Decline porn (part II), VPN patriotism, and Charli XCX's finsta drop

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1:47Okay, Matt, you know how we're banned from talking about AI fruits? Yes. Fruit, love, violent, everything. And there's not enough depth for it to be a... Yeah, exactly. But I have found a workaround, which is human beings have started making videos as though they're AI freaks. Oh, I've seen this. Have you seen this? What am I to do? My husband's never home. Hi there. I'm here to fix the sink. What have you done, Strobelina? This is a banana. Appleton, wait. Congratulations, Mr. Apple. You have seven healthy babies. Seven? This is impossible. Oh my God, I can't stand listening to them all day long.

2:25I'm tired. Can I just say about that, why is there always that really emotional music in the background? Honestly, one of the top comments is, why is it always that song? And this is for people that can't see, by the way. It's like two people. One is dressed up as an apple, one is dressed up as a pear. And they've cut out fruit-shaped cardboard and put it around their heads. And then they're holding loads of pears with goggle eyes on and pretending that those pears are their babies. I think that there is a deeper story with the AI fruit stuff, which is that it always has this like manosphere. Yeah, it does have a manosphere undertone.

2:58Where it's always about. Like cheating men. Like the whore wife, right? Going out and cheating on the good guy husband with the like traditional alpha male. And then she goes, oh my God, why did I cheat on it? I had everything and I cheated him with the good guy. And he's like, you stupid idiot. Yeah, but also there's one I watched the other day. I don't know why I watched it. It was like some grapes. and then the grape-like queen had had two twins and one of them was green and one was purple, but the royal family of grapes had been green for all of history. So she painted the purple child green.

3:33Yeah, so there's a racial undertone too. Yeah, there's that. But then also what was interesting is the grape king, his whole thing was like, I must. I think you spent too much time on these. No, this is a manuscript point. He was like, I must take my grape children fishing. And he was obsessed with it. And she was like, no, you can't take them because she didn't want them to get wet, obviously, because one of them was painted a different colour. And then he's like, my children must not be wimps. And it's really like, again, sort of masculinity adjacent. But at the heart of 90 % of AI fruit videos is the idea that men are competing in a sexual marketplace for the attention of women who will always pick against their best interest, unfairly the alpha male banana eggplant boss guy over the good guy husband, right?

4:18Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very manuscript coded. And the perception that women are essentially shallow and will choose the bad guy over the good guy is what makes people into incels. I wonder what the agenda is there. What's the radicalization pipeline from AI fruit videos to hardcore manosphere? Next documentary, Matt. There are young people watching the AI fruit video. You think it's just ridiculous. There are young men watching it being like, that's exactly what women are like. I do think there's a pipeline from AI fruit to Inso, which I think deserves more attention. So today on Top Comment, we are not going to keep talking about AI fruit.

4:53Do not worry. We're going to be talking a bit about an investigation I've been doing for Panorama into AI and misinformation, but very specifically, these pages on Instagram and Facebook that purport to be British patriots and UK based, only it turns out they are not, or not all of them at least, and they are sharing huge amounts of AI slop that is very anti-immigration.

5:21I love the term foreign patriots because this is the crazy thing about this story that you have done. And everyone should watch this film. It's amazing. And eye opening is that all of the stuff that I'm getting fed on my feed of these British looking people complaining about their country is made by people who are not British. So why are they doing it? What's so interesting is we chatted about decline porn on our very first episode of Top Comment. This idea of making content, specifically often AI content, that makes particular cities like London, say, look like they're in decline, essentially.

5:57But this is very much sort of expanded as a genre. It's much more than just the Croydon AI water park videos we chatted about before. So I did a bit more digging as I was doing this panorama, which is all about how AI can be used to spread misinformation. It's a doc that's on BBC iPlayer. And I started seeing particularly the videos that were like, you know, someone, like a journalist interviewing someone in like the supermarket wearing a hijab saying, oh, they're only selling halal meat or like an elderly British pensioner. So there was this one video that came up on my feed the other day and it was an AI generated video of an elderly British guy crying about his pension, essentially being like, Britain's just not what it used to be, all this kind of stuff.

6:34Look at me. I paid in for decades and now I'm counting coins in the supermarket. Bills up, pensions down and I'm still scared of next week. Is this Britain's pride or Britain's shame? Don't stay silent if I'm wrong. But the men and women who gave their youth and strength for this country are now waiting for basic care. Is this how we honour sacrifice? The video is not labelled as AI, by the way, which all of the companies have committed to doing. And there's just loads of this stuff, particularly often showing almost like the same man in his sort of 40s or 50s, who's essentially saying, like, are we witnessing the end of Britain as we knew?

7:15There's uncontrolled mass migration. And they're essentially talking about how the UK is being ruined by immigration. Be honest with me, when you look at our streets, do you even recognise them? Is it the overwhelming scale of mass immigration that has changed us forever? Or is the real culprit the weak leaders who sat back and let it happen? Now, when you look at this account, so this account's called Great British People, and it says it's based in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is spelt wrong. First clue. First clue. And then you go a little bit deeper and what's quite useful on Facebook is they have transparency tools that let you see where the accounts that are running the pages are based.

7:51And you're like, ah, Sri Lanka. I then started looking at loads of the other pages that were engaging with this one page, this is on Facebook, and that were kind of cross posting content or commenting. And so many of them are Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Vietnam. But then also, I kind of go on to Instagram, and there are several that appear to be sort of sympathetic towards Iran and Russia. And there are ones, there are quite a few of them that are based in Europe. But what's interesting, and this is what's different from when we spoke about decline porn before, these are accounts that are pretending they are.

8:23like Great British News, British Daily, British Life, Patriots, they've got the Union Jack flag, they've got all of this stuff, sharing these reels, often with captions saying like, you know, this is really happening or this protest happened. And they're not anywhere near the UK. And seemingly lots of them have like absolutely no connection to here at all. It's absolutely wild. I mean, I saw the Bureau of Investigative Journalism also looked into an Islamophobic account that claimed to be based in the UK, but was actually run by a Pakistani Muslim out of Pakistan, which all just begs the question, why are these people doing it?

8:57I think what has been so revealing about, so I've obviously messaged like loads of these accounts. I've looked into where they're based. And we're talking like dozens of accounts here on Instagram and Facebook. And in some ways it feels like the kind of new frontier of influence operations. And we can discuss what we mean by an influence operation because that's not necessarily just saying like a hostile foreign state influence operation because you've actually got an eclectic mix of accounts. Some of them, for example, the ones that seem to be based in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, look like they're engagement farming, not least because they've often also changed what their page is about.

9:31So they went from, for example, supporting Make America Great Again and Donald Trump during the election to suddenly being like, right, let's now post these anti-immigration AI videos. It does seem strange that these viral engagement accounts are constantly posting pro-MAGA, pro-reform, polarizing, you know, immigrant-focused stuff. There are left-wing forms of viral content. They could be posting about, you know, the war in Gaza. That does very well on social media, but they're not doing that. So for some reason, it does feel like it has a kind of anti-immigration agenda, usually. Yeah, and this is important because actually I've spoken to several of the accounts posting this content, the ones that did reply to me, and some of them have openly admitted that kind of both things can be true.

10:14They want the engagement, sure, but they actually also do have a political agenda. So there's this account that exists on Instagram. It's called Point of View Sensei, but essentially it uses, you know, that trend that was really viral on TikTok kind of like six months ago now, a bit longer than that, where people would post like point of view of like historic events, like you're in the plague, like you've woken up in the world war, like you're living in a different era or time. And what they've done is take that trend, built on it, capitalised on it, and essentially said, right, OK, let's do point of view videos, but these point of view videos are going to show different places around the world in 2050.

10:51So they show loads of British cities like London, Birmingham, Liverpool, all in like a state of decline. So like they're really grubby, there's fires. Can I guess, are there lots of non-white people walking around in these post-apocalyptic visions of London? Correct. There's lots of people who are dressed in traditional Islamic dress, hijabs, for example. I still can't believe this is what London looks like now. Yeah, but the kebabs smell amazing. Should we head over the bridge, find a cleaner spot? The account that I messaged and spoke to about this said to me, and they say they're a team running this account from a European country.

11:24They wouldn't specify which one. And they essentially say, our content has a clear purpose. We aim to inform people and voters about what we believe could happen in the coming decades if current social and cultural trends continue. In our view, there was a growing tendency to suppress one's own cultural identity out of fear of offending others. We believe this is an issue worth discussing openly. And they said that they're based in a European country where, quote, a sense of insecurity has become more noticeable. And then I asked them about because they show Iran, like Tehran, the capital of Iran, as being almost like idyllic.

11:57So it's like a beautiful square and a tram in 2050, which on the surface kind of doesn't make sense because you're like, hang on a second, lots of this other content is clearly like anti-Muslim and anti-immigration, but yet you're choosing a country, an Islamic country, and making that look really nice in 2050. And their response to my kind of questions about that was, this is Iran in an idealized way in order to provoke thought and discussion about political and cultural evolution. So it does seem like they have a political agenda. Yeah. And when I messaged another account on Instagram that had been interacting with some of the content from this point of view Instagram, which is like a British patriotic account, and they were in the UK.

12:36They're based in the West Midlands. And they said to me, oh, look, I engage with a load of different accounts from loads of different places like India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand. We even have a group chat on Instagram where we basically choose to coordinate posts or we'll talk about like, right, so I'm going to post this. Have you posted this? What edits? And that's what's so interesting is - That does appear like a coordinated influence campaign. Well, exactly. And so this is where you get into this kind of gray area of trying to demonstrate whether, for example, these kinds of campaigns are connected to like an actual hostile foreign state power.

13:12Yeah, because it sounds state funded. Yeah, exactly. It's incredibly hard. But what you can prove in these cases is like there's a level of coordination, but their content is broadly very similar. They're not necessarily sharing the same videos, but they will often be sharing videos where all the characters sort of look the same. They have the same vibe and feel. You've then got accounts admitting to me that there are group chats where they will talk about like content and cross-posting and cross-promotion and everything else. And even though this eclectic mix of accounts seem to have kind of slightly different aims in some cases, they ultimately all benefit from boosting each other's stuff and inspiring each other's content and encouraging others to post.

13:49And then you've got actual Brits, like real patriots, not foreign patriots, as they would call themselves, who are like, well, I don't mind if this stuff is coming from abroad because broadly it aligns with my political goals. And it feels like... Even though it's AI, So it's like a fake video made by someone who has no stake in your country. Yeah, and who possibly has never been there at all or doesn't really know anything about it. Why might a foreign country want to ferment kind of anti-immigrant feeling in the UK? I think if you look back to, if we think about the kind of like journey of influence operations from 2016, when there was the Brexit referendum, the US election.

14:27and at that time we know that there were lots of like inauthentic accounts that would post deliberately divisive content for example like young black women graduating from college and then several of those campaigns were traced back to Russia say and the goal of that was to essentially sow division this is the same thing in many ways even though and it's worth saying like lots of these accounts do not seem to be connected to a state power I think they're just doing it off their own backs but this is how this works right it's like AI has become the perfect way of you can create gripping divisive emotional content that's actually increasingly convincing that some people will believe and other people won't believe but it leaves an impression or an idea in their head you can influence opinion and then also lots of other people were genuinely starting to do this off their own back so you can kind of like co-opt pre-existing accounts i've already got big followings that start creating this content you can then astroturf or change your page so that it becomes like focused on a different topic you can make all this stuff if i was running a foreign influence op i mean i'd be like oh duh this is an obvious way of pushing these kinds of ideas and it seems to me that what you found is one of the main ways that ai makes these kind of influence campaigns easier is that it has increasingly become a visual tool and now that you can actually in seconds create an engaging video to go over your diatribe or whatever it is you can now reach hundreds of thousands of people and you might look at this stuff and think this is ridiculous right who believes this but these accounts do have hundreds of thousands of followers it only takes a kind of vocal large minority to influence elections to influence policy yeah and as part of the panorama i've also spoken to quite a few different sort of professors and experts who work in the sort of realm of social psychology and ai and all that kind of stuff and one of them i spoke to a guy called um professor sander van der linden who works at cambridge oh i know yeah sander van der linden professor sander van der linden yeah so he He is a proponent of inoculation theory.

16:24Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah, so we cover it in the Panorama actually because he's got this game called the Bad News Game. You basically play a game as though you're like a misinformation spreader and you see how many followers you can get and it teaches you the tactics of how it works. Like reverse psychology kind of thing. Having spoken to him, because we were on a panel at South by Southwest London, he said that basically if you start, sorry, I'm mansplaining your own film to you. That's all right. But he said that if you basically tell people that they're being manipulated by fake news, then that actually makes them further entrenched because they're like, no, you're lying to me too.

17:00And they feel like you're being aggressive towards them. But if you instead, before they watch a video, show them a little game about how this stuff works and the tactics of fake news. And basically empower them, like give them the agency to spot it for themselves. It trains their mind, it inoculates their mind to fake news. Yeah, which is so interesting. And so I spoke to him about all of this stuff, but specifically around these sort of foreign patriots. And one of the really interesting things we discussed and that he spoke about was how you can use AI to build your following, grow your following, grow your reach, influence.

17:30And then you can sell your account on to another. Like people will want to buy your account because it can then be a kind of influential mechanism by which you can put content out. So you can also see how, for example, the pages based in Sri Lanka could grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, then sell their account to an influence op or whoever else who might want it. Right. So it's almost like they're preempting it. You did it. You wrote the book. But now what? If you're struggling to figure out how to get your manuscript published, Christian Faith Publishing is here to help. They are an author friendly publisher that works with writers just like you.

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18:46Yes, nice earrings, Grammy. And now we're doing it on our phones, too. Video calls from the L train, group chats that never shut up. Neighbors texting you the score before your TV catches up. Get a load of this guy. Catch up on a dog. Yeah, we've got thoughts. Because nothing here gets built without conversation. Nothing moves without connection. So if you think you know AT &T, it might be time to rethink that because their network has improved, like, a lot, which means Chicagoans can keep speaking their mind with the top-rated fiber internet in the city. Chicago won't stop talking. Our improved network backs it up.

19:21AT &T, connecting changes everything. AT &T Fiber limited availability in select areas. Top-rated and fastest internet. AT &T Fiber, based on analysis by Ooclub's Beats Intelligence Data 2H 2025.

19:34Now, how many people are in these coordinated groups? So in terms of the numbers of pages that we're talking about here, we've got like dozens of pages on Facebook and Instagram. In terms of like the mass reach, it's not even about whether you believe it. And there are some people who will believe it. But it's about the drip, drip, drip impact of this stuff. It's like impressionistic and it leaves that feeling. It's like when we're talking about the war sloppoganda. It's like the same thing. It just like creates a narrative over time that you come to believe a kind of version of reality that doesn't actually exist.

20:05Absolutely. And it's very difficult for us to take stock of how our perception of reality is gradually shifted over time. The things that would have outraged us 10 years ago now don't even don't even touch the sides. Right. I mean, there are there's about 10 news stories a day today that would have shocked and been like, you know, a reason for cancellation of a politician's career 10 years ago. All of these stories don't even make it into headlines anymore. But that's because our reality, our perception reality has been gradually shifted over time. When you're seeing slopaganda, when you're seeing this stuff, it just shifts the Overton window in your own brain.

20:40Yeah. And that is the kind of cumulative impact of this. Whether you believe it or not, ultimately, it can change how people vote. It can change people's perception of like society and politics and everything that's going on. And it's getting a huge number of views and likes, which means that it's getting pushed to more people. and people within the UK or outside of the UK. And I think what's crucial here is just the element of deception. There'll be people seeing these accounts who genuinely believe that they are like British news accounts or pro-UK accounts, and they are not. Is that legal? Yeah, it's totally legal.

21:11And what about in terms of the platforms? Does it break their own rules? So all of the social media platforms have guidelines about AI content, labelling it, removing particularly malicious AI content or accounts sharing it. Well, they're pretending to be from the UK. Well, exactly. That's a lie. Well, there is and there are rules around impersonation and around influence ops. But anything that sits in this harmful but legal section. Yeah. They just seem to do a lot less about it. I've obviously contacted Meta. So Meta own Instagram and Facebook about this. And they got back to me. They said, we take coordinated inauthentic behavior seriously and have specialized global teams constantly working to identify and disrupt this type of activity.

21:49will take action on any content or accounts which violate our community standards, which apply to all content, regardless of whether it's created by AI or by a person. One thing that did strike me about what you just said is that it's only dozens of accounts in these groups. I think what that shows is how vulnerable these platforms are and these algorithms are to manipulation. It only takes 12 accounts to reshape the discourse of an entire country's social media feed. And I saw this with Andrew Tate as well. It was a small group of guys who were like, we could game the algorithm if we do this.

22:21And they made him the most famous person overnight. I think that says something about how weak and vulnerable these algorithms and these companies are. Yeah. And I think that if you look at the numbers, like some of these AI videos, lots of them have got more than a million views. Some of them have got like five million views, six. Like this is massive. This is not like small accounts that are getting like a couple of hundred likes and comments. And also they deliberately comment trying to boost their content in the algorithm. And I think that as ever, the technology and the accessibility of AI and how much it's improved in terms of how convincing it is and all of that stuff, it's moved so much quicker than the politicians trying to regulate the social media companies or even than the social media companies themselves can necessarily keep up with.

23:04Like some of these posts are labeled as AI, but quite a lot of them haven't been. I think the accounts that you've identified in these influence operations appear that they could be run by a hostile nation. It wouldn't be surprising. We know that, for example, Iran and Russia spend a lot of money trying to influence our politics through these kinds of influence campaigns. But people should realize that it's not just Russia and Iran that is trying to influence you and shift your perception of reality. Almost everything you see on social media or at least half. Someone has a stake in it. Someone has a stake in it and there's an influence operation behind it.

23:35I mean, that could be, for example, natural gas companies, companies that sell gas have influence campaigns where they're getting influencers to cook on natural gas. Why? Because they're worried about induction hobs replacing gas stoves. So you're always being influenced. Almost everything is an influence. Yeah, exactly. And that's almost that's the lifeblood of social media right now. It's worth saying as well, actually, for the panorama, I spoke to Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, because he's commissioned some research for City Hall. so that's like the mayor's office which suggests that there's been an uptick in this kind of content i mean obviously he's interested in the whole london in decline stuff but a lot of it fits into this wider much wider remit of just like the west and the uk and europe in decline and he he said that his team when doing their research did find evidence of like russian or chinese sort of connections and activity as well as talking about like maga and american influences and so on i did find quite a few examples of us-based pages that were pivoting to posting this kind of content.

24:33But I think that people always want influence operations to be really simple. Like, oh, it's some baddies in a basement in Moscow, like going, ha ha, let's make an AI edit of a video of a man in the UK or whatever. It is kind of that. It is kind of that, but it's like not just that. It's like really quite eclectic. And I think that the more that we can break down and unpick how this stuff works, the easier it is for all of us to spot it. Even if the influence, like whatever the goal of that influence is, it means that you can inoculate yourself against said influence. But we also don't know the extent of what Russia, Iran and China are doing, because it is secretive departments within their governments.