“We believe the media can change the story and be a force for good”
Gareth Davies, Bureau Local Editor

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While Westminster wrestles with yet another crisis of leadership, today the streets of London are expected to be filled with tens of thousands of protesters attending the latest ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally.

Organised by far-right Islamophobic extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (he’d like you to call him Tommy Robinson but it’s not his real name), it’s his latest opportunity to stir up proto-nationalist sentiment and hatred towards migrants living in the UK.

I’ll be there with a couple of colleagues to see how many attendees have been unwittingly interacting with the manipulative anti-migrant AI content coursing through social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And as migrants find themselves under attack by our country’s press, politicians and public, we’ll be continuing to expose what we’re dubbing the “hate economy”: a self-reinforcing system in which fear, outrage and division are monetised. 

As The Bureau’s Gareth Davies explains in his latest piece, we’re determined to investigate the hate economy and tell a different story. Instead of adding to division that has resulted in people electing a councillor celebrating the rape of a Sikh woman, or another who declared the Holocaust was a hoax, we can tell the stories behind the manufactured outrage.

Gareth puts it most succinctly: “We believe the media can change the story and be a force for good. Not just through brave, fact-based reporting but by working with people and communities rather than writing about them. Together we can spark change and break apart the machinery of hate.

“And while journalists can do their bit, we think the people best placed to tell the stories that challenge these narratives are those directly affected by them.”

Tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk run the platforms where hate multiplies and spreads, making it difficult for users to find the truth amongst the AI-generated bilge pumped out across their feeds. We’ve led the way in exposing how people in other countries are using AI tools to monetise hateful content on social media, because it reveals an important truth.

Outrage can be manufactured. Hatred can be monetised. And ordinary people pay the price.

You can help us, by supporting independent fact-based journalism exposing what fuels the rise of outrage and division.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Poland is the largest poultry producer in the EU and roughly 60% of it is exported – including to the UK. But there are serious worries about environmental standards on Polish farms, and the sector has been dogged by food safety concerns in recent years.

Notoriously, this includes the supply of chicken contaminated with antibiotic-resistant salmonella, which poisoned thousands of UK consumers and led to several deaths. How many chicken megafarms are there in Poland? Worryingly, it depends on who you ask. Take the Mazowieckie region, a poultry-producing hotbed where Czepielin is situated. 

Poland’s General Veterinary Inspectorate suggests there may be more than 600 poultry farms with more than 40,000 birds each in the region, but the Ministry of Climate and Environment’s records say there are only 261. It’s also unclear who’s responsible for ensuring that farms hold the permits they need.

Read more here

When Tom Wall started exposing how illegal care homes were putting vulnerable children at severe risk, he didn’t expect to have to contend with the mob. 

But a new report paints an alarming picture of the dangers that can await vulnerable children in these homes: while councils do a woeful job of monitoring the homes, organised crime groups are quick to target and exploit the children living there.

Tom’s latest investigation already revealed how Caerphilly Council in south Wales put a 15-year-old girl in the care of a company employing two ex-army men with seven previous convictions between them. They drugged and sexually assaulted her while they were meant to be looking after her.

This latest report – compiled by two academics based at Anglia Ruskin University – cites interviews with 12 child protection professionals, including specialist police officers, council staff and frontline charity workers.

One frontline worker cited in the report described an example of how gang members swooped into a care home because they knew that the local authority was not properly monitoring it: “Word got around and at one point it was a home full of all the same risk-level young people, no checks were being made, but these young people were being picked up immediately after leaving the residence and being found with weapons on them.”

This is one of the biggest and most under-reported scandals in the UK right now, so you can count on us to keep digging.

You might have caught this story earlier in the week in your inbox: throughout our reporting of unregulated experts tearing families apart in the family courts, journalist Hannah Summers has told the story of how a mum had her two children ripped away from her and denied access for years. 

Her son Dylan (not his real name) was nine.

Last year, Dylan found his mum again and they were reunited for Christmas. Now living back with her, Dylan sat down with Hannah to tell his side of the story. Dylan had been told that his mother was “mentally ill”. He didn’t know what to tell the other kids at school, so he just told them his mum was dead.

I can’t overstate what an important moment this is, to hear the perspective of a child that has had the early years of his life so deeply affected by the family courts system. 

Dylan is now in the process of rebuilding a relationship that was put on hold for more than half a decade. “She’s figuring out how to be a mum again and I’m figuring out how to be a son,” says Dylan. “She has to parent a 16-year-old she’s only known for a few months. I’m a completely different person mentally and physically.”