Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr

March 7-8, 2026 — Interests associated with America (including tech bros), Iran, China and Russia are all threatening UK democracy via corrupt social media bots and algorithms, according to one of Britain’s most powerful checks on government power.

Women are especially under attack right now, with Sunday being the 115th International Women’s Day — when the UN is calling for the dismantling of barriers to equality and justice.

Online abuse is rife said Emily Thornberry, a Labour Member of Parliament and chair of the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee — she was not appointed by the government or the party leadership but directly by MPs — so she’s trusted by elected folks representing the people …and she plans a hearing with tech companies this week, including an X executive via video link.

She was even thinking of putting an X on X’s seat at the hearing because there are essentially no senior X employees in Britain.

Intelligence agencies including Britain’s have found high levels of disinformation and propaganda warfare, putting legitimate journalists under attack and eroding the spread of important news, Thornberry said Friday at the UK Media Freedom Forum in London.

“It’s silly, in a way, for us to find out what’s going on across the world and not apply those lessons to the UK, because our democracy is vulnerable, and I think there’s a level of complacency in the UK, a feeling that, well, we’re the birthplace of democracy, and we’re robust, and we can stand up …. actually… I really worry that we can’t (stand up to the onslaught).”

I don’t want to be the MP for Islington South and Finsbury (an area known for pushing for wider democracy in the 1800s and 1900s) “that oversees the dying of our democracy by disinformation, by malign foreign influence trying to undermine us. I’m very concerned about this.”

She said: “So we have started to make clear to the government, and we will make clear to the government, the trends that we’ve seen internationally, concerns that we see in only a small degree in the UK, but what we learned in Romania was that it can blow up very, very quickly if an election is called.

It may happen in the (UK May 2026) local elections, it may not happen. They may keep their powder dry and they may wait until there’s a general election.

But we should not allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. We must make sure that we protect ourselves.

…So the problem is, is the way in which algorithms are used. And so you can post something, and, you know, if you post something, it may not be true, it may be true, but I think actually the way to look at it is this:

Why should that post have so many eyeballs on it? Does it get all those eyeballs naturally, or is the algorithm being manipulated by the bots, by the way of the preference of the owner, you know, whatever it is, to promote that post much more than it ought to get ….in order to make sure that you have maximum impact.

That needs to be regulated. [CarrZee: most important sentence of her speech.]

The problem is that it’s the very last thing social media companies want to happen, and that’s the challenge.

There were, and we know this … in the summer, 1,300 Scottish nationalist bots stopped posting. And it coincided with the time when there was the 12-day war in Iran, where the Internet broke down. And then after the Internet came up again, for a few weeks, they were talking about how wonderful the Supreme leader was …

There are 1,300 Scottish nationalists in Iran. Extraordinary.

And when you look at their profile, they’re not like little egg cups. They’re not like the obvious, you know, bots where, you know, the profile is nothing. You know, they don’t have any friends and relations.

You know, none of their friends and relatives are real people speaking for them. They’re obviously bots. These are much more sophisticated bots….

And why are the Iranians so interested in this? Because they want to undermine our democracy because they want to divide our country.

We have to make sure that we make it clear to the public this is what happens.

You know, on Reddit, there were, a few years ago, just a few hundred posts on Reddit that said that London was dangerous and violent.

Those three words. And then if you look at it last year, there were hundreds of thousands of posts on Reddit because it’s a campaign to undermine our city and our city standing in the world.

What are we doing about this? Nothing.”

She criticised “countries like Iran, America, individuals in America, non-state actors, but then also China and Russia.”

Listen to 10 minutes of her speech here:

 

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRuJyYhx/

(more to come; this story was hacked Saturday; now repaired; some transcribing with AI help, Otter, ChatGPT)

Note

–The committee chair position is allocated to a party (in this case Labour). All MPs vote in a secret ballot across Parliament. Candidates campaign among MPs from all parties.

So Thornberry became chair because a majority of MPs voted for her, not because she was appointed by Keir Starmer.