Is Burnham right to blame Russia for spreading online disinformation?

After Prime Minister Andy Burnham put Russia-linked disinformation campaigns under the spotlight, BBC Verify has been examining how these attempts to influence people's opinions work.

We have tracked – and debunked – numerous online disinformation campaigns produced by Russia-linked groups that have attempted to shift public opinion on issues like the war with Ukraine, influence elections in the US and Germany, damage social cohesion and undermine trust in authorities or institutions.

In his UN speech, Burnham said there was an "insidious campaign" being carried out by the Russian government to target people in the UK.

Last year, a series of fake videos featuring British public sector workers appeared online.

Among them was a 999 call operator in Preston named Aaron, who told BBC Verify he was shocked to find out his voice had been cloned with AI to create a fake video of him talking about the 2025 Polish presidential election.

Those videos are part of a major Russian-linked disinformation campaign known as Matryoshka, which BBC Verify and other research groups have been tracking.

AI is used to create fake videos - sometimes dozens a day - which impersonate journalists and major news organisations like the BBC to push disinformation about Ukraine and Western countries onto people's social media feeds. But Aaron's case indicates ordinary British citizens could also be a target.

In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, BBC Verify reported how there was a shift in focus from Ukraine to post fabricated videos about the US election. We are once again seeing early evidence of similar misleading videos ahead of November's US midterm elections.

BBC Verify has previously exposed a large-scale disinformation campaign run by a former US police officer now based in Russia. With the help of AI, the operation created hundreds of fake local news websites in the UK, US, France and other Western countries with the aim of spreading completely made-up stories.

One of these was a fake news website called the London Crier which falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had bought a mansion owned by King Charles at a bargain price.

It was seen by hundreds of thousands of users on X and shared by an official Russian embassy account.

We also found that a fake AI-narrated video on YouTube was the source of the bogus story. The platform removed it after we reported it.

And in 2023, BBC Verify found a major propaganda operation involving bogus accounts on TikTok, which posted misleading videos in multiple languages - including English - generating millions of views, with the aim of influencing the views of users in several European countries about the war in Ukraine.

TikTok removed more than 12,000 fake accounts involved in the operation, saying its investigation indicated that the accounts originated from Russia.

Another campaign was discovered during the 2019 UK general election campaign when a trove of confidential documents about a possible trade deal between the UK and US was posted by an anonymous user on the platform Reddit and later used by the Labour Party in its campaign.

While the documents appeared to be genuine, Reddit later confirmed in a statement the leak "was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia".

But there are questions about how widespread or effective some of these disinformation campaigns are in reality.

While many of them appear to be extensive and organised, it is hard to determine how widely they have spread or how significant a role they have played in actually influencing people.

Russia is also not alone in using industrial-scale disinformation campaigns which spread false information to further its own geopolitical aims, as other authoritarian governments like China, North Korea and Iran are also major players in online disinformation.

BBC Verify has previously reported on a number of X accounts posting in support of Scottish independence, but whose location information indicated they originated from Iran.

And, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the BBC discovered a network of more than 1,200 faked or hijacked accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that posted pro-Chinese government and anti-US messages.

There is evidence to suggest Western governments also engage in disinformation campaigns, although the scale of their operations are not always clear.

An investigation by Reuters in 2024 revealed that during the Covid pandemic, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation to discredit China's Sinovac jab.

And Meta has previously removed an influence campaign originating from France that targeted a number of countries in Africa.

AI has also exacerbated the spread of disinformation, as images can now be more easily faked and videos misleadingly edited using text prompts.

Text generation has also improved and can create plausible, authoritative and coherent sounding fake news reports.

BBC Verify saw evidence of this during US-Israel war with Iran. While in the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict most of the disinformation published online consisted of old or misleading videos and inaccurate claims, we have seen a deluge of AI-generated images and videos since the Iran war began back in February of this year.

Carl Miller, an author and founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, told BBC Verify that state-run influence operations "amplify and exploit existing grievances and fissures - making it really hard to work out exactly what sort of effect they might have".

"Influence operations are quite fragile things, usually, and we need to find ways of making them much more likely to fail if they target us," he added.

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