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Dec 6, 2022 8 tweets 5 min read Read on X
#THREAD

Shareholder Discovery has sold its stake in GB "News". Bought for £20 million, it was offloaded for just £8M. The channel, where the average daily view is less than a minute, is currently being investigated by media regulator @Ofcom for its coverage of the COVID vaccine.
"Comments made during an interview with Dr Naomi Wolf about the coronavirus vaccine rollout raise potential issues... our investigation will consider whether this programme broke our rules designed to protect viewers from harmful material." - @Ofcom

ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/20…
This is the second @Ofcom investigation GB News is facing over its vaccine coverage.

The latest one relates to an interview with the author Naomi Wolf, in which she claimed women were being harmed by #Covid19 vaccines as part of an effort to “to destroy British civil society”.
#Ofcom said it would investigate whether the programme broke “rules designed to protect viewers from harmful material” after receiving more than 400 complaints from members of the public.

The interview with Wolf was originally broadcast on 4th October this year.
Dangerously irresponsible & quite possibly damaged conspiracy theorist Wolf compared doctors’ support for the vaccine rollout to the behaviour of the medical profession in Nazi Germany & described herself as the “last remaining independent journalist” willing to question this. 😬
Wolf was being interviewed on the Mark Steyn Show, which has repeatedly raised doubts over the safety of vaccines. Steyn’s claims that the jabs cause “every conceivable kind of damage” is typical of the ill-informed outrage-provoking style of the UK's very own Fox News wannabe.
😬
So right-wing Brextremist hedge-funder Paul Marshall bought out GB "News".

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More from @docrussjackson

Dec 9
🧵

How have populist UK politicians and Britain’s right-wing press and broadcasters got away with repeating — day after day, year after year — the brazenly false and wildly misleading claim that we live in a “high-welfare, high-tax” country? Image
Why the “High-Welfare, High-Tax” Myth Persists.

The claim that Britain is a “high-welfare, high-tax” country is a shameless lie—brazenly false—as OECD and OBR data consistently show: the UK's tax take is ~36% of GDP (mid-table globally, and well under the EU average of 40.5%). Image
The UK's total tax take of 36% is far under France's 45% or Denmark's 46%. Welfare benefits spending (including state pensions) is a modest ~11% of GDP—among the lowest in the OECD, well below the EU average of 17.5%, and just under half that of France (20.5%) and Italy (20%). Image
Read 31 tweets
Dec 8
🧵

Not only has Nigel Farage shamelessly normalized far right discourse, but Reform UK have welcomed a new generation of young, radicalised, Andrew Tate fanboys who think it's acceptable to spread divisive bigoted lies and disinformation, and to make crass bigoted 'jokes'. Image
Joseph Boam is a radicalised 22-year-old Tate fanboy who started out as a Tory, running as a district councillor, then switching to Reform UK in 2024 and becoming a councillor in May 2025 representing the Whitwick division on Leicestershire County Council for the Reform UK party. Image
A former KFC worker, who has worked with his dad on sheds and property renovation, despite his total lack of any relevant experience or knowledge of the area, he was appointed Council deputy leader and cabinet member for adult social care—which ispatently absurd. Image
Read 14 tweets
Dec 5
🧵

‘The Psychology of the New Far Right: Privilege, Fear, and Media Power in the Rise of Authoritarianism.’

Fear, belonging, and power are being manipulated into a frightening new age of populist outrage and algorithmic media, argues Dr Russell Jackson.

bylinesupplement.com/p/the-psycholo…
I've reproduced the article in 🧵 form, below, because its a subscriber only article from @BylineTimes.

You can subscribe here, and I would encourage you to - Bylines tells the stories and undertakes investigations many national news media fear to.

subscribe.bylinetimes.com
Across the West, figures such as Trump, JD Vance, Farage, Johnson, Tice, Kruger, and Lowe helped normalise far-right populist rhetoric within mainstream politics. Their appeal is anti-elite—yet they themselves embody the privilege they claim to challenge.

populismstudies.org
Read 91 tweets
Nov 21
🧵

In May, Reform UK became the UK’s first party to accept crypto donations; experts warned of major money-laundering and foreign interference risks.

The NCA says Tether—backed by Reform’s £13.7M donor Christopher Harborne—has been used by Russia to fund its war in Ukraine. Image
A multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto—digital tokens hiding users’ identities—has enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state”.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
In 2023, the hedge fund co-founded by GB "News" owner Paul Marshall, who employs 60% of anti-Net Zero Reform UK's MPs, had £1.8 BILLION invested in fossil fuel firms.

Harborne (who has Thai citizenship under the name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit) also makes money from fossil fuels.

Read 17 tweets
Nov 19
🧵

I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.

Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.

The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.
Read 38 tweets
Nov 19
🧵

Reform UK’s head of Policy is a privately educated son of immigrants called Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf.

Yusuf is a shameless liar.

Below, I'll expose just a few of his more recent brazen lies and misleading claims about asylum seekers, immigrants, and ‘foreign nationals’.
In the September 2025 @SkyNews Immigration Debate, chaired by Trevor “Muslims are not like us” Phillips, Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf made a series of inaccurate and highly misleading claims about migration, and more recently, on @BBCNewsnight, about social housing. Image
These assertions are easily disproved with publicly available data, but often go largely unchallenged on air, despite being about some of the most sensitive and polarised issues in politics.

Yusuf started by claiming that UK net migration “last year” was “about a million.” Image
Read 39 tweets

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