There are concerns among hawkish wonks in Westminster that the proliferation of ads on X featuring AI images of Nigel Farage scrapping with Andrew Bailey on Question Time is connected to a foreign state which could be gathering info on Westminster. The ads – coming from any number of small accounts – have been infuriating SW1 types for some days now…
Reform and the Bank of England have both addressed the ads. The latter has urged X to take action against them. Once users click on the images, they are taken to a fake BBC post with links to ‘trading’ websites whose servers appear to be based overseas. A standard strategy here is to buy old X accounts – often around ten years – with a higher trust score, meaning the advert is less likely to be flagged…
Wonks at the Henry Jackson Society say the ads on X are likely targeting followers of accounts with a Westminster audience. They say the ads are powered by a sophisticated agentic AI-powered bot network which are producing many hundreds of assets from user clicks onto overseas servers. They add that scams like this are often traced to Iran or North Korea…
One IP address is based in Belize. While dressed up to look like a crypto scam for boomers could be a trial for a larger attack. Dr Helena Ivanov, Associate Researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, tells Guido:
“The potential implications are deeply troubling and the potential risks significant. Parliamentary authorities and the security services should investigate this urgently.
If this is indeed an example of a coordinated disinformation campaign, it serves as a stark reminder of how quickly such operations can be established in the digital age, and of the potentially far-reaching consequences they can have for public trust, democratic institutions, and political discourse.”
Stay vigilant if you see Farage punching more senior civil servants online…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”