Who influences the influencers? This is one of the pressing questions about the coordination and management of the far-Right riots and assaults following the murder and mayhem at the Taylor Swift children’s dance event in Southport on July 29.
The question mirrors the one that troubled ancient Greece and Rome in their heyday – put pithily by the poet Juvenal: who guards the guardians?
Influencers, using a variety of social media platforms and open and closed channels, have urged thousands onto the streets from the North of England to Plymouth. The first focus has been on an obscure website Channel3Now, which first maliciously suggested that the three little girls in Southport had been murdered by an illegal Muslim migrant who had crossed the Channel last year.
This turned out to be wrong in every salient aspect. Nonetheless, the false rumour was retweeted before it was taken down by the originator. Riots ensued, leading to attacks on police, on mosques, attempted burnings of hotels housing asylum-seekers, the looting of jobs and the trashing of small businesses. The cry was “give us back our streets”, and “give us back Britain”. The “demonstrators” were encouraged online by shock influencers Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson – cover name for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, now being sought by police on a number of counts, including jumping bail.
Today the Russians play a long game... the influence op runs alongside cyber-attacks outsourced to third parties
The media effort has been well-funded and organised – quite an elaborate information operation was needed to get so many far-Right demos in different places. So were there foreign government influences behind these vicious influencers and super-influencers?
Unlike previous cases, the rash of false media influencing in 2016 in both the Brexit campaign and the US general election benefiting Donald Trump, the clues aren’t obvious. Just over 10 years or so ago, the Russian IRA – here the initials for the Internet Research Agency under one Yevgeny Prigozhin – was in its pomp, influencing elections across the world, from Latin America to the Baltics. It was Prigozhin’s troll factory, inventing false Facebook accounts and supporter groups, a not-too-subtle hand backing Maga in the States and Boris Johnson’s Bring Back Control message for a Brexit Britain.
The messaging, including denials and deliberate obfuscations, were crudest and most blatant, perhaps, over the failed attempt by Russian GRU agents to poison the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018. The too-blatant efforts of the troll factory fooled almost no one, least of all Theresa May, who led a huge expulsion of Russian spies and diplomats across Europe.
Since then, Russian influences have become a touch less obvious, but they are still there. Today the Russians play a long game and the influence op runs alongside cyber-attacks outsourced to third parties and small companies. This is where we are now with the aftermath of the Southport incidents.
Channel3Now was derived from a YouTube channel acquired from two Russians 11 years ago. It now has a “staff” of 30 according to media accounts – and most work is done by freelancers, on whom it blamed the false rumours about the Southport killings.
Other favourite channels for the rioters have been Telegram, founded in 2013 by two Russians and now operating out of Dubai; Signal; and TikTok. Inflammatory material has been rebroadcast by X, formerly Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, who re-admitted Tommy Robinson to the platform and is locking verbal horns with Keir Starmer after falsely claiming the UK to be in a state of incipient civil war.
Musk also owns Starlink, the system of low-orbit satellites which proved so crucial to the early defence of Ukraine after the Russian attack in February 2022. Which makes him the leading equivalent to a condottiero, one of the notorious mercenary war captains of renaissance Italy, in the age of satellites and star wars.
Social media and apps are good for coordination of mass movements, but poor for converting recruits to a new cause. In 2009, hundreds of thousands of protesters were urged to rally at specific points in Iran by the fledgling Twitter channel. The Green Revolution against the Ayatollahs was seen as the first Twitter insurrection. But it fizzled out, because, as the author and commentator Malcolm Gladwell pointed out, it had no revolutionary message, to generate his famous idea of a “tipping point”.
Russia hasn’t abandoned its old tactics, of bots, fake news and false rumour by tweet. Just now Maria Zakharova of the foreign ministry has tweeted that the UK “demonstrators have every right to express their disagreement” with government. And the government in question “only pays lip service to what it calls its democratic principles”.
Tame stuff compared to what we heard in 2016 and over the Skripals. Surprisingly, the troll factory hasn’t said anything much about the newly minted presidential run of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Perhaps its gaze is focused elsewhere.
Social media from Moscow is focused on the sudden attack by the Ukrainians on Kursk inside Russia. The surprise offensive is symptom of a big failure of the information operations at which Moscow is supposed to excel.
Another sign of a major rethink in Russian strategy and information operations may be the sudden move to free and exchange 24 prisoners at the beginning of this month. It was the biggest such swap since Soviet times.
It was long planned, but Vladimir Putin surprised by acting to do this in the last months of the Biden-Harris presidency. He must have known this gives a boost to Harris’s election campaign almost before it’s started. In the new psychological cat-and-mouse information game, Russia’s once-and-future Tsar isn’t betting the ranch on his old pal Donald Trump moving back to the White House.
