As news emerged of multiple injuries in a terrorist attack on London Bridge, a tweet apparently from Jeremy Corbyn began to circulate on WhatsApp and Twitter.

The tweet shared was an image rather than a link to an original. It showed Mr Corbyn expressing sympathy for the attacker, claiming he was "appalled by the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police" because "an unarmed man [was] shot to death" without a trial, and in another describing the attacker as having been "murdered by British police in broad daylight".

The message spread quickly, driven by those criticising it. One user tweeted: "Disgraceful of Corbyn to say he was murdered by the police, this person was trying to [kill] people FFS."

"Good old Jeremy Corbyn quick to condemn," tweeted another user with almost 20,000 followers. Their message was retweeted more than 110 times.

But the tweet they were criticising was a fabrication. Mr Corbyn had actually said: "Shocking reports from London Bridge. My thoughts are with those caught up in the incident. Thank you to the police and emergency services who are responding."


Shocking reports from London Bridge. My thoughts are with those caught up in the incident. Thank you to the police and emergency services who are responding. — Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) November 29, 2019

The fake tweet convincingly used the actual layout of Twitter's web application to display messages which Mr Corbyn had never written. Nothing other than the content of his tweets were manipulated - the design around the message was accurate.

News organisations, including Sky News, debated whether debunking the messages would limit the spread of false information or counter-productively amplify them. At the time and in this article we have chosen not to publish these fake tweets.

But the question of who had produced these fakes - and to a convincing standard - remained. Why had they bothered? And how did they start spreading around social media when solid evidence contradicting them was literally a click away?

How true are politicians claims over London Bridge?

Sky News and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) have uncovered that this tweet along with other similar efforts were first posted to the internet on the imageboard 4chan before being spread to other social media platforms.

We have obtained a number of these fake images constructed with different grammatical constructions but similar spelling mistakes as they were being collectively workshopped by a decentralised disinformation effort.

"In the hours immediately following the attack we very quickly saw the community on 4chan come together and start sharing fake memes designed to disinform the public about the nature of the attack," said Jacob Davey, senior research manager at ISD.

The material was mostly comprised of falsified social media posts from Mr Corbyn responding to the attack. In some instances the material was not designed to disinform, but more as an in-joke for the community - Mr Corbyn complaining about Arsenal football club using racist language. But other fakes were able to impact the public discussion.

"Although this material appeared to be created by individual users there was a collaborative air around it being shared - with users correcting another when they used the wrong font in their content," Mr Davey said.

Image: Within hours of the attack, disinformation was spreading

But crucially the content that was picked up and shared more broadly around the internet impacted the conversation after the attack by generating hostility towards Mr Corbyn, ISD found.

"In these instances it was the content which seemed most 'believable', and which didn't contain obvious spelling mistakes or explicit slurs which was most widely shared," Mr Davey added.

"The fact that we first observed these images shared on 4chan before spreading throughout the internet demonstrates how disinformation can quickly travel across the internet," explained Mackenzie Hart, research associate at ISD.

"4chan is a notorious source for this sort of material with individuals creating it with the intention of confusing people, and shaping discussion towards their political goals."

Specifically the images were posted on the politically incorrect discussion board (known as /pol/ due to its URL) which is a hub for for neo-Nazi and far-right online activists who focus on producing provocative material to get a rise out of others.

Speaking to Sky News back in 2017, academic researcher Dr Gianluca Stringhini explained how his team had examined the "raiding" behaviour of the /pol/ discussion board's users - in which they visited an external board in an organised fashion in order to distort the discussion.

The fake images of Mr Corbyn's tweets were designed to negatively impact the Labour leader by representing him as sympathetic to terrorists.

Image: The fake messages appeared to come from Jeremy Corbyn

Mr Davey said: "It would appear that the fake Jeremy Corbyn tweets were purposely designed to create confusion and shape online discussion in the aftermath of the attack - both for the purpose of smearing Corbyn, and to generate hostility towards Muslims.

"The fake tweets feed into narratives that have been used by other groups in the run up to the election - such as Corbyn being soft on terror - to further sow doubt amongst voters."

At the same time as fake messages presenting Mr Corbyn as sympathetic to terrorists were spreading, other messages appeared suggesting the London Bridge incident was a false flag attack - a covert operation conducted by one party disguised as another who would receive the blame.

Some of these tweets were the honest opinion of authentic individuals - that is, they were not fakes in the way that the Mr Corbyn tweets were fake - however they were rapidly compiled into handsomely produced images and tagged as being representative of the Labour Party even when the accounts they came from did not appear to endorse Labour.

"The speed with which compilation images of 'false flag' claims were put together shows the hyper-polarised state of politics, with people on the hard left and hard right monitoring each others' activity to seize on content which reinforces their own narratives," explained Mr Davey.

"At this stage we have been unable to confirm whether all of these tweets are genuine or not, but the fact that these compilations were put together so quickly could also suggest that some of this content has been artificially generated with the aim of sewing political discord."

Image: Discussions on social media were manipulated

In at least three situations the ISD found individual users posting their suspicions that the attacks were false-flag operations to multiple Facebook pages which were expected to support the Labour Party and Mr Corbyn.

They had targeted some of the most popular pages on Facebook for their ideological cause and attempted to swing the discussion on these pages by promoting a conspiracy theory.

"We have seen individuals very quickly work to spam these images across multiple Facebook groups in an attempt to skew conversation across their ideological lines," said Ms Hart.

These did appear to be independent individuals, much like the users on 4chan, but even though they believed what they were saying they were exploiting the same mechanisms as people actively trying to spread fake news to try to dominate the debate.

Ms Hart said this highlighted "how distortive practices are being adopted across the board by political activists, and extremists," in their attempts to manipulate the public.

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