Exposing Russian interference in the UK election

In the penultimate days of this year’s UK election campaign, ABC NEWS reporters discovered a network of Facebook pages spreading pro-Kremlin talking points, racist memes and posts in support of the Conservative Party’s biggest electoral rival, Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party.The five Facebook pages were seemingly unconnected and claimed to be based in the UK, but reporters Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen found all of them were networked and administrated out of Nigeria. Meta, which owns Facebook, has previously acknowledged Nigeria is a base of operations for Russian-linked influence efforts targeting Western audiences online.The Facebook pages had a combined 190,000 followers and some of their posts had been shared by Reform UK candidates. Claims stemming from Russian state media were also being promoted by the pages, including criticism of Western support for Ukraine and misinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Examples of AI-generated…