“The more extreme the content, the more the shares, the more the engagement. And engagement on certain platforms links directly to money.”
Matteo Bergamini of Shout Out UK, a media and political literacy organisation

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Three days before his second inauguration, Donald Trump launched his own crypto coin, cashing in his support. Here in the UK, we’ve just caught someone copying the playbook: one, whip up a xenophobic frenzy; two, confect outrage; three, cash in. That’s the hate economy in action.

We recently exposed how the far-right political party Advance UK was drumming up support by working with a team of AI “creatives”. That group, called the Node Project, made Advance UK videos by reusing material from their biggest project yet: Danny Bones.

Bones is an AI creation, a “working-class rapper” making music and videos targeting foreigners and Muslims.

Our investigation rattled them. The Danny Bones TikTok account was closed and Instagram took down some of their posts.

So the Node Project fought back, claiming the “media” was trying to shut them down – and asking supporters to open their wallets. Fans of AI-generated Islamaphobic rap could become a “Founding Member” for £100 or an “Early Member” for £20.

We could see payments were flowing in. But there was more money to be made.

The day after we published our investigation, several Danny Bones-themed crypto coins appeared on a platform that isn’t authorised in the UK. They were promoted on X, with one ad trying to rally supporters by saying: “Fck the mainstream media.” Interesting take, given we’re a small band of investigative journalists working on super tight budgets and going up against the massive flow of dirty money that props up these far-right waves.

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst and editorial manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said the trajectory is common for this kind of scheme, where groups “use outrage to drive the value of the coin”.

This week, I was at the launch of a research report into how online conspiracies spread in schools. The findings were stark, revealing how widespread mis- and disinformation are – even primary school children are exposed to them.

The most worrying part for me was that children frequently said their own parents believed in conspiracy theories or incorrect information they saw online.

The Danny Bones investigation is about exposing how these fake, xenophobic and harmful narratives are spread across social media. We’re working with Shout Out UK and the all-party parliamentary group on political and media literacy to take these findings to parliament. There, MPs can use them to scrutinise the Representation of the People Bill.

Unlike Bones, we are real people doing real work – investigating who bankrolls this content, and who profits from the spread of hate. If you want to help us put pressure on the government to stamp out these attempts to divide us, then become a Bureau Insider and help make our next investigation even stronger.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

In a joint investigation, we went undercover and recorded a conversation with an unregulated psychologist where she revealed shocking biases. Her advice had been pivotal in the decisions to remove 11 children from six mothers.

Melanie Gill is an unregulated psychologist who has given evidence in hundreds of family court cases. She specialises in cases involving allegations of parental alienation – a heavily contested concept that describes a child’s unjustified rejection of one parent through manipulation by the other.

During two calls with a reporter posing as a father seeking advice in the aftermath of a breakup, she said judges have bought into ideas about domestic violence, “spun internationally by radical feminism”, that “all men are violent, all women are victims”.

We have been investigating parental alienation in the family courts for years. Following our reporting, the use of unregulated psychologists within the family courts has effectively been banned.

Read more here. 

The government’s decision to cap political donations from voters living abroad and ban crypto donations didn’t come a moment too soon. It’s a massive win, and I’m delighted to see the Bureau recognised for exposing how easy it was to make illegal donations.

The biggest loser from the changes, which will appear as an amendment to the People Bill, is Nigel Farage. His Reform UK party has thrived on cryptocurrency donations and huge sums from one very wealthy Brit abroad.

Reform has bagged the most donations of any party in the past year, with most of its cash coming from cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne. He’s donated £12m to the party since August – but he lives in Thailand and the new cap restricts Brits living overseas to donating just £100,000 annually. I’ll be curious to see how he keeps up his support for Farage.

Reform will also have to stop accepting donations in Bitcoin. Just last October, Farage told Reuters that the party had already received donations in crypto.

The government’s changes were based on research by Philip Rycroft, a civil servant, and are aimed at countering foreign interference in UK politics. He was frank about the threat, both from hostile states like Russia, China and Iran, and a new threat: “an emerging willingness of foreign actors and private citizens, including from allies like the United States, to interfere in, and influence, politics abroad in pursuit of their own agenda.”

Rycroft then turned to our investigation into illegal donations. Before the 2024 general election, the Bureau revealed that five of the UK’s six main political parties had accepted illegal donations. We’d gone undercover, fully expecting all of them to reject the donations we’d arranged from a foreigner based outside the UK. It was ridiculously easy to do.

Only Labour rejected our donations, while Reform, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Scottish National Party all accepted the money. “Vigilance on the part of the political parties is more important than ever,” Rycroft wrote in response to our findings.

But the Electoral Commission isn’t sufficiently interested or equipped to take on the challenge. While its funding has grown to £46m a year, Rycroft wrote: “The enforcement powers of the Electoral Commission are derived from a mishmash of statute that has never been thought through as a coherent whole.” In other words, even if it spots some wrongdoing, chances are it won’t be able to do anything about it.

We’ll keep pushing the government and the Electoral Commission to do their jobs – and we’ll keep investigating how dirty money ends up in our politics.

Later this month, we’ll be hosting the latest edition of TBIJ Live to break down our blockbuster investigation into illegal children’s homes.

An increasing number of vulnerable young people across the country are being placed in children’s homes that are not registered with Ofsted. It means they are not subject to routine inspections, so there are no guarantees of quality or safety. Unsurprisingly, it’s also against the law. And yet in 2024 alone, nearly 800 children were placed in this type of illegal accommodation. They stayed there for an average of six months each.

Councils say unregistered homes are only ever used as a last resort, when no lawful accommodation is available. But evidence from the children’s commissioner for England shows that these placements are not always a stopgap.

Join us on Thursday 2 April on Zoom to hear from Bureau Local editor Gareth Davies, reporter Tom Wall, as well as Rebekah Pierre, the deputy director of the children's charity Article 39, and Dr Paul Nelson, a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and a former social worker. Tickets are free, so don’t miss out: