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17-05-2026
LONDON: The “Great British People” Facebook page, which purports to be from Yorkshire, has had 1.3 million views for its latest video of an elderly white British man crying about his pension. Other videos show reporters discussing “the overwhelming scale of mass immigration” and asking viewers if they miss “the Britain we used to know” but it is not clear whether the creator of the videos knows the UK at all; the account is really run by someone based in Sri Lanka.
It is one of dozens of interconnected Facebook and Instagram accounts identified by BBC Panorama and the Top Comment podcast, which create and share anti-immigration AI-generated posts about the UK to large audiences but the creators are often located hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Several are from Sri Lanka, the US and elsewhere in Europe, while others are in Vietnam and the Maldives, or linked to Iran and the UAE, according to information from Facebook’s transparency tools, interviews with the content creators and other tell-tale signs on social media such as spelling and accounts they follow.
One expert told the BBC that research shows people are worse at detecting AI fakes than they think, and the more AI content they see, the more likely they are to distrust authentic material.
London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan who has commissioned research into AI-generated images showing the capital in decline, which he says harm the city’s reputation abroad, said while some of the people behind the accounts are motivated merely by money, others are backed by hostile states such as Russia and Iran.
It is difficult to verify claims of direct state involvement, but a handful of the accounts do share posts sympathetic towards the Russian and Iranian governments. The owners of the accounts did not respond to the BBC’s attempts to contact them.
Several accounts have repurposed their pages, seemingly to increase engagement, switching from topics such as “Make America Great Again” and “Life in the USA” to using AI to push anti-immigration narratives. Some of them have also occasionally experimented with content more sympathetic to migrants.
States and other groups are attempting to manipulate public opinion with Fake AI accounts such as these, according to Prof Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who described them as “new evolution of influence operations”.
It is easy for AI fakers living overseas to pose as British nationals online, he said, because it is relatively cheap to buy social media accounts originally set up in the UK. The accounts have been racking up hundreds of thousands of views with AI-generated videos of fake scenes such as the House of Commons filled with men in traditional Arab clothing imposing Sharia law. Others feature fake interviews with women in hijabs discussing how the UK needs to be more Islamic.
The image of the UK these videos create can be contradictory. In some widely shared content, this decline is associated with Muslim immigration, but at the same time several videos from the same creators present Islamic countries as being idyllic in comparison.
We spoke to two people who said they were behind an account with more than 20 million views showing content like this. The account shows AI-generated videos from the point of view of people walking through a series of British cities in 2050.
Liverpool, London, Birmingham and unnamed places in England are depicted as dirty and full of rubbish with people dressed in traditional Islamic clothing and hijabs lining the streets. Stalls have “Halal” written on them and there’s bunting featuring what looks like Arabic script. There are also fires and chaos.
Foreign cities such as New York and Washington DC, as well as some European capitals, are also portrayed in a similar light. (BBC)
