You're listening to a stage talk titled Synthetic Propaganda, tracing an AI driven political operation. This week we were joined by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Effie Webb. Effie specialises in investigating big tech and AI. In this talk, she shares how she uncovered a far right political party that had paid for an AI influencer. and provides advice on how to investigate AI propaganda without amplifying it further. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk in
the podcast description. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Mar, on Thursday the 16th of April, 2026, in the Bill and Kat Discord server. So over the past few years, we've seen rapid advances in generative AI reshape everything from media production to political communication. At the same time, concerns about disinformation, influence operations and the integrity of online spaces have only intensified, particularly as new tools make it easier to create persuasive
and scalable forms of content. Today's conversation sits at that intersection. Our guest is Effie Webb, an investigative reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. whose recent work explores how emerging technologies are being used within political campaigning in the UK. Her reporting raises important questions, not just about what's possible with AI, but about transparency, accountability and how we understand influence in an increasingly synthetic media
environment. Effie will talk to us about her reporting and what some experts are calling a first -of -its -kind case, where a registered political party paid for content from an AI -generated influencer pushing ideological messaging. Before we begin, a short reminder that you can place your questions in the chat accessible in the right -hand corner of your screen. But please remember that this is being audio recorded for
the podcast. So if you don't want me to mention your username, please add that as a note in your question. Okay. Effie, over to you. I will mute my mic. Thanks, Charlie. Yeah, I do shout if my audio goes a bit dodge, but it should be okay. Yeah, great to be here. Yeah, as you said, I'm an AI reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. For those who don't know the Bureau, we're an impact -driven non -profit newsroom
based in London. And yeah, I've been increasingly focused on AI influence operations and political campaigning, which brings me to this Danny Bones So yeah, in a nutshell, the last few months I traced this anonymous influence operation essentially behind an AI rapper, political activist, commentator, et cetera, to a registered political party, Advance UK, and their kind of by -election campaign in
Manchester. So I thought it would be maybe interesting if we could just like listen to some Danny Bones content okay so i'm gonna try and play a Danny Bones song this might work so this was his most recent track called UK So yeah, that's Steiny Bones' latest song. How do I come across Steiny Bones? Maybe that's useful to... go through first. So I found him on Spotify. It was in a Discover Weekly playlist. I'd been kind of keeping an eye on AI -generated music. So I think Spotify
sort of picked up on that. I've been listening to like a bit of the Crew Con Gazette stuff as well, because that had made some headlines. And yeah, I'd listened to This is England, which is by far Danny Bone's most sort of popular song. Um, and yeah, really good production quality, production value, kind of like mixing and mastering that was professional, like authentic sounding vocals, no kind of trace of an AI slot type song.
Um, press on the profile and like notice the artist profile image was an AI generated image. Um, I thought that was interesting given that like Aside from that sign of AI, there were hundreds of thousands of streams across the four songs, I think it was at that point. And he not verified as an artist because Spotify doesn't do verification anymore, but registered as an artist. And Spotify didn't seem to be kind of demoting the artist
for being AI type thing. So then I went to social media and saw he... he, it was across sort of all the mainstream platforms and having only started in kind of November time was cultivating a like pretty healthy following by posting kind of mostly I'd say YouTube shorts and TikToks, but also kind of reels and videos on Twitter of kind of anti -migrant, anti -Muslim dog whistle type content, very conspiracy adjacent stuff a lot of the time, all with this kind of patriotic
undertone and sort of implicit or explicit calls that we should all kind of take back our country and fight for, yeah, fight for the sort of British or Britain that wants wars type thing. What I found in, again, I'm going to just quickly share my screen because I think the way that Danny Bones is presented, yeah, so he has like kind of a roster of different looks that his creators have kind of given him on purpose. So he's kind of like sometimes a religious figure. Sometimes
he's like more of a gritty grime artist. Sometimes he's a bit more of like a skinhead type rioter. And yeah, I think that's not an accident. I think he's not made to be... this isn't a deep fake situation. He is a kind of persona and character that can kind of be repurposed and remixed for whatever audience is the target. And in this case, it is kind of young British men, overwhelmingly, but more on that later. I'll stop sharing now. I was interested in this Danny Bones character,
but at this point it was just a curiosity. At the same time, I'd been looking at the use of AI and synthetic media by political groups and particularly right -wing political groups and came across Advanced UK's recent shorts they were posting on on Twitter, sorry, and on TikTok actually, in this kind of attempt to appeal to a younger population and just a bit of context about what Advanced UK are for those who probably
understand we've never heard of them. They are a kind of fringe splinter party headed by Ben Habib, who's the former co -deputy leader of
Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party. They're sort of Christian nationalist, they would dispute the term far -right, but I would say far -right party whose policies all sort of center on this idea that mass immigration is a national emergency and that sort of mass deportation is the solution, alongside a sort of policy to kind of adopt widespread Christianity and sort of pious other religions. And that's kind of where I think the Diabones
character has interesting parallels. But at this point, I was just noticing Advanced UK's use of AI. It wasn't the, I hadn't connected the two, so to speak. And it was in late January when Advanced UK were launching their culture and immigration policies. They posted a two minute video, which was a of AI -generated video. It was a montage of British culture and history, all parts of it at least, with various wars. So second world war soldiers, Anglo -Saxon warriors,
et cetera. And there was a gritty voiceover that urged people to, or not urge people to vote advance, but say that an advanced UK government would be able to bring back bringing Britain back to its kind of, um, uh, you know, a time when, when it was better type thing. Um, and this, yeah, this video for whatever reason, sort of resembled the Danny Bones type content that I had been kind of keeping on as well. And the same kind of style and overlay. It also had a similar voiceover
and the backing track as well. like was actually the instrumental to the This is England song, which is like his most popular song. But that kind of subtle detail was kind of easy to miss. And I had to re -watch this video a couple of times before, before really clocking on to that. And then right at the end of the video, a logo or, you know, a text overlay for the Node project
flashes up for a second. The Node project, I then kind of uh, searched up and found that they were the sort of, they described themselves as
a collective. So the influence collective behind, um, this Danny Bones kind of character or persona, if you like, um, very, I mean, they've changed their website now, but the website in there in its original form was this very slick boutique style, um, influence agency type website, one that you might expect a kind of high -end modeling, um, agency to have, um, with yeah, Danny Bones kind of plastered over the front of it and at the same time said, intentionally being very
vague, both in its language about what it does and who's behind it and sort of also where it's based. There was nothing in terms of clues there. So yeah, I was really interested in what this node project thing was because now we had a kind of indication that um, at the very least, Advanced UK were using, um, node project content in their, in at least one of their videos. Um, so there were two questions, I suppose. One was who, like, who is the node project? How many people are
behind it? Where are they based? And two, is money being exchanged hands here? So is, is this sort of a paid job? Um, or, you know, maybe other hypothesis being is advanced UK kind of someone in the social media team advanced kind of just pirating or copying from the node project. So at that point, it became a bit of traditional journalism, just calling up advanced UK and being like, hi, I'd like to speak to you about your
AI generated stuff. They were very open with me about their relationship to the node project. They did tell me that they had paid for that two minute video I mentioned earlier. They didn't tell me how much, although they did say that it was not an insignificant amount of money. I did press them a bit on how much they paid, but they wouldn't go into that. I then spoke to someone else at advance who kind of is more
on the social media end of things. And they said that it wasn't just that video, but it was a series of videos. which was significant because the other series of videos they commissioned from the Node Project were sort of their campaigning videos for this by -election, which was the Gortland -Denton by -election where Advance UK were contesting their first ever seat. And the Node Project made at least four videos, sort of one that kind of
fronted their candidate, Nick Buckley. another that kind of showed this again, similar to sort of the Danny Bones type content, a very dystopian AI generated Britain, whilst urging people to register to vote in the upcoming by -election. So yeah, at this point it was clear that it was confirmed that by a lease advance that there had been a sort of paid payment here. We didn't
know how much. there was a contact email for the Node project and that was kind of all there was in terms of how to get in touch with them. They were also relatively happy to engage in conversation over email, not over video, very keen to keep their anonymity as were advanced. So advanced were also, although they'd claimed they'd met some of the people behind the Node project, they were They refused to sort of give anything away in terms of who they were or where
they were based, et cetera. So at that point, it was kind of a judgment call. Like we had enough to publish a story or more than enough to publish a story. We had an AI rapper, Danny Bones, an enormous influence operation and a fringe political party that has had the backing of Elon Musk paying for election campaign content that is AI generated. Almost for my own curiosity, I wanted to get to the bottom of who was behind the Node project
and indeed how many people there were. So yeah, as I'd been sort of tracking and monitoring the node project. I'd been tracking and kind of just making a huge kind of spreadsheet of who were the most frequent engagers, who was commenting the most, who was donating. So they had a buy me a coffee donation page set up, who were kind of like the early donators on that. And, you know, just searching as well on Meta's ad library and uh, TikTok's, TikTok's ad library as well.
So that was useful in two ways. Meta's ad library showed me who, well, one that there was the node project were paying for ads to like paid for, I think it was five ads for, to yeah, to promote themselves. Um, and they were targeting 18 to 35 year old UK men, most of them. Uh, and then TikTok was useful in another way because it showed that the, someone had paid for a like not an ad, hashtag ad type thing, but someone had boosted some node project content and this was a particular
person called AJ. And AJ had come up in my like earlier kind of network mapping of kind of particularly enthusiastic and committed followers, I suppose. So it then became a question of, is this person a super fan or is he a member of the node project or, you know, node project themselves. And it was very, um, it was interesting because I think there were some behaviors or things being posted that did, um, that resemble just kind of fan behavior. So resharing, reposting, um, liking,
engaging, et cetera. There were others that went a step further. So on their personal accounts, particularly on TikTok, on threads as well, posting. I remember distinctly there was a Node Project t -shirt, or there was a t -shirt with the Node Project logo on it that I hadn't seen and was not apparent at all on any of the Node Project or Danny Bones platforms, but only on AJ's platforms. So that struck me as very strange behavior for
someone who was just a fan. Um, I did get in touch with both AJ and the Node project, um, Stokes people, possibly the same people about this and they both denied, um, his involvement and said that he, yeah, he was, he was nothing more than a fan. Um, the story did shift a few times. So, um, there was a lot of back and forth. Um, but yeah, when it came to publishing, it was a judgment call that we didn't quite have a smoking gun to say definitively. this is the
node project, here you go. Because again, it seems like there's not a kind of zero chance that there isn't at least more than one person involved in this type thing. And we did mention him in the piece though. So that was kind of... That was worth noting, but we didn't want to kind of just pin it on someone when it could be a larger operation. Maybe I will leave it there for now. And yeah, there's a lot more in terms of what happened after. But yeah, Charlie,
if you want to. Yeah, I think people in the comments are just digging into the NOE project right now. I posted their websites and people are very interested in what they've got to say on it. It's really interesting what you were saying about just the volume of this and the role that AI is playing. We'd spoken in the comments, particularly about
how it's not just a UK focused issue. We've also got, Bellingcat recently covered, how AI generations were being used to spread hate speech in India around election candidates and how troublesome that is. Today, the Foreign Press Association put out a statement on the IDF using AI to change an image of a journalist. It's kind of terrifying how much this is seeping into politics. In regards to this particular operation, how sophisticated is it? Are we looking at something that could
be replicable by other party groups? Or is this only something that you think might? operate within the UK political structure? Yeah, it's a good question and don't think it's unique to the UK at all. I can see a world in which Danny Bones himself, there's nothing particularly British about the Danny Bones character except his British outfits. He could easily be used in a Polish election. He looks quite Eastern European, a
lot of people have said. In terms of the AI element, I think AI poses a lot of threats to democracy, et cetera. This isn't a deep fake situation. He does look increasingly hyper real, I think, if I came at it fresh. If I was coming at it fresh now, I would probably have taken a step back and been like, is that real? Is it not? But back in January, there were very clear AI giveaways, especially with the the music videos. I think it is quite a sophisticated operation.
I think the music in particular. So I wanted to know kind of, yeah, is this just a case of they're downloading a commercial AI music tool? So like some of the mainstream ones like Suno or UDO. I don't know if you pronounce that right, but yeah, UDO and Suno. I downloaded Suno, pasted in the lyrics to a Danny Bowen song and within like a minute or two had four different tracks in four different genres. So like drill, grime, acoustic, and they were nowhere near as good
as Danny Bones sort of stuff. But it did make me think, okay, this isn't something where you need to be a musician or a complete tech whiz to do. Um, and I think, but I do think there's something about the Dunnybone stuff that, um, is not like, that does kind of put him in a category
that isn't slot. I also think the character itself and the kind of character storytelling and creation that goes into it, um, that the creators or creator has put quite a lot of thought into in terms of making sure both technically that the character is consistent from video to video in terms of voice and appearance, et cetera, but also the political stuff. They are very reactive to the current affairs and current events of the day.
During the Gortons and Denton by -election, there was a lot of far -right hate towards the Green Party and the various tactics. He was very on the money and very quick at putting out those videos. Is it sophisticated? Yes. Is it reputable? Definitely yes. Is it something that I think
you could do pretty cheaply? Also, yes. And I think that there's nothing to say that we... I think the music medium is like maybe the most interesting part of this because also I think if you're a kind of rapper or a drill slash grime artist, you do have a bit more license to kind of say the controversial or like push the overton window a bit more with like... what you're saying as opposed to a traditional influencer word.
We also saw in Iran with the Lego AI rap propaganda that was coming out a few weeks, maybe even still is coming out. I think there's just an interesting move into the music space because music is so visceral and it is catchy and it is memorable and it does a bit of political work without a listener necessarily approaching it from a political space. Yeah, and we've seen recently artists deny politicians from using their music as well
in big political stages. We had a comment earlier that said, this is one of the more worrying things about AI for me. It lets fringe groups access a production quality and even artistry that they either couldn't have afforded or they wouldn't have been able to find artists willing to make things for them, which I think is really relevant. We actually had a question about the AI Lego videos earlier and since you brought it up, I'll
mention it. When AI is used by multiple actors in a political conflict or war, what can be done by both the media and the public in order to be able to sift through all the slop? What are your thoughts on that particularly? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the media has, we have to think carefully about coverage being thoughtful, responsible, and that we're not just echoing and amplifying. you know, back and forth slot between two bad actors or more bad actors.
I think for this story and this was like, again, it was a judgment call in how much kind of, you know, there's a balancing act of you want to paint the picture of Danny Bones and you want to show the sort of harmful Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, far -right, conspiratorial content whilst also not just becoming a like unpaid bit of marketing
for him. I think whenever you report on something bad like that, and especially with AI where people are curious and they'll go and press on the Spotify artist or go to the social media, which we did see happen, it's kind of an inevitable balancing act that you have to just make a call on. In a general sense, I think a good rule of thumb is like, think about why you're reporting it. Is it just like, huh, like this is, this is kind of, this is really funny. This is, um, this is,
yeah, exactly. This is sort of AI slop being done for AI slop sake. I think, yeah, obviously because this had an actual registered UK political party's funding, it was a story worth telling. If it hadn't had the funding, I think There may have been an argument to publish anyway because
it was still being used by the party. But I think going forward and knowing now what happened after we published and the kind of publicity that Danny Bones did end up getting and the Node Project did end up kind of making money essentially from our coverage, I will approach stories with that in mind, I think, going forward. I really want to touch on that. But first, maybe you can give us a little bit more background on the Node project because we have had a few questions about that
specifically. So someone asked earlier if there was anything in the UK that kind of protected us from organizations like the Node project. And so Hans just asked, is this Node project registered with Companies House? And perhaps you can just give us a little bit more breakdown on the No Project, what it is specifically, and then maybe we can go into the impact the article had after. Sure. Yeah, that's a good question.
No, they're not on Companies House, sadly. They have a website, that is kind of all they have. Well, they've got a website and then they've got all their social media platforms where they kind of... Um, frame themselves as sort of the management of Danny Bones, um, the sort of, yeah,
artist manager. Um, the, I have archived the previous website, so if anyone's interested in seeing it in its original form, um, I can, I can send that over, but essentially, um, now what the website is or, you know, what the known project shows is a kind of very stripped back thing saying, Hey, sign up for a paid membership
here. You can be a £20. you can pay 20 pounds to be a Node founding member, sorry, a Node early member, or you can pay 100 pounds to be a founding member and have access to a private telegram group and all sorts of perks that are promised like that. And you can see that they've made kind of over two grand just in the last three
weeks from that. So clearly there is interest in the Node project and In terms of their website, I did a Whois lookup and it had this kind of domain registration that was shielded by a commercial privacy proxy service, like quite standard. So it was just a case of getting in touch with them. trying to, well, trying to keep the conversation going, not being super confrontational and kind of like accusatory essentially, but actually
just like entering a dialogue with them. Um, I will say I, and this is kind of a piece to, to come, so I won't like say too much, but I do have a bit more of a lead now on like who
is behind the node project. Um, so yeah. more to come on that, but in terms of the bit about kind of protections we have, there are like, I think the key ones are like the Advertising Standards Authority and the Electoral Commission, both of whom have rules in terms of, you know, they weren't, none of these rules really were obviously designed for kind of AI influences or synthetic influences, but there are rules around, you know, disclosure and transparency
when something is a um, paid for ads and when something is, um, particularly when it's a kind of political campaign. So, and there is a lot of scrutiny on that kind of thing at the moment and kind of making sure those rules do kind of match the, the AI age. So, um, I think, yeah, yes and no in terms of, in terms of kind of protection. Thanks for answering that. And you, you've kind of hinted a little bit about what happened. Um, but perhaps it's a good lesson as well for the
audience to hear about. what happened after you published, because the No Project and a small group of crypto traders then tried to turn the coverage itself into a source of income, right? I'm sharing your second article in the chat now for those who might want to read it as you talk about this. Yeah, so yeah, I think what I was prepared for after we published the first was like backlash from the far right, which often happens and maybe some personal online attacks
at me. That didn't happen at all. That was all very above board and professional and there was no doxing, none of that. What happened instead was the Danny Bones character and the Node Project very much leaned into the criticism and leaned into the controversy. They quickly made a reaction video going bit by bit through our article and calling out which bits were wrong in their mind and then ending this video with a call to support the cause and donate and then they had a new
donation link. There was a series of other videos that followed that and you could see they were just trying to stir controversy and classic kind of tropes like mainstream media kind of left state. sponsored kind of stuff were being thrown around and sort of accusations we were trying to silence him or, yeah, silence Danny, so to
speak. On a completely separate corner of Twitter or, you know, relatively separate corner of Twitter, two groups were set up called The Node Project, which were sort of, yeah, these crypto speculators who saw this stir that had been created around our coverage and also the Daily Mail's coverage, plus Danny Bones and the Node Project, plus the far -right reaction and the back and forth we
were having. The crypto speculators very shrewdly thought this seems like a moment that could be flipped into a meme coin or into a lucrative crypto opportunity. At the time, I had tracked four Danny Bones meme coins that popped up on the Solana blockchain created on Pumpfun. And I actually just checked before this talk and now there are 40. Forty and I think there are
about a dozen creators behind them. So some of them are kind of duplicates or, you know, the creator created more than one type thing, but still that's... that's a fair amount of coins. And this all happened within about 48 hours. So like the Danny Bones blackbash happened within
three hours, the coins popped up. From what I could tell and from what I could trace, largely from people in the US, there wasn't an indication that the people causing the hype and encouraging people to buy into these coins were in any way kind of connected to advanced UK, anyway kind of interested in British politics necessarily, but were more kind of just opportunistic and rightly seeing like this as a kind of political moment that, you know, sitting with parallels
to a very simple, another situation with this Amelia character who also was turned into a Mean Boy and I can go into that a little bit more if we want, but a few months prior to our story, Elon Musk had kind of retweeted about this immediate AI character, which had made the mean coins related
to her extremely lucrative. So I think there was a sort of logic that maybe we can make that happen again and get endorsement from Musk himself, which didn't happen and the coin sort of... um, crash and value, um, relatively quickly, but they are still, they're still floating around. So you never know. So you didn't predict this kind of response, um, that it did happen. Has it changed the way that you mentioned earlier that you might change the way that your report
going forwards? What kind of concerns or, or considerations are you now putting in for this next report that you're working on? Yeah, it's a good question. I wouldn't dissuade people from covering this type of stuff at all. I just think it's interesting to be prepared for these different types of responses and reactions that aren't necessarily the traditional personal attacks, but actually might be much more of a kind of who's going to try and cash in on the coverage.
Again, the reason we did that second piece is it was a story in itself. We then had a look at the whole Node project commercial engine and realized there were six revenue streams, commissions from Advanced UK, ad hoc donations, both crypto and normal. There was the money from Spotify and possibly money from X probably. Not, well, the other platforms didn't claim that he was, they were earning on that. Um, and then obviously
the crypto hype. So when the sort of 24, 48 hours of crypto hype was happening, uh, the node project shared their own kind of wallet. So they did kind of cash in it to some extent on that or at least appeared to. So I think, yeah, it, it made the. It almost made the, um, hateful kind of side of all this and the kind of, um, yeah, sort of, um, political side secondary to the,
um, economic side, I think. And the, the commercial side almost became the more interesting one because again, we didn't, we don't know how political or how apolitical even, uh, the Node project and its actors are. And again, it's something we've seen before. My colleague Niamh published a story. um, late last year about, uh, individual in Sri Lanka who was making a lot of money, um, making kind of, uh, AI slop kind of videos targeting, um, you know, relatively racist videos targeting,
um, UK audiences. And not only kind of, he was making and distributing them and cashing in on that, but he had a kind of, um, program or kind of Academy, you can call it, to teach others to do it and go viral and make money. So it's, yeah, the incentives to do this are very clearly financial and you don't need to be a holistically aligned, ideologically aligned person to do this. So it really could be anyone. So I think that's something I'm thinking about more going forward.
It's a money -making machine. Interesting. Hexnaught asked earlier, Really great work from Effie. Is there any indication of this type of usage of AI propaganda in a highly targeted manner? I'm effectively thinking of the combination of voter targeting based on area, interest and specific propaganda. Edie, do we see a different Danny Bones type for users in Belfast versus Cardiff versus London? Ooh, that's a very good, yeah,
that's a great question. The only, yeah, as I kind of said earlier, the only indication that there are kind of possibly different, different Danny Bones for different audiences are those, um, kind of different digital skins, if you will, that he, that the creators will give him. And I do think there is a sense that they're doing that on purpose to, so as to not alienate, um, part of his audience who clearly are not into like UK grime and UK drill. but are more on the
Christian side of things. And then thirdly, the kind of more riot, like overtly political stuff. So I think there's definitely kind of slices of his audience that he is trying to appeal to maybe all at once. It would be really interesting actually, I think, yeah, to see where those, I mean, the Metta ad data could only really give us so much in terms of like how granular that
is. Obviously Metta used to be better and I think other platforms are pretty rubbish in terms of targeting, but yeah, no, I think going forward with other elections coming up, you know, midterms in the US and May elections here, it would be really interesting to to have a look at that kind of data and, you know, maybe set up some kind of profiles based in those places to see if different types fetch different kind of profiles,
so to speak. There's been a bit of chatter in the chat about whether you saw any evidence towards or any evidence that dismissed a theory that this could have any foreign influence involvement. Often, you know, you see AI propaganda campaigns are coming from foreign sources. Is this just a UK based operation or have you seen any indication that it could be wider field as well? Yeah, I think it's such a hard thing to attribute and going off the word of the Node project, I wasn't
keen to like take their word as final. They said they were based in the UK or he, it, whatever, said they were based in the UK. Fine. AJ, as far as I could tell, is also UK based. Advanced UK, Ben Habib himself said he'd met them or had met people who are involved in the Node project and that they were based up north. So increasingly as I was going through this, my hypothesis went further and further away from this being a foreign
interference situation. That's not just it, but again, like the whole kind of node project set up and the way that they allude to themselves is that like, this could be one node of like multiple different, um, different kind of, um, different nodes. And again, it's a very kind of nascent operation only starting November. The Danny Bones character is the only kind of, you know, is that kind of, um, proof of concept
potentially. And that could be Danny Bones for, for, for other jurisdictions and other kind of localities. There is no indication directly of it being a foreign thing. I also just think there's a hunch that whoever's behind it is so tapped into the minutiae of UK news and not in a kind of way that anyone outside the UK could just tap into, oh, we've got a kind of we've got a lot of backlash towards like small boats or whatever, but like very, very kind of hyper local news
and stuff like that. Again, doesn't mean it couldn't be a very sophisticated and politically aligned, you know, for an actor, but that was another kind of heuristic, I suppose. Yeah, it does really speak to a lot of British signals, especially
to do with the far right in the UK. If you are interested in learning a little bit more about foreign influence operations and disinformation campaigns, we did speak to DoubleThink Labs Jasper Hewitt, I think last year or the year before on the stage talks about Chinese influence operations and disinformation campaigns. So I just put the link to that in the chat in case you want to listen back to that. It's interesting that they are based in the UK but aren't on Companies House.
That's an interesting question. as to why they're not there. But I'm sure you might explore that in your upcoming piece. We had a simple question, they said it earlier in the chat. Did you see any evidence that people believed Danny Bones was real? Did anyone seem to know it was fake and not care? I'm curious about whether we're moving towards a time where authenticity doesn't matter as much as production value and appeal to people's own biases. No, I love that point.
Regardless of how real he appears, there is still a compelling character there. There's catchy songs that get stuck in your head that maybe then filter into your unconscious biases. I remember when he got banned from TikTok because we didn't report him, but we asked TikTok for a right of reply. I kind of felt sorry for him, the weird way, because he did this really... Anyways, I was really anthropomorphizing him, despite knowing
how synthetic he was. And in terms of the first part of your question about were there people that genuinely thought he was real? Yes, absolutely. Most people that asked me about this initially is, is this guy real? Who is this guy? Is he real? So that's been something to really reckon with. And again, for reporting as well, to just make that explicit. What's been interesting as well is the way he will stitch together footage
that is real. Again, because he's sort of commentating on the day's news, he'll stitch together like a normal politician or activist might, stitch together real footage. very sophisticatedly place himself, the avatar, in that space. So that's like Trafalgar Square or something like that. So yeah, I wouldn't blame anyone who would kind
of question whether or not he was real. And I think particularly, yeah, as I've said before, the music side of things, I'm sure there are people who are listening to him on Spotify and have no idea that there's like a sort of AI generated persona behind him. And same with Advanced UK, I don't. I think they were pretty convinced by it when I spoke to them. Oh, you think Advanced UK thinks he's a real artist? No, I think they were just very impressed, as they should be.
I think they were just like, this is incredible, incredible air. I was about to say, I think someone needs to chat to them with those. They think they're famous for a real creator. You mentioned that you'd reported it just now to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, right? And they both took action. Do you think current moderation systems are equipped for this type of content? And Spotify, I'm guessing you did report to that
they didn't take a step. Why was that? Yeah, we didn't report in a takedown way to any of the platforms. We wouldn't ever do that as journalists. We were just generally interested in what's their policies on both AI -generated influences like this, on disclosure, on AI labeling, and on the political links, plus a lot of the more egregious hateful content. It was interesting seeing the array of or the range of responsiveness from
the different platforms. So yeah, TikTok completely banned the account straight away, which was a surprise, I think. You can speculate about why, but I think maybe because all of the social media companies are under a lot of scrutiny now with the kind of litigation in America about addiction and social media harms, possibly. Instagram took down three of the videos that I've flagged. YouTube... didn't take anything down, but they added AI disclosure labels, which was interesting and
not quite the point. YouTube have demonetized AI generated videos. Not because of this story, but that was sort of earlier in the year. X didn't get back to us, surprise, surprise. Spotify, and I think this is reasonable from Spotify. Spotify didn't act and What Spotify are dealing with content wise are just the songs, which aren't necessarily like overtly racist or Islamophobic or anything. It's the content, which is kind of the more on the problematic side of things.
So Spotify, I had an interesting conversation with them where they said, look, there's a whole spectrum of artists using AI and not using AI. there's no way to tell whether an artist necessarily is using AI, which is quite scary. Um, and that some artists, you know, they are real, but are using AI in their, in their day -to -day kind of production, um, uh, methods just like, you know, we all are at work and things like that.
So yeah, I think Spotify quite lacks, um, when it comes to AI, but I think in terms of moderating the content, it is really difficult to moderate, um, music and audio and like more so I would say than video just because a lot of the nuance and yeah a lot of the meaning can kind of get lost in like um kind of rhetoric and you know there's then this plausible deniability about like oh maybe you didn't actually mean that because it's a rap song where you know there's lots of
it's quite normal to use a slur or it's quite normal to use like language that incites violence type thing uh whereas it would be much more easy to moderate them all. traditional kind of someone giving a hot take on YouTube or something. Yeah, that's a really interesting point about where the lines are when it comes to music. For example, the Indian AI generated imagery that was created to generate hate around the elections that I talked about earlier that we recently released
an investigation on. All of that was still imagery and video imagery that clearly contained very hateful messaging and was rightly in some cases taken down from platforms. But yeah, as you're saying in music, the lines are a little bit more blurred and less clear. Somebody shared earlier actually a case, another case where an AI generated band had released two albums on Spotify before they were kind of, before they admitted that they were completely air -generated and they
got over 1 million views, listens. Really interesting that Spotify is kind of finding themselves in this kind of hole. You mentioned that the lyrics to Danny Bones' songs aren't... too explicit. What kind of lines are we, what kind of things is he talking about specifically? And where do you think the lines between kind of creative expression and political manipulation, where can we draw the line when AI is involved with that? Yeah, I'm not sure AI changes the line
at all. I think AI just makes the accountability much more murky. I think where Danny Bones' music is, I mean, okay, let's say, it is worth saying, I think it has got, and that clip I showed at the beginning, it has got a little bit more crossing
the line, I think. So like, you know, more explicitly mentioning, you know, more explicit criticisms of immigrants and, you know, the fact that we are handing quotes, well, I'm not going to directly quote, but like handing out benefits to migrants who don't benefit the country type thing and
getting much more overtly political. I think, again, it's the lyrics, but what Spotify I think would say is the lyrics by themselves and the songs by themselves without the music videos, which is kind of a separate beast to Danny Bones short form content, are relatively harmless. The music videos and the songs together, I would say, is where you can kind of pick up on the implications he's making in his songs. I think he's in his right to be very critical of the
government and that's totally fine. There's a lot of things he says which I think we'd all agree with. There's, yeah, there's always, you know, like, this isn't to say, like, he shouldn't have kind of free speech, etc. But I think there is, again, yeah, with an AI musician, there's, yeah, there's two levels, or there's two kind of layers of accountability that are more difficult, both kind of, who do you call out if something does? across the line, especially if a party
has paid for it. Like, is the party going to take the responsibility? Is the platform, is the musician, is the creator? It's very unclear. And the second one being, well, it's music. You know, it's a genre that can evoke racial slurs or, you know. homophobic slurs, et cetera, which
do appear at times in his music. But again, it hits a minefield and I think Spotify and other distributors will have to think carefully about whether they want to keep allowing this kind of stuff to maybe even take over human artists on the platform. I'm not saying that's happened, I don't know the stats, but I think YouTube made a conscious decision to stop monetizing AI. videos.
And again, that might be completely commercial as opposed to anything ethical, but like, you know, you're just, if you just have an onslaught of AI slot, then you're not going to get the views you want to get. So it might be something we, I think it'd be interesting to look out for in the next couple months or year or so. Yeah. I think it's interesting how throughout this talk we've really personified this AI. entity, calling in him, you know, talking about someone's
just put in the chat. Does an AI entity have a right to free speech though? All these questions are things that we don't necessarily have the answers to. And we also don't really know, right, how involved Advanced UK were in regards to the content of the videos. They could have commissioned something, but we're not sure how involved they were in the actual creation, just involved in
the payment and the use of. It's super interesting the way that these lines are drawn and how we're talking about this kind of entity that has had some political sway. If we fast forward five years or even 10, what does the Danny Bones playbook look like for maturity to you? What are your
concerns there? What could this mold into? I think... even in a year like AI moves so quickly as does kind of, well, I think especially the right are very kind of more willing already to adapt to like newer types of political influence and like campaigning and they have been much
more successful in engaging and using AI. I think like what's to say that human influences will kind of just be totally totally replaced by these AI avatars who are like compelling, who have a kind of backstory, who have a believable set of political and believable and sort of consistent set of sort of values and, you know, to such way that, yeah, we have ended up literally personifying
him it. And, you know, obviously that you know, let's assume AI continues the way it is, we'll continue to get cheaper, faster, even automated. There won't really need to be a human in the
loop to, to, to, for that kind of thing. And I would say, yeah, as we mentioned a bit, like I think it will, the next frontier might be like hyper personalizing it and maybe, you know, targeting becoming, you know, sort of so strong that, you know, we're all getting a sort of a different version of an influencer or that we don't even, you know, that there isn't even a kind of one influencer that we're seeing kind of explode, but actually kind of a tailor -made kind of,
yeah, influencer that our algorithm picks off on. So I think, yeah, we can obviously like look out for stuff and just keep doing like... keep doing good journalism and flagging these cases, but not platforming them if we don't have to. Absolutely. Somebody just shared that AI generated content is generally afford the same first amendment protections as content created by people, corporations and other legal entities, but it's also subject to the same established limits on speech in the
US. So it really depends on the country in question, which is really interesting. And absolutely, you were saying, report it, flag it where you see it. But yeah, try not to amplify it so much. That is an issue that Bellingcat faces every day as we're often finding deep fakes and things like that coming through social media, trying not to amplify the original post. Just as a final point. What would be your advice to someone who may be familiar with a case like the Danny Bones
case? What would be your advice for first steps if somebody, a researcher or a journalist listening to this has found something similar? I would say, yeah, do all the forensic digging you can
just on the mainstream platforms. I think the Danny Bones case was relatively... interesting in that there was all I kind of needed on those big mainstream platforms, but I think definitely take a look on, yeah, go on the telegrams, go elsewhere, because yeah, what I saw in the investigation is once they were banned from TikTok, there was a very swift, ready move to kind of, well, to X, which again, that's pretty mainstream, but
there's now telegrams. So there is that kind of like... predictable trajectory of where these people end up. So I'd say you can maybe get ahead of the curve there. I think Facebook groups as well, see which Facebook groups they're in or maybe if you know the creator behind it, see what groups their content is being shared in. I think that's always interesting to get a sense of both who they're targeting but who is finding
this stuff just interesting organically. I would say make sure you keep a record of everything. And if that is, you know, one of these, um, kind of screen capture type useful, um, nifty tools, that's great. But if you just have to go through and manually screen record every single TikTok then so be it, because I was very, I was very glad I did that because when the TikTok account was banned and the story had so much of the TikTok
content. in it that we were referring to. It was very, it was a relief to have those kind of there and also then to kind of present the case as evidence to, you know, the Electoral Commission, the Advertising Sounds Authority, the relevant people. It was, we had all the documents, evidence, we weren't just going off kind of, you know, memory. Yeah, sadly when one platform door closes, another platform door opens for these groups. I shared in the chat, you don't
have to manually save everything. We do have the Bellingcat auto -archiver, which is a tool that you can use. It works on most social platforms, not all, but most. So do have a look at that and make use of it. There's a really useful guide to it on our website, which I've just linked to. Effie, thank you so much for the fantastic talk today. People have been fascinated by what
you've got to say. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, maybe they have a lead for you, maybe they want to just chat to you a little bit more about the investigation. Where can they find you? How can they reach out to you? I'm on LinkedIn, EffieWeb, so E -F -F -I -E -Web. I think that would be the best place. I'm also on Blue Sky, although I'm trying to be on memoir. I'm also on Signal at EFW .40. So either of those three. Brilliant. I've just linked to your LinkedIn
in the chats. Please do make a point of saving that. I'll also include it in the description of this podcast if you're fine with that. But yeah, make sure that you read Effie's pieces and the follow -up piece that we're all eager to read now. And I can't thank you enough for taking time out to chat today. We'll be back in two weeks' time with another stage talk. But for now, thank you everybody for listening. Great. Thanks, Raleigh. Thank you for listening to the
stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live where you you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.