A story about immigrants seemed to appear in The Daily Express this week: Burnham's migrant gamble, thousands stranded in Cueta to be brought to the UK. I say seemed because it actually didn't. The story and its appearance are both totally fake. That may not be a surprise to you since it’s difficult to find anything in the DE these days that is reliably true and accurate. This one was categorically far worse since it isn’t a legitimate Express story at all. Someone has gone to the trouble of creating a clone of the DE website, same font, same icons, same style, and even using the name of a real staff reporter. The cloned page had a subtly different URL and contained hyperlinks which took you to actual stories on the genuine Daily Express website.
The only way to ‘find’ the story was on social media. You couldn’t access it via the real DE website, and unless you noticed the URL was different, you would never know it wasn’t genuine. A reader could see the story on Facebook, for example, click on it, read the page and believe they were reading the Express. They could then click a link to another Express story or the travel section and be taken to the genuine site, never realising they hadn’t been on it the whole time.
A post on X linking to the story came from Lembit Öpik, the former Liberal Democrat politician, now with his own YouTube channel, which carries items such as Is Britain Finished? and The Great Climate Lie:
Burnham’s big migration plan: Take 4,000 stranded migrants from Ceuta, bring them to UK, and put them up in luxury hotels. Americans look at Europe in despairhttps://t.co/FCmxTVRvOV
— Lembit Öpik (@lembitopik) August 20, 2026
In 2021 he was expelled by the LibDems and after a brief spell with UKIP, he joined Reform UK in 2025, telling a reporter at their annual conference, “I go where the money is.” Whether Opik created the fake page or he simply saw it elsewhere and posted the link is hard to say. But he has certainly had a wild political journey from the LibDems to a race-baiting Reform supporter. At least he's open about his motive.
His tweet has 1,700 retweets and 4,400 likes, although a community note has been added pointing out the story itself is not true. Some of the 730 replies point out the page is fake, but many seem to think it's all true. The damage has been done.
The fakery was first revealed by Emma Monk who should be given credit. The page can't be reached any more, by the way, but Öpik's post with a screenshot is still up.
This practice of copying news websites isn’t unknown. Wikipedia has a whole page about it, and Columbia Journalism Review carried a piece in 2016 about a fake website “impersonating” ABC News in the US to issue an entirely fake story about a basketball team led by Michael Jordan. That story fooled many journalists at regional publications who then amplified and gave it an air of legitimacy.
Who took the time, money and effort to create and publish a page designed explicitly to whip up anti-immigrant tensions in Britain? Lembit? Possibly. But it also begs the question: how many times might they have done similar things before?
Before the advent of social media, that could never happen. It has allowed people with evil intent to hijack legitimate news sources for their own ends. Social media has a lot to answer for; let us hope it does.
Careless People
I raise this social media issue because I’ve just finished reading a book, Careless People: Power. Greed. Madness. by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander who worked as Global Director of Public Policy for Facebook during a period of massive growth from 2012 to 2019.
She was a former diplomat who originally believed FB could help governments and politicians to connect directly with the public and to provide a public forum to exchange and debate ideas. She dealt on a daily basis with the most senior people, including co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer (COO).
What is clear from the first 250 pages or so, is that the company, which first went live in 2006, accidentally hit upon something people craved and wanted desperately to be part of. In twenty years, it has gone from nothing to a $1.4 trillion (market capitalisation of Meta) business, with annual revenues of over $200 billion and profits (I had to check this, by the way) of around $60 billion or 30%. It is almost as profitable as it is highly addictive.
Zuckerberg owns approximately 13.7% of Meta's equity, but controls roughly 61% of the total voting power due to a clever dual-class share structure. Basically, he alone controls the company.
FB’s explosive growth was a model of how US companies rapidly expand and dominate markets around the world and develop into these so-called unicorns. It was aggressive, exploited every conceivable way of monetising what its users think of as a ‘free’ service, ignored the rules, avoided taxes, misled regulators as a matter of routine, all while growing at an astonishing rate fuelled by cash rolling in like a financial tsunami.
The book’s subtitle gives it away: Power. Greed. Madness.
The interplay between politics and FB is fascinating. FB faced numerous threats of being closed down in different countries, which usually got the politicians the concessions they wanted, even if it meant doing the opposite of what the company had publicly proclaimed. And this, in turn, helped enable FB to avoid taxes as a sort of unspoken quid pro quo.
The people at the top had (and still have) immense egos and cared only about themselves, the growth of FB, and, through that, acquiring ever more wealth, higher salaries and more stock options. It was driven by sheer avarice. The book contains plenty of examples of how FB was originally viewed by political leaders as irrelevant, a passing fad, before being seen as capable of societal change, a useful tool for bypassing conventional media and winning public approval, but eventually recognised as a danger to society. The company now faces legal action by 29 US states and is currently on trial on charges of being deliberately addictive and damaging the mental health of young people.
However, for me, the most incredible story in the book is one about Zuckerberg sometime after November 2016. He stubbornly refused to accept FB played any part in helping Trump get elected. He told an internal staff meeting it was a “pretty crazy idea” that FB had “any impact” in the election. Zuckerberg seemed to have no idea what had been going on inside his own company.
Then, some days or weeks later, during a ten-hour flight to Lima in Peru, Elliot Schrage, FB’s VP of Global Communications, Marketing, and Public Policy (and Wynn-Williams' boss), painstakingly explained to Zuckerberg all the methods used by FB to swing the election for Trump. She sat through the whole discussion, summarising in her book:
“Facebook embedded staff in Trump‘s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump's campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Pascale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the ‘single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period’.”
Zuckerberg, at first sceptical, eventually understood. But instead of being horrified, he’s full of admiration for the sheer ingenuity. Sheryl Sandberg, FB’s Chief Operating Officer, when she finds out, thinks it’s brilliant and innovative and even suggests hiring Pascale. Zuckerberg appears to begin thinking about a presidential run himself and actually goes on to visit several swing states!
Jumping on ten years, the FT now reports that a backlash (or techlash as they call it) is coming for the social media companies and the tech bros:
"Rather than fighting rearguard court actions, tech companies would be best advised to heed the changing political and legal mood. They should redouble their efforts to run safer, privacy-preserving services that demonstrably serve the public interest as well as consumers’ needs. In their own self-interest, tech company shareholders, who have for so long discounted all regulatory concerns, should cajole them to do so."
Will they do so? Only when forced.
Nick Boles
Nick Boles, a former Tory minister (he was responsible for the National Planning Policy Framework) has written an essay for the Demos think tank: Beyond Brexit, a new deal for Britain, Ukraine and Europe. It pitches what he says is the case for a new relationship with the EU.
It’s sixteen pages or so where he carefully sets out his pro-EU arguments for the UK to gain “full participation in the European single market for goods.” Brussels will enjoy a wry smile at this because it isn’t “full participation” At all. He specifically excludes “free movement, Schengen membership or Eurozone entry.”
It’s not really very different from Michael Gove’s claim in April 2016 that Britain would stay in the “free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU.”
Gove actually added: “The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and the Ukraine would stay part of this free trade area – and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus – is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP.”
Well, that is in fact exactly what’s happened. Look out for Juncker applying for membership of Reform UK.
Boles is slightly more realistic and admits we would need “dynamic regulatory alignment with EU rules on goods” and make a financial contribution. He talks of creating by treaty a “European Confederation” which would embrace both EU and non-EU countries as well as NATO.
This is I’m afraid, another example of Britain trying to cherry-pick, have its cake and eat it, all to avoid free movement as if we alone have some principled arguments against foreigners living among us.
Lord Kinnock thinks it’s a “practical approach” and there’s talk of Britain offering to extend the protection of our Armed Forces and nuclear deterrent across Europe, in exchange for access to the EU’s single market. But they already have this through NATO. What’s new about that?
To see a more realistic opinion, I would look to UK in a Changing Europe. They have a new report out which provides a revised version of Barnier's 'staircase' but this time with figures against each step of the impact on UK GDP. The final step before rejoin is the EEA - the single market goal of Boles - and it's clear that it means accepting free movement. We might avoid Schengen as Ireland does and even the euro as Denmark does, but free movement is fundamental.
The Boles essay will never fly. The EU isn’t going to water itself down to accommodate us. It’s a hopeless case.
