{"id":592414,"date":"2026-05-19T12:12:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T12:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/592414\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T12:12:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T12:12:08","slug":"whos-behind-the-facebook-page-posting-hateful-ai-slop-about-the-uk-the-answer-might-lie-in-south-asia-niamh-mcintyre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/592414\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s behind the Facebook page posting hateful AI slop about the UK? The answer might lie in south Asia | Niamh McIntyre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scroll through any Facebook<\/a> feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you\u2019re likely to come across an account with a union jack profile picture and a vague, generic name like Britain Today.<\/p>\n

These accounts \u2013 and there are hundreds, possibly thousands of them \u2013 present themselves as the work of British patriots. In one typical, AI-generated video, a middle-aged man claims his local cafe \u201chas stopped serving pork, bacon and sausages just to avoid offending people\u201d. Another post from the same account includes a sepia-tinted set of images of Victorian London, mourning a time when the city \u201cwas English, first-world and beautiful\u201d. Alongside this type of reactionary nostalgia, it\u2019s not unusual to see memes that call Islam a \u201ccancer\u201d, decry Muslims praying in public as an \u201cinvasion of the west\u201d or promote the \u201cgreat replacement theory\u201d<\/a> (which claims that white populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants).<\/p>\n

For the past seven months, I have been investigating who is really behind pages like these. The answer, it turns out, is often young, entrepreneurial men from south Asia. They tend to have zero interest in UK politics, but the content they create often boosts far-right talking points in Britain and contributes to the increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and British Muslims. They\u2019re part of a booming cottage industry producing commercial AI slop.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s notoriously difficult to determine the extent to which people are influenced by what they see online. But after months of trawling through these Facebook pages, it\u2019s hard not to feel that they have a poisonous effect: look at the comments beneath these videos and you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

The financial incentives for creating this kind of content are huge, particularly for creators in the global south. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism<\/a>, we looked in detail at two very successful \u201csloperations\u201d targeting British audiences from Pakistan<\/a> and Sri Lanka<\/a>. They make money from the online ads that Meta places next to high-performing content. Meta shares a proportion of the ad revenue with the creators and also makes direct payments to creators to reward posts that receive a lot of engagement.<\/p>\n

Once you hone your algorithmic rage bait, there\u2019s 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 (\u00a31,119) 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 weren\u2019t able to verify these figures, but both men were certainly making many times the average income in their countries.<\/p>\n

Their success represents the seductive promise of \u201cpassive income\u201d culture, a pervasive modern gospel that says you should quit your job and make easy money online. The 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.<\/p>\n

Rightwing propaganda and Islamophobia<\/a> are, of course, not new. But two key structural factors have made it particularly pervasive on social media.<\/p>\n

First, the wide availability of generative AI tools. These are used at every stage of the content creation process: to brainstorm ideas, to write captions and, most importantly, to 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\u2019s Facebook course, he told his students that AI-generated videos can help political content go viral up to 10 times faster.<\/p>\n

Second is Meta\u2019s retreat from content moderation. Over the past couple of years, the major social platforms have made mass redundancies<\/a> on the trust and safety teams that monitored and took down harmful content. This was partly motivated by pressure<\/a> from the Trump administration, which believed that platforms had engaged in heavy-handed censorship of content during the Biden presidency.<\/p>\n

Social media companies justify the moderation job cuts<\/a> by pointing to their use of AI<\/a> to find harmful content more efficiently. But our reporting shows there is masses of deeply offensive content on there which anyone could find in a few minutes, if they bothered to look.<\/p>\n

After we spoke to the Pakistani creator, he said it was a \u201cgood thing\u201d we had informed him about the nature of his posts and he deleted many of them. Sooriyapura told us that he did not encourage his students to \u201cspread violence\u201d and that he just educates \u201cpeople on Facebook monetisation and audience-targeting\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Pakistani creator didn\u2019t cover his tracks particularly well. It took me a couple of hours and a little help from Osint Industries<\/a>, 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\u2019an. These are actions that Meta easily could 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?<\/p>\n

When we contacted Meta<\/a> in both these cases, it took down many of their pages and sent a one-line statement: \u201cWe have clear community standards that prohibit hate speech, harassment, harmful misinformation and inauthentic behaviour and we have removed these accounts for violating our policies.\u201d I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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 that provokes extreme emotions, others will always appear in its place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scroll through any Facebook feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you\u2019re likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-592414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}