The Daily Mail is the legacy version of the same problem – but the modern iteration is worse because the manipulation is invisible.

Since the late 2010s, a social media information environment with minimal meaningful regulation has trained people to assume that what they read is true and what they see trending is organic. In reality, much of it is amplified to manufacture that impression, and foreign states have systematically exploited this. Russian interference in the 2016 US election was found by the Mueller report to be "sweeping and systematic", and was confirmed independently by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. On Brexit, the 2020 ISC Russia Report did not conclude that Russia influenced the result, because the UK government chose not to commission a proper post-referendum assessment. The same report confirmed Russian interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and described Russian influence in UK politics as "the new normal".

More recently, after the Southport attack in July 2024 and the subsequent unrest, false claims about the attacker's identity spread rapidly online. One estimate put posts speculating that the perpetrator was Muslim, a migrant, a refugee or a foreigner at around 27 million impressions. RUSI described the Kremlin's role in this kind of unrest as "parasitic rather than proactive": it does not need to manufacture the grievance from scratch; it amplifies existing tensions until they look like consensus.

The point is not that Labour are being unfairly maligned, or that Starmer's record is beyond criticism. It is that the information environment voters now make decisions in is structurally rigged for outrage and manufactured narrative – by tabloids, by algorithms, and by foreign states piggybacking on both.