Exposed: the faceless accounts inflaming the Ceuta crisis

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1:37You're probably listening to this after the eclipse has happened, but Marcos Llorente, the World Cup winning Spanish defender, posted an image of like clearly AI generated image of a bunch of sheep wearing eclipse sunglasses looking at the eclipse with like alarms on their heads. And it turns out he's actually like an anti-sunscreen, the sun can damage you as a lie, conspiracy theorist type guy. But I just find this so funny because like what's the conspiracy here that we're, like is it like big eclipse sunglass that's making us convince? Well, I think as well, because you've seen all of these cues of people trying to get the glasses, the glasses are now really expensive.

2:14That obviously feeds into the slightly more conspiratorial narratives. It's like, oh, they're telling you to wear the glasses, not because you could go blind, but in fact, because they want to make loads of money from you. And the reason he's gone for sheep is because of the sheeple thing. So basically we're all sheep but wearing these glasses to protect our eyes. We're just following what we're told. Yeah, I feel like we do have a duty as like a public service broadcaster to tell people that, I mean, this is after the eclipse, but you do need the glasses because it will burn your retina. But the idea that like they are somehow withholding like the health benefits of looking directly at the sun from us is such a funny conspiracy to me.

2:45Also the sheep are wearing these COVID masks, aren't they? Which plays into obviously all the conspiratorial content around COVID. I really enjoy this Venn diagram of football players and conspiracy theories because it's actually quite a sizable intersection of footballers who post on social media conspiratorial content, which is not all footballers, but a significant number. I don't know if this is a thing that's popular amongst a lot of footballers, but Andrus Townsend posted recently a picture of him with his children appearing to stare directly into the sun saying one of our daily non-negotiables is getting light into our eyes first thing in the morning.

3:19well when you're listening to this we hope top commenters you won't have been staring at the sun you can still listen to the podcast but you can't watch the youtube you know yeah or the social clips the beauty of this podcast is you can still enjoy it if your retinas have been burnt out by the eclipse one thing i will say is every time there's an eclipse it does seem like the papers will say there's not gonna be another one for a hundred years and then there's like the next year by the way i know there's that's going to trigger a lot of people in the comments obviously See, astronomers, please explain to us why we're wrong about that.

3:46But it does feel like there's an eclipse every bloody week these days. Okay, so on the episode today, we're not actually just going to be talking about the eclipse and footballers dabbling in conspiracy theories. So everyone still is talking about the Suta crisis, where almost 80 ,000 migrants attempted to reach Europe through Suta. A hundred of them died. It's been chewed over by social media. There's been right-wing conspiracies, talk of an invasion. There's been left-wing conspiracies. but you've been doing some investigative work to figure out who is really behind this. Yeah, so we're going to be getting into how I created this dummy account in order to investigate a network of seemingly interconnected Instagram profiles that publicly are posting aspirational content about Souter, getting lots and lots of views and engagement.

4:30But then behind the scenes on private chats, I'm going to expose how they appear to be encouraging people to risk their lives for profit.

4:44Whatever your algorithms are looking like at the moment in your feeds, it is highly likely that you will have seen some content or chatter or posts about this enclave, the Spanish enclave called Suta. And we're going to dig into and unpick the role that social media has played in what happened. But just to remind people what a big deal this has been, basically, and the risk to life that it's posed. So as many as 78 ,000 migrants arrived in Souter from Morocco within hours. This happened right at the end of July and it's estimated that there were at least 100 deaths. Now, quite a few of the posts about Souter posted on social media in the build up to lots of people trying to head to the enclave, mentioned or focused on or referenced this court ruling that concluded that essentially people who reach Souter, the enclave, by water can't be returned until there's a judicial review.

5:40But what we know is that in the vast majority of cases, you know, if you're an economic migrant, that judicial review is going to find that you can't stay there and you're not going to be granted refugee status. That particular ruling spread far and wide on social media, but it's not that on its own. There's actually a whole ecosystem of content about Souter. There were loads of incredibly viral videos I was seeing, like there's this one, isn't there, of the two of the women in the wetsuits walking around Souter? I think that was the kind of patient zero post of this. It was the first thing that I saw.

6:08It was one of the most viral ones. Yeah, it was two women and they're in Suta and they're very happy. They're wet, so they've clearly just been swimming. And it was viewed 32 million times. I think the context of that post was actually saying Suta can't handle more migrants. But that image of these two happy women who's just come out of the water in Suta went viral in Morocco. The effect that this event had on social media in a number of different ways was huge. So on the right, you had people like Tommy Robinson saying that Ceuta has been turned into a third world city in 48 hours. Musk referred to this as an invasion.

6:45Nigel Farage kind of brought up again his famous breaking point poster of lots of non-white refugees pouring into the UK. At the same time, on the left, instantly we saw conspiracies that this was potentially coordinated by the Moroccan government on behalf of the US and Israel as kind of revenge for Spain's criticism of Israel and how they conducted themselves in Gaza. And so both of those narratives kind of dominated social media. What actually was behind this? So there are lots of journalists who have been discussing the role that social media played and what happened here. We've seen reporting from the ground, which suggests that people who arrived in Suta specifically said that they'd seen posts on social media that contributed to them deciding to head there.

7:28But what we've not seen and what's different about what we're doing here on Top Comment is trying to actually get to the bottom of hang on a second, like which exact post, what accounts and what really is behind all of this? Who is behind it? And so I started to look at lots of the accounts and profiles that were sharing this kind of content. and I think quite a good way of describing it is almost like mirage content so this idea that the posts are advertising Suta in a way that's possibly misleading like oh you can just swim over to Suta there you go easy there's also lots of content showing people once they get there you know like out and about sitting in the streets making it look idyllic's maybe a little bit strong but just making it look very appealing and attractive and we know that you know lots of people have lost their lives making that crossing so the idea that it's a really straightforward swim is not true um what are the accounts that are posting this mirage content so when you look at these profiles a lot of them are you know they'll have the spanish flag as their profile picture they'll often have like the calling code for like morocco and then they'll do an arrow and have the calling code for spain so it's like advertising the merits of going to suitor like kind of aspirational stories of, oh, this person managed to make it to Suta.

8:43But presumably this kind of pro-migration content, this mirage content has been going on for a while. What's behind this recent influx? Yeah, so we know that everything surrounding Suta, people trying to travel there, is not entirely new. And a lot of these accounts predate what's happening right now. But I think what's crucial here, and this is what I've been investigating, is that actually what might seem like an eclectic mix of content that's just coming from creators, profiles that want to post about Suta is actually, it seems, a little bit more organised and a little bit more sinister than you might think.

9:18So what I started to notice when I was looking into these videos, like the most viral ones, the most recent ones, is that a lot of the accounts had really similar names. It wasn't just that they had the Spanish flag or similar captions. They were essentially called the same thing. Haraga Suta. and haraga in arabic seems to have this dual meaning so it essentially means burner but in maghrebian arabic which is the kind of arabic that they would speak in in morocco it's a word that's often used in relation to immigration migration this idea that you travel somewhere and then you burn all your papers so that you're able to kind of like arrive set up a new life yeah exactly um and obviously burner also means in like our social media world like burner account right like it's an account that you set up and then you might remove it or it has a particular purpose usually burner accounts aren't done in your like own name they have a different identity and also usually the type of account you set up if you're doing something dodgy yeah exactly and you don't necessarily want people to know who you are and why you're running that account and what you're up to and so when i started to look at these accounts i realized that there were dozens you know we're getting up to like 40 accounts on instagram that were essentially called haraga suta with like a number or with a underscore with a dot some of them had tens of thousands of followers and were getting tens of thousands of views some of them were were smaller are smaller so I messaged quite a few of these accounts on my profile so my BBC profile which obviously I make really clear that I'm a journalist I investigate social media at the BBC and I just wanted to ask them some questions about their accounts and what they were doing and what was interesting is several of the smaller accounts I was talking to said to me look these bigger accounts are essentially run by people that will offer you assistance to cross to suitor to get to suitor.

10:55And then I was like, oh, hold on a second. So a lot of this viral content is actually not just Mirage content trying to make it look appealing. It's actually also almost like an advert for a service, right? So you're suspecting that there might be some kind of coordinated thing going on behind all this content. Were there any other clues as to who might be behind it? Yeah. So the other thing I started to notice is that several of the profiles, not all of them, but like kind of clusters of them seem to be connected to each other. So not only would they be frequently interacting with each other's content resharing it that they all follow each other but also they would have whatsapp numbers or email addresses connected to those profiles that were the same on several profiles so it wasn't like they were completely unique they actually took me to the same place so i'd be like messaging one account and it would say all right this is how you contact it often set up almost like a business profile on instagram and then you'd go to message it and then it would take you to like the same whatsapp number that another profile would take you so i started to be like whoa okay hang on i think actually a lot of these accounts are either being run by the same person or the same group of people or are connected to one another and what was interesting is even as me like as an investigative journalist who's looking into these accounts like i told them it really up front they're like adding me to whatsapp groups so there was one evening on monday night i got home and i was like being called in all these random whatsapp groups i was like what is going on here and even though i kept kind of explaining i was a journalist they didn't really seem to care and like the combination of all these things which which we would call sort of prima facie evidence.

12:21So when you start to have like a critical mass of evidence that suggests to you, whoa, something might be a bit dodgy here, you then go, right, how do we actually demonstrate or test or verify or figure out whether they are actually offering people help and services? And so we get to this point where we're like, actually, shall I set up a dummy account, a burner account myself in order to test that? So this would be you pretending to be a want-to-be migrant from Morocco. Exactly. And I mean, this is the same, and you know this really well, but it's the same across any investigative journalism, particularly with regards to like social media and dummy accounts and all that kind of stuff.

12:58The public interest obviously has to trump and be higher than the level of deception. And I think what's really crucial to also understand here is that a lot of these accounts are posting about people trying to cross to Suta again this weekend. So you've got a kind of imminent, like, whoa, hang on a second. More people might possibly lose their lives, drown. And these accounts are actively still posting They're still getting tens of thousands of views in lots of cases. And they do seem to be, according to the other evidence we have, coordinating with each other or trying to help people. So you're then in a position where you are able to create a dummy account who we called Mohammed because it's one of the most popular names in Morocco.

13:34And that we set up to essentially look like a lot of the accounts that I had been speaking to or engaging with. Quite straightforward, really. Like you want to have some interest. So this profile we decided likes football. So they were following lots of like different footballer accounts, that kind of thing. They also had like a caption in the bio that was similar to kind of some of the other ones, some emojis, all that sorts of stuff. And then went and followed a lot of these Haragasuta accounts so that I could message them. So you've already got the kind of prima facie evidence that there's something coordinated going on here.

14:07And it does appear to be quite organized and coordinated, especially by how quickly you were filtered into those WhatsApp groups. there's a number of people involved now you're posing as a fake moroccan migrant what happened next so then i message a load of people and we always agree as well like how we're going to engage with other accounts right because there's like different levels of deception so obviously messaging people is a pretty like low level of deception versus say calling someone up or organizing to meet them so i i messaged quite a few of the accounts where i had evidence that suggests or indicates that they could be involved in offering people help to cross.

14:42So I message and I say, hello, I've seen your videos. Can you help me? I live in Meknes, which is a city in Morocco that's not too far from Suta, but also not right by it. And it's not a particularly affluent area of the country. And I say, and I want to cross into Suta this Saturday to start a new life in Spain. So I sent that similar message to a lot of different accounts. And at first it was, it was quite quiet. I was like, oh, no one's replying. I wonder if they're going to reply to me because on my journalistic account, obviously people had replied to me like really quite quickly also because I have a verified account this is a new account it's private so people can't see my posts but then then late last night I'm on my way home and I get a message and the message is from one of the I'd say medium to bigger sized accounts so it's got nearly 20 000 followers and this profile gets back and basically says what do you want me to help you with so then I go back and we'd agree to kind of like a little bit of a path where you'd call it so like generally what you're doing is just asking like really straightforward questions because you just want facts and you want facts that are in the public interest to get out this person so specifically like what are you offering how much does it cost that sort of stuff so i say can i pay you for help getting to suitor and do you know of any other instagram accounts that can help me then the account comes back and says yes 5 000 dirhams up front 5 000 moroccan dirham is the equivalent to 400 british pounds they suggest doing it through something called cash plus and then they say i'll i'll give you information that will help you enter suta and i say okay i can do that how can i get this information and have you helped other people cross before he says yes many people and then i say okay well how will i get this information what kind of information is it i want to reach suta safely and then he starts talking to me about the sewer pipes he says through the sewer pipe.

16:30So we do know that there have been examples of where migrants have been found often in sewer pipes or trying to kind of half-cross to Suta, not by swimming, but by going through the system of... A sewer pipe from the mainland? Yeah. Wow. I mean, as you can imagine, not the safest thing to do. No. And I then said, so are there lots of Instagram accounts that help like this? I've noticed there are a lot of them. Obviously, my account was following lots of them. And then I said, well, I get a refund if this doesn't work. how can I send you the money and they got back to me saying yes to that question of there's a lot of accounts that will help you and then they said via bank account they didn't mention any refund or that I could get my money back and then I said thank you and could you help me this weekend is August the 15th the best day to which they just came back and said yes and then I went back again and said what are your bank account details and I haven't heard from the profile since but what's really interesting is this same profile is one of the ones that responded to me when I first started messaging.

17:31And when I messaged this account originally, they said to me, okay, yeah, I'll answer your question. So I sent through a list. When you were messaging as a journalist. This is as a journalist as myself a few days ago, when I messaged and asked, can you tell me a bit more about your account? Why are you posting this profile? Are you helping people? All that kinds of stuff. Their response was, I do not encourage immigration to suit it. Wow. So you completely caught him out there. Yeah, but that is exactly what he's doing. And what's interesting is, you know, this is one of the profiles that connects back to this kind of network of email addresses, WhatsApps, different profiles that are all very similar and or appear to be working together or at least are aligned in what they're doing.

18:12And the fact that this same account I had messaged only a couple of days before and then they responded so readily to the burner suggests to me that, you know, it's not like they're only messaging me and the fake account, right? They're messaging like loads of different people, or why would they respond to me so readily offering their services in that way? That's incredible. Okay, so this migrant crisis happened, the internet is chewing it over, making all sorts of conclusions. You've uncovered that there's this huge wave of content from Morocco that's painting migrating through Suta as this appealing thing.

18:46First, First, you contacted the accounts behind it and they seemed to be kind of coordinated. You then went undercover and you actually got invited by one of these accounts to pay them to smuggle you to Suta through a sewer. Yeah, exactly that. And the thing that's, I think, important for people to understand is a lot of this content that these profiles are posting is super viral, right? You could just be a young person in Morocco who's being recommended this on your Instagram feed. And we know from a lot of the reporting on the ground that various people who arrived in Suta and who did make the crossing said that they specifically saw this kind of content and or the misinformation about the ruling that we mentioned in Spain in the Supreme Court and that that played an active part in them deciding to travel.

19:30So essentially you've got this world where it's not just that people are like themselves going and seeking out these profiles, but that this content is actively amplified by the algorithms on Instagram. And that content becomes the gateway to connecting with people who can then offer you these services, which ultimately probably put you at risk and or scam you essentially because you are going to pay a whole lot of money for something that may or may not work and may actually kill you. Yeah. And by the way, this isn't just the Suitsa crisis. This is how human traffickers and people smugglers operate all across Europe.

20:03The Albanian mafia use social media. People who organize small boats crossings to this country, the UK, also use social media. And what you've uncovered here is essentially an organized crime network that is tricking people through this illusion, this mirage content, as you're calling it, on social media, to pay them money to do something that could end in them dying and drowning. and definitely doesn't work, by the way, because remember, none of these people appear to have made it to mainland Europe. I think that one of the things that has really struck me about all of this is how easy it is really to set up an Instagram account like this.

20:37This is not my dummy account, but rather the profiles we're talking about that seem to be part of this kind of interconnected network. How easy it is for them to grow their reach, to post this stuff. And like, you know, we're not saying that this is like the mafia in Morocco. These could actually just be someone who's like, great, this is a way of me making money out of people who are possibly like quite vulnerable who really really want a better life and have decided they want to travel and i'm going to kind of exploit that essentially and i can make quite a significant amount of money right like if that that same account that replied to me is getting 10 20 30 messages a day they're making thousands of pounds in theory and well i think there's loads of misconceptions about the role that social media plays in migrant crises in general I think in particular, like lots of people think of it as like, oh, all this stuff happens on the dark web or in hidden places or in like, you know, the dark corners of like you have to be on this app or in this place.

21:29Actually, this is happening like what we would maybe consider like in plain sight. It's just happening on Instagram. And what's really interesting is a lot of these profiles include this caveat at the top of their profile. A bit like, you know, when people used to post on Twitter, like retweets are not my views or whatever, or views my own, not my organisations, that kind of thing. they'll have little captions that are like this account does not incite migration to suitor as though that is a sort of like get out that then instagram and to be honest like in theory it's working because their content is still being recommended by the algorithms and instagram is allowing these profiles to exist which i very quickly came to realize seemed well yeah this is the this is the the bigger story here right is arguably what you're what you've uncovered demonstrates that these social media companies could be to some degree some might say responsible for a crisis that ended in 100 people dying and 80 ,000 people almost trying to get to Europe.

22:22I mean, if something happened like that in the UK or in the US where these companies are based, 100 people dying because of a kind of almost like a mass mirage created on social media, surely people would be furious at the social media companies behind it. Yeah, and understandably, there has been a lot of scrutiny of the authorities, whether that's in Morocco or whether that's people looking at kind of like Spanish politicians and the government there, or whether it's people, you know, wanting to hold accountable the individuals trying to cross or individuals encouraging, all this kind of stuff.

22:52But what often is lost in that conversation and what I've really thought is that a lot of the discussion about social media is quite sort of like nebulous. Everyone will be like, oh, I think social media played a part here. There was a bit of misinformation about something and maybe it played, but there's no accountability. Like the companies don't seem to have to answer any difficult questions. We do know that the European Commission have been in conversation with Meta and with TikTok and there's been an agreement that they will look to sort of ad hoc fact check, misinfo about Souter in the wake of what's just happened.

23:22But like what we're talking about here is - Which is pretty significant for them to say, okay, this is actually bad. We have to do something about it. Yeah. And also because the European Commission are pretty firm when it comes to the social media companies. It's been the same with X. Like they've often threatened to kind of like either ban them or fine them or all sorts of other stuff. So you can see how the companies are clearly engaging with them and making this decision. I mean, there's two issues here. One is that this stuff is always reactive, right? Like it always is after the fact. Like it doesn't change what has already happened.

23:49And the second thing is that, okay, yeah, bung some fact check labels on these posts. Sure, maybe that will make a difference to a small number of people that might see those posts. And it's not necessarily a bad thing to do that. But it doesn't resolve the issue of a whole group of accounts that are basically able to game the algorithms, draw people into their content, message them on Instagram's own platform. Like, I mean, in some cases, I have been going over to WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta. But in lots of cases, like this is happening on Instagram DM. Like this is just happening. And I know, OK, fine, that's not happening in plain sight.

24:20It's not happening in the comments. But it doesn't take a genius to work out that there's clearly something like slightly dodgy going on here, not least because the accounts are all not in their real name, not real identities, posting this kind of stuff. And OK, they could argue that they don't necessarily have grounds to remove these profiles or to take them down because their public facing content is not violating any policies. But they don't have to be actively recommending this stuff. And if they weren't actively recommending it, then these people probably wouldn't be doing what they're doing in quite the same way because they wouldn't be able to draw people like my dummy account into speaking to them and they wouldn't be able to make as much money.

24:54I think this story, it's the perfect story because the same type of story we come to again and again on this podcast, it perfectly encapsulates the dangers of social media. We often talk about there's two kinds of stories we do on Top Comment. One is the kind of story where something that happens in social media bleeds into the real world, where the unreality of social media causes a real world event. In this case, like in so many cases, it's a mirage, a lie that exists only in the world of fake social media that leads to a huge tragedy that ends in 100 people dying. But the other kind of story that we often talk about is stories where something that happens in the real world is distorted through social media.

25:31And this is that story too, because the second act of this story of the Suta crisis is how it has been chewed over by people on social media who've used it to play into this idea that this is an intentional invasion of Europe by migrants. And it's not just political accounts that are posting this stuff. It's also accounts with links to the Russian military. So there was an analysis that found that more than 500 ,000 people in the days following the mass influx of people in Tisuta, according to 411, which is a counter disinformation network, came from accounts with links to the Russian military, especially the Pravda network.

26:06And this is all about destabilizing Europe by making people worry that, you know, migrants are invading this continent. It's similar to like the Belfast riots and the Southampton riots that we spoke about, where it turned out that over half of the posts about those events came from abroad, did not come from the UK. And in some ways, it doesn't surprise us, right, because we sit here and chat about this every week. But the divisive social media content about topics that are controversial and will trigger a reaction and discussion, like immigration, for example, those are then jumped on by what we often refer to in the social media world as like bad actors.

26:44I mean, it succeeds. and also the other thing it succeeds in doing is kind of masking or distracting from maybe distracting is the right way of putting it it serves as a distraction from the stuff we're talking about like the network of accounts because then people are talking about like oh well it's the russians or oh it's this or it's all part of this far-right narrative or it's x y z and no one is actually saying hang on a second like let's go back to the beginning like where did this actually come from and how did it work exactly and again this shows that social media is actually quite easily manipulated, the algorithms are quite easily manipulated by a small group of people who want to sell you a lie in order, in this case, to make money even at risk to yourself.

27:23And what's so crazy about this story is the event, the tragic event itself, was woven out of thin air, arguably by people who have a financial interest in selling you this idea because they're making money off of it. And the ramifications of it and the political division that it resulted from it, that led to Farage posting about it, Robinson posting about it, all this stuff, was also a complete distortion because there's been no reports of them making it to Europe. I got in touch with Meta, which owns Instagram, about what I've been investigating and put these allegations to them. Meta told me, quote, we have a team monitoring the situation in Souter in real time and removing content that violates our policies, including content that offers to provide, facilitate or seek human smuggling services.