It starts with a tragic event; a woman goes missing, a young man attacks children at a dance class, and a female politician is brutally killed in her home.
At first the online discussions are purely factual – dates, times and places – as people process what has happened. But, within hours, neighbourhood Facebook groups are awash with wild theories, prominent X accounts are suggesting a cover-up and hard Right politicians are promising to get to the bottom of it. In a matter of hours, the truth is left gasping for air beneath a tsunami of misinformation.
Conspiracies around major global events are nothing new; there have always been groups of people questioning what most of us accept as reality. What has changed recently are the number of people unwittingly spreading conspiracy narratives, the willingness of right wing politicians to jump on the bandwagon, and the negative effect on both policing and democracy.
The Lead took a deep dive into the misinformation eco-system to explain how conspiracy-spreading techniques are being used to promote an increasingly extreme political agenda.
The Event
On July 9th reports emerged in the press that Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe had died. Noting her age (seventy-eight) and listing the achievements of her political career, no information was given regarding her cause of death and the tone of the articles suggested no wrong-doing.
The following day, new reports emerged. Widdecombe’s death was now the subject of a murder investigation and a twenty-six year old man had been arrested and released without charge. The sudden change, coupled with police suggesting there was no political motivation, blew up comment sections across multiple platforms as everyone suddenly had an opinion on what had happened.
Over the next twelve days, another suspect (28 year old Joshua Kerry) was arrested and charged with murder as four newspapers published images of him taken from social media. These, coupled with two court sketches of Kerry attending bail hearings and a paparazzi photo of him in the back of a police van kick-started the conspiracy machine.
By the end of July 22nd, barely two weeks after Ann’s death, known conspiracists had claimed that Kerry wasn’t a real person, Tommy Robinson incorrectly identified him as a man speaking at a Communist Party conference in 2023, and Nigel Farage wrote an article in the Sun, claiming to have it “on good authority” that Kerry was a “hard Left activist”.
The ongoing police investigation means that we can report on what is being claimed but cannot verify or rule on guilt or the specific claims made against Kerry. This has not stopped the public from speculating, and the people involved are just some of the many who have made their careers capitalising on inflammatory misinformation.
To understand what motivates them, The Lead approached Dr Daniel Jolley, a social psychologist who leads Nottingham University’s programme on the psychology of conspiracy theories. Responding by email, he wrote that there were differences between those who deliberately spread conspiracies and those who believed every word of them and “may see themselves as helping others or exposing wrongdoing”.
For these people, he wrote, “conspiracy theories can give them a sense that they possess important knowledge that others have missed – that they can see what is ‘really’ going on beneath the surface.
“This is particularly appealing if people have a desire to feel unique, particularly within communities where uncovering supposed hidden truths is valued. There can also be a sense of purpose and belonging that comes from being part of a community working together to expose perceived wrongdoing. That connection with similar minded people can be powerful.”
For those whose entire career is dependent upon such people, it is vital that they are kept questioning the narrative around traumatic events.
The Influencers
Jacqui Deevoy is a well-known voice in conspiracy circles. A former journalist for UK national newspapers, she now writes for her own Substack, conspiracy publication The Light, and the far right website Unity News Network.
Initially gaining traction during Covid, her unevidenced claims that the pandemic was a hoax found her in good company on social media. In 2023, her profile was further boosted during the disappearance and death of Nicola Bulley. Taking the stance of “just asking questions” (a conspiracy-seeding technique which allows for maximum reach with minimum personal accountability) Deevoy wrote multiple posts and articles questioning whether Nicola Bulley was a real person.
Suggesting that Nicola’s death was a false flag, invented by the government to usher in the digital ID and “[micro]chippping system”, Deevoy repeatedly asked to speak to people who knew Nicola in person. As friends of Nicola’s family responded, she dismissed their statements because they only knew her “third hand”.
Deevoy has recently made similar posts about Joshua Kerry. This time she is questioning his existence because a picture of him from 2022 looks different to the picture of him taken in a police van last month, and neither are completely identical to the various court-room sketches. Her questions have been echoed by multiple social media users on various platforms, each offering increasingly bizarre and unevidenced explanations.
The lack of information created by the ongoing police investigation has left a void, which those keen to feel unique and purposeful have filled with every possible conspiracy theory. Already primed by influencers like Deevoy to see any official silence as a cover-up, the longer this persists, the harder they try to fill it with “answers” and the more questions are posed by those keen to monetise their confusion.
When The Lead questioned Deevoy about her claims, she wrote “in these days of A.I. and social media, it’s often difficult to know what’s fake and what’s real, what’s true and what’s false and what’s a psy-op, a false flag operation or a real event. As an old-school journalist, my first port of call has always been to establish if the people involved in a story actually exist.”
Adding that “the way things are right now, I need to see things with my own eyes before I believe it,” Deevoy said she had personally seen “zero proof of [Nicola Bulley’s] existence.” Deevoy also noted that she had never made a concrete statement in this regard and “merely dared to ask the question”.
Regarding the impact of her posts on the families involved, Deevoy wrote that she was unaware of “any statements from any relatives who’ve claimed to be impacted by anything I’ve written”. In 2023, Nicola’s husband described the online obsession with the case as a “monster that got out of control” and comments on Deevoy’s X posts show the immediate responses of people who knew both Nicola and her family.
Dr Jolley explained that people only believing what they have personally experienced came from an “extreme erosion of trust in traditional sources of knowledge” and that “once somebody starts from the position that governments, journalists, police, scientists or other institutions may all be deceptive, the usual ways we establish whether something is true become much less persuasive.” Noting that this can lead to personal experience feeling like the only trustworthy source of evidence, he added that “you can end up with an almost impossible standard of proof…the absence of personally verifiable evidence can itself then become suspicious.”
The Politicians
Trust in the media is at an all-time low and a recent study conducted by Kings College showed that those who used “alternative media sources” (including social media) were more likely to believe in specific conspiracies about the pandemic, the far-right Great Replacement Theory, or that the Manchester bombing was a hoax.
Hard and Far Right politicians have spent years cultivating this mistrust in much the same way as conspiracy theorists; relying on constituents’ limited knowledge of the law and policing to present a lack of public information as ‘the Establishment’ deliberately seeking to mislead them.
In the wake of the Southport murders, as conspiracists claimed the attack to be a psy-op, Reform party leader Nigel Farage publicly questioned whether the attacker was being monitored by security services, seemingly echoing false claims that had previously been circling social media that the suspect was an asylum seeker and on an M16 watch list. Following the ‘just asking questions’ model he said “police say it was a non–terror incident … I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us?”
The attacker – a British-Rwandan boy named Axel Rudakubana – was seventeen years old and protected from public identification by the Children and Young People’s Act which prevents the naming of anyone under eighteen. Whilst Farage’s followers and those who attended the subsequent riots could conceivably be unaware of this, Farage, as a senior political figure, would be expected to know that reporting restrictions apply to minors.
He employed the same technique when dealing with the death of Ann Widdecombe. Fully aware of the fact that police often withhold information during an active investigation, he used the event to publicly speculate about Kerry’s political leanings and claim that the “Westminster establishment” wanted to “sweep it under the rug”.
The long-term impact of this type of misinformation, according to Dr Jolley, is that it “reduces trust in the institutions and processes that allow democratic societies to function. If elections, journalists, courts, scientists or public bodies are routinely interpreted as part of some hidden plot”, he continued, “it becomes increasingly difficult to establish a shared understanding of events.”
This then leads to “political disengagement, prejudice and, in some circumstances, greater willingness to endorse political violence…[and] when prominent political figures then repeat or legitimise those claims, that can give them an additional layer of credibility. Something that might initially have existed on the fringes can therefore become part of mainstream political discussion.”
The Law
Assistant Chief Constable Arman Mathieson, NPCC lead for information disorder, told us of the impact of these fringe beliefs on policing.
“The growth of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy narratives present a significant challenge”, he wrote. “Events such as Southport demonstrated the real-world risks that can arise when false information spreads rapidly online, undermining investigations, damaging community cohesion and, in some cases, contributing to public disorder and harm”.
“In response, policing has made substantial changes to the way it communicates with the public and media. Forces are providing clearer and faster updates during major incidents, supported by new national guidance on the release of information, including suspect ethnicity and nationality where certain criteria are met…all designed to improve transparency, consistency, and the timely provision of accurate information.
“Recognising the scale of the challenge, policing has established a national Information Disorder Portfolio, supported by policing, Government and partner agencies, to strengthen prevention, response and ethical decision making across forces.”
By encouraging the public to “recognise that misinformation, disinformation and malinformation all exists, and…always carefully consider the information they read and share online, and to seek accurate information from trusted authorities,” Mathieson made it clear that police are hoping to disrupt the misinformation cycle. If their strategy is effective, it will enable the public to rebuild their trust in regulated media outlets and become less vulnerable to conspiracy narratives.
Despite a public warning from the CPS Chief Prosecutor in the Widdecombe case that “proceedings against the defendant are active and he has the right to a fair trial. It is vital that there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information which could in any way prejudice these proceedings,” neither Farage nor anyone else sharing misinformation has been censured under Contempt of Court law.
Whether that gap between law and enforcement narrows remains to be seen. But as Mathieson’s own reforms acknowledge, policing can only do so much to contain a misinformation ecosystem that political figures continue to feed — largely without consequence. ■
About the author: Katherine Denkinson is a freelance investigative journalist with an extensive body of work on conspiracies and the the Far Right, published in multiple UK newspapers. Her reporting is informed by traditional journalistic methods and OSINT techniques, focusing on deep-dives into the murky waters of online communities. She is also the co-host of chart topping podcast, Carrie Jade Does Not Exist.
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This is the first part in our series aiming to tackle the misinformation ecosystem being built in Britain, and digging into the dark forces behind it. Subscribe to The Lead today to support our reporting.
Great pinpointing of that classic conspiracy tactic … “I’m just asking questions”
I remember all the 'theorising' that went on in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's assassination and it didn't need social media to feed it. Conspiracies are as old as the hills.