Who’s behind the Facebook page posting hateful AI slop about the UK? The answer might lie in south Asia | Niamh McIntyre

Key points

• Scroll through any Facebook feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you’re likely to come across an account with a union jack profile picture and a vague, generic name like Britain Today.
• These accounts – and there are hundreds, possibly thousands of them – present themselves as the work of British patriots.
• In one typical, AI-generated video, a middle-aged man claims his local cafe “has stopped serving pork, bacon and sausages just to avoid offending people”.
• Another post from the same account includes a sepia-tinted set of images of Victorian London, mourning a time when the city “was English, first-world and beautiful”.
• Alongside this type of reactionary nostalgia, it’s not unusual to see memes that call Islam a “cancer”, decry Muslims praying in public as an “invasion of the west” or promote the “great replacement theory” (which claims that white populations are being deliberately replaced...