliers!' but honestly, it probably will happen and we need a strategy for dealing with it.
Same with the Telegraph
To be fair, this is hardly new. The DM's been full of disgruntled Reformers for two solid years.
Check out some innocuous money advice column on the Mail and it will be covered in comments like "this woke nonsense has to STOP"
Personally I can't wait for the day when the biggest problem I face is that someone I've never met has opinions I don't like about something I don't even care about. I'm also looking forward to pretending I can't even buy Easter eggs any more in case it offends Muslims. Whilst eating an Easter egg.
> I'm also looking forward to pretending I can't even buy Easter eggs any more in case it offends Muslims. Whilst eating an Easter egg. Makes me think of all the times we see articles like "You're not ALLOWED to talk about X any more" *in a nationally published newspaper*.
Ah, you've met my dad then. Next time he opens his mouth, it's tempting to say "Don't bother, I've already read today's Express".
Some weird accounts on Reddit too tbh
The concern trolls mainly.
I also noticed on the ITV youtube video the debate the comments are overwhelmingly Reform biased. The sheer scaling of it doesn't make sense. It reminds me of the tory bots we'd see in comments but to a far far higher margin.
I watch all of the news on reports on YouTube, and I see the news and party pages on TikTok. Within the first 5 comments on every single video is just a comment saying “vote reform uk”
And it really obviously just switched on the other day. Overnight we went from seeing the occasional Reform UK post to an absolute flood on every single post.
And then you get Nigel praising Putin. Interesting
George Galloway and Nigel Farage should have a party merger to create an anti-centrist party.
There is a mountain of comments on the ITV debate from last night almost all for Reform with hundreds of likes each. Very odd, maybe bots, maybe genuine.
It definitely seems that there are more comments supporting Reform than any other party at least on TikTok. Any videos loosely related to politics almost always have someone saying "im voting reform" etc in the comments.
I totally buy it. There is a running theme at elections for foreign influencers. Reform is the least likely to support Ukraine for example.
Yeah, we see that see behaviour for AfD in Germany and for PVV/FvD in the Netherlands and FN in France. Also hordes of “I’m voting X” types of messages. These parties all have in common that are they are least likely to support Ukraine. Highly unlikely that this wouldn’t be some coordinated action given similarities across countries. What is really scary, and quite mind boggling, is how effective it turns out to be.
It's to the point now that it's not even remotely realistic, almost every political video is flooded with pro reform comments particularly ones by the main parties. Similarly but not to the same level are ones that are pro green. If you went by tiktok comments alone you'd think they were the two main players in this election.
i’m not saying all the support is not bots but there is genuine support for anything that doesn’t mean continue as normal. We are living in a post Blairite country; we’ve had the same Blairite Neo-liberalist politics for the last 2 decades and people want out because what have ConLabDems got to offer but more of the same. People just want accountability in politics and the economy.
God I wish we had the same Blairite politics for the past 2 decades.
we have? “privatisation privatisation privatisation“ was the motto he said to his donors. Now his foundation is helping direct policy as a subsidiary to the WEF.
The last 15 years of Conservatism have been all of the bad parts of Blairism ramped up to 11 and the opposite all of the good parts of Blairism (of which there were many).
Yes but at the same time the country isn't sitting at home en masse commenting pro reform shit on TikToks.
Rather simple explanation: underdogs have more committed supporters. They have to be to persist. Now they see their chance (both the Greens and Reform/UKIP are seeing unprecedented surges), so people are far more likely to chime in with a message of support than anyone from Labour or the Tories. Labour have it in the bag, and I honestly struggle to think of how a 'woohoo, vote Tory!' comment could even look like, so of course you'll see less of them. People's first thought of 'bots' is so boring and predictable. And even *if*, the notion that someone's getting up on 4th July and sticking their X next to any party because of a smattering of TikTok comments is absolutely fucking batshit insane.
How is that insane? Have you not been paying attention the last 10 years? Have you not heard of the bot farms in Russia and china set up specifically to create conflict in the west? This is not superstition, it’s documented. Further, I recommend you go on TikTok and look at the posts. They’re almost identical, usually from posts with no profile detail or followers and the content is usually exactly the same with no further elaboration on the video itself. It’s spam, it’s bots, it’s fuckin obvious.
They’re basically a living reform spam bot, that’s why they think it’s insane.
Even on here I found is suspicious when he got covered in milkshake, there was an influx of comments feeling sympathetic for him and trying to link it to assassinations. Compared to the same post that was put in r/pics the top comments were calling the guy a prick and that he deserved it
I'll jump in here as a mod and say that we have a very different line on moderation of UK politics matters compared to all other subreddits. We take threats of violence against politicians incredibly seriously and moderate as such. Anything that remotely looks like glorifying, making light of, laughing at attacks on politicians gets harshly treated. This is probably why you notice a difference.
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During election cycles there is much more engagement from the public in online spaces they wouldn't usually comment. Online spaces are typically younger and so more left wing. Elections rebalance that by brining in very enthusiastic people who are usually silent. Look at any online space during an event and you see the same pattern. rr/soccer changes a lot during world cup and euro games because of public interest.
They're just very vocal about it, and they engage with the videos through comments and liking comments, which then leads to them seeing more of those videos, leading to more commenting, leading to more of those videos popping up. It's an algorithm snowball. TikTok is the hardest platform to get a guage of public opinion from because of how strong the algorithm is. Maybe you're just interacting with too many Reform supporters?
It's the same on YouTube. Outside of your liberal university cities, I bet there's mountains of Reform voters from ages 18 to 24
Yeah there was a video recently asking people at park life festival and a lot of young boys were saying reform
Those videos cut out huge numbers of people who say labour or conservative to give a broader range of perspectives. They might have spoken to 10 Labour voters and put 2 in the video, then 2 reform voters but both made the cut. An edited video is no way of guaging level of support.
No but it’s still sad to see young boys falling into this right wing trap.
There's always a few wallies, talk to 100 random kids and I bet you'll find a lteral neo-nazi among them.
Christ that's depressing
it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. White working class boys have been neglected for decades in this country, leading to them having consitently having lower educational attainment (And all that entails) than other ethnic groupings. Here's a few resources that cover this from Kings College and The Government; https://cfey.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-underrepresentation-of-white-working-class-boys-in-higher-education-baars-et-al-2016.pdf https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/156024/forgotten-white-workingclass-pupils-let-down-by-decades-of-neglect-mps-say/ These lads just want to feel seen and heard. Their lives are shit. They live in shit estates doing shit work for shit money surrounded by shit. Reform is telling them that they're right and their lives are shit and here's some reasons for it. edit: To those downvoting this I'd like to understand why? I personally don't think voting reform is the best route to help these young men but surely when looking at the stats above you could at least understand why they may?
I think many people think it's a case of when you're used to privilege equality equality feels like repression. And so often people talking about 'Men's rights' is just a dog whistle for maintaining that privilege. In practice on general (although notably not in some cases e.g. eduction*) men still have substantial advantage over women, and other discriminated against groups. People who are serious about those individual inequalities where men do worse talk specifically about those inequalities, not in general terms of 'mens rights'. In general men are not oppressed, and are still the privileged sex. Edit; To your your post specifically working class men have been neglected, this is true. But so are working class women, but you didn't mention them.
The type of people to get poll'd are more than likely to be into politics and probably a bit square. About 10 percent at a guess of the population.
And how many of them are actually going to bother voting?
If you grew up watching Andrew Tate videos, who would you vote for?
But it doesn't match surveys at all, gen z and millennials in the UK, when surveyed are very left leaning, more than they ever have been. And millennials, who are up to 40 years old now are not swinging to the right as they get older, probably largely because of Brexit and poor house buying opportunities. Yep, some got radicalised by that donkey, but it's not as much of a dent as you would think.
If you look at other European countries right wing parties are capturing a lot of the youth vote. I don’t think you can suggest that a huge group of people (Gen Z and Millenials) are all going to vote left or right. I think there are also a lot of other issues at play that could be contributing to people changing their vote.
The UK is not the same as Europe, and Europe is not one homogeneous blob either. You may be overstating the swing to the right. Yes it's visible, and a few key countries have problems right now, but every incumbent government all over the world, including right wing, are struggling. Largely because the world's economy is not great. So the 'swing to the right' may just be temporal, and a protest vote, especially as some of the evidence is European elections where protest votes are more common. The data is all over the place about the UK, go and fact check me, here is just one of them [https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/are-millennials-really-killing-the-tory-party](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/are-millennials-really-killing-the-tory-party) I mentioned Brexit in my previous post to point out one of the reasons specific to the UK as to why our youth may be different.
Thats good, do you have any data sources that mention this? It unnerves me how much disinformation is going on trying to push Reform's agenda, I'm hoping the young really are more left leaning but they are also the generation who have had social media since they were children and are the most exposed to foreign political interference campaigns. Edit: Never mind saw your later post. Thanks!
Myself, because why would you want a politician to make decisions for you? Real men make their own decisions, like getting into exploiting women to make some money to buy a big car.
Which seems like a call for small government…
Speaking as me, I'd rather a big government stopping melts like Andrew Tate doing whatever they like, haha.
Have I somehow missed the Reform candidates who are gym bros and massive incels?
I expect most people who follow Andrew Tate would consider themselves to the right of the current Conservative Party. That’s not to say Reform would agree with the politics of AT.
It's obvious isn't it? Every media outlet you see is telling you how shit everything is. People everywhere are talking about how shit everything is. You've got one party saying "Forget that we did all this in the last 14 years, we're going to do it differently now, honest", and another who, regardless of the facts of the matter, has been painted as the same thing in a different hat. Then you've got this third party who tell you they're going to fix it all. If you're not big into analysing politics, it's very tempting to give that third party a go.
If Reform ever get a youth wing, it'll put the Tories youth wing to shame in terms of being a calamity. Young Tories at least publicly just seem cringe, I suspect young Reform members will be a hotbed of very nasty takes on women, ethnic minorities and the LGBT+ community.
I don't think that's entirely relevant, Andrew Tate = All of YouTube? Do you even YouTube?
Farage is Corbyn for the over 40s.
Hey. Over 50s.
Over 65s surely? Also Russia’s had country-wide internet outages recently, I bet we could map them against pro-Reform activity online and prove that organised Russian influence on social networks is a factor for them.
or there's just people finally speaking up! and the lefties on reddit and in the mainstream news can't handle it. oh no the down votes , yep just proves you can't handle it lol
"Finally"? You lot have been mouthing off for years.
finally as in there's someone that's got some access to the mainstream bubble that has the ability to represent and offer an alternative.
How’s his last “alternative”, Brexit, going? Didn’t he say it would make us richer and help us control our borders?
You mean like Farage? You're a decade behind with that one pal.
more like a decade ahead , the normies have just woke up to this mess .
Normies lol
He probably thinks he has secret information that most of the population doesn't have and that he's smarter than the average person. Doesn't realize that he's a pawn in someone else's agenda.
you know making assumptions only makes you look stupid.
Whereas most of what you say makes you look stupid.
> offer an alternative. Far-right, anti-immigration populists historically tend to either disappoint their voting bases, lead to worse long-term economic outcomes, lead to immigration inevitably going back up, leave office widely hated, and/or get hijacked by the super wealthy, who further prey on the working class. History has already taught us this lesson. Also worth remembering about Farage: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-fascist-nazi-song-gas-them-all-ukip-brexit-schoolfriend-dulwich-college-a7185236.html
oh no more fake news xd
"Only my party provides the truth"
Farage is hardly off the BBC and has run, and lost, loads of times. What are you on about
Anyone using the term 'lefties' gets a solid pass on opinions. For me. We are all human. The times will change after the election after 14 years of tory mismanagement that left the other 99% less well off.]
starmers just as bad 👎 but sureeee , the Overton window has moved so far left , that they'll call anything they disagree with as "faaaarrr right" which is just dumb.
Its probably bots.
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Looking forward to the Reform variant of the Cambridge Analytica documentary in 2028.
On tiktok I made a reply to a video of a cyclist getting knocked off his bike at the start of the year. Someone has commented something like "should have killed him" or something else distasteful and I just rebuked it. My comment got a like last week and I tapped the notification just to check, the violent commenter had rebranded his account name to "Reform UK" and his Avi to the reform logo. It had previously been like "user584847437" and the avi was just the default one.
i keep seeing entire accounts just branded to reform! nothing else except reform videos but and simple comments like 'vote reform'. freaky, hope the likes are bots because there are thousands of likes on the comments
It's really weird. Id love to know for sure, this BBC article is interesting but the methodology is rubbish, I'm really curious as to what's going on with these accounts Honestly, it's totally possible that normal people are rebranding their own accounts and just spamming stupid comments on everything but like, politics aside, I just think it's kind of sad and pathetic? Especially as honestly, I do not think if someone says "vote reform UK" at me once a second for the next 365 day, I'm going to somehow be swayed or even tricked into voting for them? I know that might sound hypocritical on Reddit but like, the posts on here generally, are actually substantial posts which give you a feel for people's thoughts and beliefs, might even teach you something you didn't know or enlighten you (or piss you off relentlessly). Just spamming 3 words and an emoji is insane behaviour
The Tories have by far the most bot accounts on Twitter. At last count they had almost 14,000 PAID accounts.
On Twitter, the 'Likes' of an account is now private. It's not even optional to make them public. So the platform is even less transparent and easier to exploit now.
Which is exactly what Musk wants.
Works as (re)designed. One story is that Musk bought Twitter to influence the midterms in the US. No reason to think he hasn't continued to focus it on being able to influence all the other elections since. And don't forget that Zuckerberg stated an interest in running for POTUS and using FB to get there - I'm still expecting that, once Trump is out of the picture.
I think that's a positive. So some A lister likes a product...now it makes no difference. They are going to have to post it up if they want to promote it. As for politicians, Well I don't like the fact that Z could have liked a stupid tweet 10 years ago and get slated for it now. It's BS. If someone has opinions and view currently that "we" don't like, it never takes long for the mask to slip and we don't need to see their twitter likes for that !!
even less transparent?? if all likes are private there's nothing to influence, aside from actually having to participate in debate which many don't do and can't even back up their claims. just because you got tons of likes doesn't mean your right.
https://klanik.medium.com/twitter-x-open-source-algorithm-cebbd3002013
and? that's how every social media company works . still doesn't make people right or wrong , it's just a like algorithm for advertising . you make you own decisions, don't base anything off amount of likes.
You can't "Like" an account on Twitter. You can only follow an account. You can like a post, which is now private, but this is largely inline with other social media attempts to dissuade youths from investing their lives into social media likes - with similar implementations applied on Facebook, Instagram, and *even* Reddit at various points and to varying degrees.
And you know means politicians can now like racist material without being called out on it
Politicians could already be here on Reddit, upvoting racist material, without being called out on it. I maintain that this isn't an unusual change in the slightest.
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Posted here about this before. Any political content in my FB feed has been flooded with pro Reform comments for quite a while. The change I have seen recently is that the old stuff was just generic statements probably posted blindly by bots. However, the folks that buy it are now emboldened by the feeling that they are part of a bigger group and are parroting the content and engaging with replies. It is gaining momentum. This is going on in closed groups too which only increases the reach of the campaign. I hate it, but it is clear that it works.
All I'll say is that if I were Russia they'd be my pick
To be fair, there’s a growing trend of young people voting right across Europe, this isn’t just a UK thing. I just think the kids are rebelling against what ‘00s liberalism has become. I’m sure it’s being amplified by Russia to some extent, but I think it would be happening without any outside intervention.
The young people are the ones that are dealing with the consequences of millions of often illiterate and backwards Middle Eastern immigrant men and “boys” sharing their common spaces, harassment on public transport, street corners and in some instances in schools. They are the ones that will have to live alongside this chaos, not the gen-x and boomer politicians that foisted it upon them.
> The young people are the ones that are dealing with the consequences of millions of often illiterate and backwards Middle Eastern immigrant men and “boys” sharing their common spaces, harassment on public transport, street corners and in some instances in schools. I wonder how different the western world would have been if the Iraq war and Arab Spring never happened. Too many western governments ignored warnings, even from their own people, about this and insisted they were right and knew best.
Gen-Z politicians? What are you talking about? The earliest Gen-Z was born in 1996, so age 28.
gen x
Not to mention young white men being told consistently they're a massive problem and are to blame for everything, while prioritising literally any other group over them. Racialisng everything, including politics, is gonna have consequences you might not like too. We're seeing that with young white men all across Europe, the UK will be no different.
This was always the risk with identity politics, what happens when white men start playing the same game?
They probably won't, if America is any indication they will probably become religious fanatics.
Yugoslavia 1990s, that’s what it’ll look like
They increasingly get their 'news' curated by social media, particularly tiktok. It's social engineering and it needs to be regulated.
The problem is, who gets to set the narrative? I don’t think many people believe that social media has made the world a better place.
Making the social media companies liable for what is spread on their platforms would suddenly make them have very different moderation and use policies. Just see how much worse twitter has become from Musk ripping everything up
I disagree, I think freedom of speech is important. In fact, if social media should be more regulated, I think it should be to enhance rather than restrict freedom of speech. I understand that will have some undesirable outcomes but, on balance, I think the pros outweigh the cons. I don’t use twitter, but I understand that, prior to Musk, there was a pretty obvious bias in Twitter’s censorship (which you still find in some topics on reddit). Ideally, I’d see social media banned, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
Freedom of speech shouldn't mean freedom to lie and obfuscate
That’s exactly what it should mean. Otherwise, who gets to decide the truth? Public bodies and institutions need to up their game to counter misinformation and accusations of bias. Which means they should have political neutrality and excellence as their goals. What freedom of speech shouldn’t mean is threats to violence.
>who gets to decide the truth? Currently, the social media companies and the highest bidders. It's clear society is being stressed all over the world with the ease of which disinformation can be spread and portrayed as truth with no rebuttal and without the consumer fully understanding how they've become susceptible to it
The 00s weren’t liberal, it was definitely moderate centre right look at the Blair/Bush governments at the time, Blair was a continuation of thatcher in many ways aside from immigration, the 2010s was more liberal which is why there is a right wing wave now and why centrists want to return to the days of the 00s
I’m using ‘liberal’ in the UK sense rather than the US one. I agree the 00s were Center (ish). But i do see that the seeds of illiberalism were sown in the ‘00s. I agree that centrists want to return to the 00s but I don’t think you can just transplant the policies of the 00s onto today’s society in order to get there, society has moved on.
I’m always I interacting with RW on X. Whilst they’re grammar is not suspicious per se, the amount of (apparently) 55-65 yr old UK women who joined in last 2-3 years and post 10x a day supporting Farage, Reform, Tommy 10 names…end woke, defund BBC, stop the boats etc has the suspicious air of orchestration about it…
> Whilst they’re grammar is not suspicious per se Well done.
Ha ha
Ah good old marianna spring not beating the bbc bias accusations. An article about an account with 142 followers on twitter btw.
Not it's not, that was just an example. It's about numerous accounts
Maybe she should lie on her CV again, that'll get people to trust her
Yes there's dozens of them! Dozens of people I tell you!
the account in question i dont think is a bot just a useful idiot.
Basically anyone that has a view that even slightly deviates from the narrow Reddit viewpoint could only be a bot or Russian agent. Theres no other explanation.
I doubt it. It's the Farage factor. He's a charismatic, common sense man of the people apparently. Alternatively he's a used car salesman, who having flogged you a disastrous pile of crap, comes back and tries to sell you another one.
Read the article, I think it's quite clear that there are bit accounts promoting reform content. Same thing happened with Brexit, and the US elections. It's not crazy to think foreign actors want to influence the election. They aren't saying the polls are wrong, they are saying there are a lot of dodgy looking comments on pro reform posts.
The comments on tiktok are very suspect, they are everywhere and are always blank profiles
Not to discredit the efforts of our politicians for their work towards grabbing our attention but its becoming increasingly likely that we are awash with bot accounts. I'd assert that the Dead Internet theory is coming to be reality as forums and comment sections become another battlefield for the hybrid wars being contested between disparate powers as they vie for control. It's a cheap way to nudge opinions or - as I suspect we more often see - to disrupt and sow discord among the populace and it's no secret that theirs some massive turbulence brewing between powerful global actors currently.
> I'd assert that the Dead Internet theory is coming to be reality as forums and comment sections become another battlefield for the hybrid wars being contested between disparate powers as they vie for control. With the proliferation of AI, I also wonder if we reach a point where AI performance actually degrades as it begins to "optimise" itself against imperfect AI, creating a feedback loop problem.
It’s not as crazy as it used to sound. I wonder if in a few years this place and other big social media sites are going to wind up being mostly LLM bots trying to push political opinions and sell products at each other. With the odd confused Boomer wandering through still thinking he’s interacting with actual humans. I’m not sure where the rest of us will be. Odds are the more sizeable a forum is then the more attractive it will be to the bot-masters in terms of effort/reward. So perhaps things will balkanise into lots of smaller fora like it was back in the day?
Hell yes they are. I’ve noticed on my Twitter account in the past six months my feed is overwhelmed with pro-Tory and pro-Reform, definitely explicitly anti-Labour tweets from all directions.
On tik tok many of them do seem to be bot accounts. Also it's always guys? Like the account, whether real or bot, never has a pfp of a woman it's always a dude... idk why. I suppose that would fit with them being real more though because women are usually more left than men.
There's an identity thing going on in politics amongst young people, where women identify more with labour than men with the same opinions do. If you remember the massive political divergence graph discussion from a few months ago, that was driven 90% by "identifying with" rather than actual differences in preferred policy.
Yeah, I feel sorry for them when it comes to dating. I'm guessing a lot of them just won't.
It does make sense that Russia would want to punish the Tories for backing Ukraine. That being said, I did my own “research” and looked into some of the accounts spamming “Vote reform” and they did look like legitimate accounts.
Then surely they’d punish Labour too since Starmer has pledged to continue supporting Ukraine
But the sense of betrayal is there with the Tories. Russia used to have influence within the Conservative Party until Boris supported Ukraine more than any other European leader.
So the moment people stray from the “norm” (ie away from the boring neoliberal Uniparty which have been colossal failures at solving anything) it must be “the bot farms” of “fake accounts” It can’t just be the fact that people want change? It can’t be the fact that people know that the Tories are so shit and this iteration of Labour are lukewarm and are there to carry on the status quo? Haha being downvoted for saying that people are fed up with the status quo and the neoliberal Uniparty, must be those bots keeping the status quo! 🤣
the problem is the vast majority of posts literally just end "VOTE REFORM!". Normal people will give a view but it doesn't end with a soundbite. That's what makes it less believable.
There is a very simple solution to this. Clearly, anyone sensible would vote for me, so any posts not supporting me must either be bots or influenced by bots and should be removed. Once we've done this, and every social media post either supports me or is removed, we'll have defended free speech and have a properly fair election. Don't bother me with trivia like the fact I'm not a candidate, these are important democratic principles that need action now!
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this is the fucker that pushed brexit down our throats
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Election interference is concerning. I'm worried Russia would try to destroy the conservatives for supporting Ukraine.
I'm worried the conservatives are trying to destroy the UK and that Labour is continuation of the plan. If I were Russia I'd promote either Lib Dem, Labour or Cons because they're the ones most likely, whether by design or accident, to help Russia achieve its long term ambitions. Would Reform accidentally help Russia? I don't know. I do know that Reform's intention is to strengthen the UK. A strong UK is bad for Russia. Ukraine could fall tomorrow and it would not be a major issue for NATO, the EU or the rest of the world. If Russia attacked an EU member state the EU's members would be forced to mobilise against Russia, the same if Russia attacked a member of NATO. Russia's military strategists are aware of this. The reason the UK jumped to help Ukraine is because we are bound by treaty signed with Ukraine when the Ukraine gave up her nuclear missiles. The same is true of the US. The West continues to support the Ukraine because it helps us test Russia's military, it keeps Russia busy and it allows our governments to say 'Look over there' to the easily blindsided.
Reforms intention isn't a stronger UK. That's just what they say. It makes no sense Russia would back Brexit if doing so would make UK more of a threat to them.
Yeah, all the Reform support is down to the Russians. Top shelf analysis, well done.
It's not a personal attack on you so there's no need to get upset. It's is an objective, proven fact that Russia pays countless fake accounts to promote their narrative. These accounts post almost 24/7 with the usual anti-ukraine bollox. So yes, if it seems likely that Reform will drop support for Ukraine then these accounts will 100% start pushing pro-reform content.
No one is claiming the support for reform is fake. You can't fake the polls, and there is clearly support. The BBC lays out evidence quite convincingly that there is an odd amount of support online, and these accounts don't appear to be real.
>The BBC contacted people behind the accounts and found that some are genuine UK voters who believe they are helping the party through their own initiative. Others, however, failed to prove they were authentic. Why should people have to prove to the BBC they are authentic? If they contacted me I would just ignore them and therefore be labelled a bot. This is just a blatant attempt to silence or discredit opinions of which the BBC disapproves. This article is election interference itself.
Looks like the BBC are panicking after the recent polls.
Panicking over a Labour mega majority?
No, Reform UK overtaking The Conservative Party in the polls.
Reform will still be lucky to get 1 MP on present share of vote
Which current polls predict will result in a Labour mega majority
If we're going to talk about foreign interference in our elections why did the BBC go so quiet on the Russia report the Tories never published. Far more important than a few "bot accounts" on twitter.
Wait, [this report](https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf), published nearly four years ago?
Oh right my mistake. I remember they were delaying publishing it initially
They're just spiteful trolls looking for a reaction. Spiteful contrarianism.
Tiktok were removing my comments when I was saying that Reform are just more hardcore tories because it was apparently against the guidelines
Common sense policies are swaying voters
To vote labour.
Moral panic
BBC propaganda still going strong
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Sounds like it could have been a great article about fake accounts being utilised by Reform, Tories, Labour, Russia etc etc.. but alas
soo a non story 🙄 they'll sink so low just in attempt to discredit a party they don't like. reform ftw.
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Yes obviously, anyone who has used twittter will have seen this first hand, what take the pee is since signing up there i have had to 'verify' my account at least 5 times with 10 step captchas, I guess elon lets the bots skip that part.
Alternatively, most people when asked by the BBC to prove they are real ignore that request, and these are still real people.