Anti-immigration videos supposedly filmed in the UK and posted to social media are actually being generated in the US and Asia using AI, the BBC has found.

Some of the clips on the Great British People Facebook page have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. One shows an elderly British pensioner crying. Others show ‘reporters’ discussing “overwhelming” immigration and telling viewers to “be honest” about whether they “miss the Britain we used to know”.

The posts instruct viewers to “share if you agree”, encouraging them to spread the AI fakes to an even wider audience.

The page claims to be based in South Yorkshire, but BBC investigators discovered that, really, its creator is 5,000 miles (8,000km) away in Sri Lanka.

Using Facebook tools, spelling checks and interviews, the BBC found that the authors of similar accounts are based in places as far away as the US, Vietnam and the Maldives.

What’s the goal of AI fakers?

Professor Sander van der Linden at the University of Cambridge told the BBC that AI fakers buy social media accounts originally set up in the UK and use them to try to manipulate the opinions of British people.

Two people behind AI-generated videos of burning English cities filled with rubbish, and people in Islamic clothing, told the BBC: “We aim to inform voters about what we believe could happen in the coming decades if current social and cultural trends continue.” They also claimed to be in contact with “various politicians” who supported their videos.

The creators of other pages said they just wanted to get followers and make money.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, told the BBC that it has special teams that work to stop this sort of activity.

Experts say that the public only accurately identify AI fakes half the time, and warn that if they can’t trust what they see, they might start disbelieving real content.