I investigated misinformation that spread in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 Southport murders, which fueled and focused anti-immigrant/-Muslim/-asylum-seeker riots across much of the UK through the remainder of the summer. I analyzed additional foreign-based "griftersphere" vectors playing significant roles, and additionally expanded on the persistent misinformation waves in the months after.

I identified deceptively fronted networks of accounts on X spreading xenophobic or nationalistic propaganda. The content and branding is targeted towards Western (primarily) European audiences, but the accounts are actually being run by people outside the West—primarily Indian or Turkish origin—flipping accounts that had been farmed with other material. Some attempted to specifically insert inflammatory narratives into current events and political developments.

I identified and analyzed a slew of accounts on YouTube that had long been posting benign cultural commentary content, but began flipping rapidly to pro-Trump content weeks before the 2024 US elections, often using similar visual features. I reported evidence to motivate investigation into whether the conduct exploits monetization opacity to run an influence operation.

I worked with information threat mitigation company Valent to collect and analyze data of engagement on X with planned posts by the hosts of popular podcast The Rest is Politics, and by a host of its American version, The Rest is Politics US. I used OSINT tools to scrape the fresh response posts, and then coded up a script to clean and process the data, drawing up exploratory visualizations and statistics on user characteristics. The hosts involved recorded a special episode about the exercise and our investigation's findings.