Indonesia's efforts to activate the blue economy

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By bno - Surabaya Office December 1, 2025

As the world’s largest archipelagic nation, the Republic of Indonesia’s future is inextricably linked to the vast expanse of its ocean territory. Securing this critical domain and sustainably harnessing its economic potential, known domestically as the 'blue economy', represents the paramount strategic objective for the government and military command.

To achieve this dual mandate, Indonesia has deliberately leveraged high-level international collaborations and fostered domestic industrial autonomy. These efforts are focused on elevating the operational capacity of the naval and maritime security forces and addressing fundamental structural deficits in the nation's legal and economic governance. The recent $5bn strategic understanding with the United Kingdom, as reported by Forces News, and the ongoing technological programme with Greek defence company Scytalys for maritime surveillance aircraft, as reported by Jakarta Globe, serve as a national push towards enhanced regional security and economic diversification.

Indonesia’s blue economy: The government’s next resource potential

Indonesia’s maritime territory represents an enormous untapped resource, yet its contribution to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) currently stands at only around 7%, Maritime Fairtrade reports. This modest figure is due, in part, to an inefficient and fragmented legal structure governing maritime affairs, which necessitates a complete reorganisation to properly facilitate investment and sustainable economic practices. The blue economy, which includes responsible management of marine resources, logistics, and transportation, requires a balanced national prioritisation that currently appears to favour large-scale, land-based ventures. Realising the full wealth potential of the sea depends entirely on resolving these domestic policy inconsistencies and ensuring regulatory clarity for citizens and international investors alike.

The $5bn maritime sovereignty boost

The multi-year, strategic accord with the United Kingdom, valued at an estimated $5bn, is a central element in strengthening Indonesia’s defence capabilities and accelerating the national shipbuilding industry. Forces News reports that this covenant is designed to transfer critical naval-vessel development expertise from the UK, primarily through the participation of the British firm Babcock. Critically, the structure dictates that the naval vessels themselves will be constructed within Indonesian yards, serving as a powerful catalyst for local investment and the upskilling of our workforce. President Prabowo Subianto noted that this initiative is a transformative step forward, enabling the nation to domestically develop and construct our own essential vessels, supported by the technology and experience of a key partner.

The benefits of this alliance extend far beyond naval requirements. The programme is also committed to producing over one thousand vessels for the nation’s fishing fleets, which is a direct policy measure aimed at bolstering domestic seafood consumption and improving our overall national food security, Dunfermline Press reports. This holistic approach underscores Jakarta’s view of maritime power as inseparable from economic stability. The two countries are further cementing their strategic relationship by jointly conducting research into advanced shipbuilding practices, including the future application of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the manufacturing process, Forces News reports.

This high-profile military export to an Indo-Pacific partner is also indicative of the UK's wider success in securing substantial covenants, such as the $12.5bn opportunity for anti-submarine warships for Norway and the $10bn Typhoon fighter jet compact with Turkey. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer emphasised that these alliances yield economic dividends for the partner nation, specifically securing roughly 1,000 employment roles in Britain, mainly in the Rosyth area, Dunfermline Press reports. For Indonesia, the greater reward lies in the long-term structural uplift of the shipbuilding sector and the improved naval interoperability and joint training facilitated by the programme, which reinforces our collective commitment to a rules-based international order and freedom of navigation.

The imperative for domestic legal reform for the Blue Economy

To truly maximise the economic potential of our vast marine resources, the Indonesian government must urgently tackle internal structural impediments, particularly the need for comprehensive legal reorganisation, as reported by Maritime Fairtrade. Experts have repeatedly stressed that the current fragmented legal statutes are simply insufficient for managing the complexities of contemporary maritime affairs and are detrimental to the national push for sustainable economic growth. The lack of clarity, for example, has resulted in high-profile incidents involving the seizure of fishing vessels based on ambiguous policy interpretations, leading to regulatory uncertainty and discouraging investment.

A crucial proposed remedy involves the establishment of a dedicated Maritime Commercial Court, also known as an Admiralty Court, as reported by Maritime Fairtrade. Such a specialised judicial body would enhance the effectiveness of law enforcement, substantially reducing the current judicial sluggishness and regulatory overlap that currently plagues dispute resolution in the sector. The profound necessity of this legal certainty was highlighted by the 2020 Batam incident, where the impounding of vessels carrying essential goods caused significant disruption to supply chains, directly contributing to undesirable escalations in market prices.

Furthermore, the full scope of the blue economy must be accurately reflected in national policy and prioritisation. Whilst embracing the vital role of traditional sectors like logistics, Professor Luky Adrianto underscores that the focus must expand to include the responsible management of all aquatic and marine resources, including the need for firm regulation of resource extraction, such as deep-sea mining and oil and gas exploration, to mitigate potential ecological damage. The prevailing sentiment is that national planning must achieve a more appropriate balance, moving away from an excessive focus on terrestrial ventures and giving the non-extractive, environmentally responsible marine sector the central, strategic role it deserves for accelerating GDP growth.

Strategic alliances to advance technical autonomy

In parallel with securing high-level external collaborations and tackling domestic reform, Indonesia is demonstrating its commitment to technical self-reliance through the development of specialised indigenous aircraft platforms. The state-owned aerospace manufacturer, Dirgantara Indonesia (DI), also entered into a strategic programme with the Greek defence enterprise Scytalys for the co-development of a high-technology maritime surveillance aircraft (MSA), Jakarta Globe reports. This compact is especially significant as the MSA will be based on the locally designed and manufactured N219 Nurtanio platform, a major achievement for the national aerospace industry.

The N219 was originally conceived as a short take-off and landing (STOL) civilian transport plane, perfectly suited for the remote and rugged environments within the archipelagic nation. Its current configuration for military and paramilitary roles, achieved through this new alliance, represents a major step forward in national technical maturation. DI will take the lead role as the primary contractor for the aircraft’s configuration, while the Greek partner, Scytalys, will provide the expertise for integrating the sophisticated surveillance technology.

The resulting MSA will be equipped with the MIMS Airborne Mission System, providing advanced digital tracking capability. Its sensor suite includes an electro-optical sensor with a 20 kilometre detection range and a radar system capable of surveying up to 160 nautical miles, making it an invaluable national asset for the Maritime Security Agency (Bakamla). Bakamla has already requested four units, reaffirming its commitment to utilising domestically produced equipment. The technology, including a tactical datalink for real-time target transmission, is crucial for closing existing surveillance gaps in remote border waters, thereby directly supporting the nation’s ability to project security across its territorial sea and uphold its maritime interests.

Notes on the historic rise of the far right in Britain

Saturday 22 November 2025, by Thierry Labica


Against the backdrop of the bankruptcy of the historic two-party system, continued social brutalization, and after years of state racism and complicity in genocide, various shades of the British far right are now securing an unprecedented mass audience, which crystallized during a demonstration in London that brought together 150,000 demonstrators in London at the call of an avowed Islamophobic fascist. Fossil fuel interests, armaments, tax evasion and Israelism: the first benchmarks for understanding this evolution.


On 13 September 2025, a demonstration called by a notorious figure of the English fascist far right, Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, his real name) brought together between 110,000 and 150,000 people in London. By its scale, unprecedented in Britain, this event marks a threshold of the audience of the far right — its mobilizing themes and affects — and of the fascist resurgence on an international scale.

Among the various factors and temporalities to be taken into account, one thinks of the historical trajectory of some twenty years in which the episode is part and comes to be a milestone: the racist focus on immigration owes little to the representatives of the far right itself and much to the violence of political and media discourse and to an ever more aggressively “hostile” legislative inflation for about fifteen years. It should be made clear from the outset that Labour’s responsibilities in this area from the end of the 2000s onwards were immense. Then we think of the political situation, both national and international, of which the demonstration of 13 September is a crystallisation: the deep crisis of the forces of the historic two-party system (Labour and the Conservatives), the audience for the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, and the centrality of the Palestinian question and the genocide, against a backdrop of uninterrupted social degradation.

But to begin with, an overview of the personnel assembled and its main themes — as predictable as they may be — seems necessary. We will then draw attention to some, at least, of the material conditions of the event; the forces and resources which determine its possibility, the figures, and which define its content and expression.

Placed under the banner of “freedom of expression,” in other words, pluralist and democratic common sense, the event brought together a number of factions of the British far right, but also European, Australian, and American. The participants were able to hear speeches by Elon Musk and Éric Zemmour (accompanied by Jean Messiha), but also Petr Bystron for the AfD, and the Dutch Christian far rightist Eva Vlaardingerbroek (one million followers on X, more than 390,000 on Instagram and present on Fox news, GB news, and the online outlets of the far-right Sweden Democrats party, among others).

Also invited were the New Zealand Pentecostal Christian fundamentalist Brian Tamaki, convinced that the pandemic of 2020-22 or Hurricane Gabrielle were so many divine punishments for our wanderings away from God, between pornography, gay rights and abortion; the Israeli-Australian Avi Yemini, a former member of the Israeli army, a notorious provocateur who during a demonstration against the imprisonment of Robinson in 2018, declared himself “the world’s proudest Jewish Nazi”, Ezra Levant, founder of the Rebel News website and known as the “Canadian Steve Bannon”, and the British Katie Hopkins, regularly spotted alongside Robinson, a once-familiar mainstream media personality for whom asylum seekers are “cockroaches” while “our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money”. Other characters of a similar kind, from Spain, Belgium, Ireland, or Denmark, were invited to offer their contribution.
The ideological matrix of the far right

Tommy Robinson, who initiated the 13 September demonstration, has become the focal point of this vast ultra-conservative and fascist movement nourished by a powerful victimhood imaginary whose martyrology now reserves a central place for him. Far from having been disqualified and marginalised by his past as a hooligan, a member of a notorious neo-Nazi organisation (British National Party from 2004 to 2005) and then the founder of an ultra-nationalist and Islamophobic organisation (English Defence League, EDL, from 2009 to 2013), Robinson has achieved the status of an exemplary incarnation of a victim of the system. A cheeky character of modest origins, abandoned by his father at the age of two, he has seen his rich career as a repeat offender (between expulsion from social networks for incitement to hatred and five prison stays for passport fraud, obstruction of justice, assaults, possession of drugs, mortgage fraud) turn into a title of bravery and glory in the face of the evil that is both oppressive and occult of a “system” whose crimes he is now revealing.

According to this version of things, the government is repressing freedom of expression (“free speech”) in order to prevent its role in the “great replacement,” “uncontrolled immigration” and the extinction of “Western civilization,” “the Islamization of our societies” and the threat of generalized “jihad.” A nightmarish vision concentrates the horror of this secret exterminatory logic of which “we” are the despised and ignored victims: “the rape of our daughters” by migrants accused not only of sexual assault on minors, but even worse, of organizing networks (grooming gangs) for the sexual exploitation of minors.

It is worth dwelling, even if too briefly, on this motif of “rape” (“of our daughters”). To begin with, there is an old panic in the face of racial mixing propagated by the non-white, savage and insatiable foreigner — many women, many children — who are incompletely civilized and, in fact, have remained in a more or less anomic state of nature and destructive of our norms. This fantastical character of the most classic racist imagination, proto-animal and presumed to be chronically overnumbered, would supposedly migrate to enjoy without limit or scruple the largesse of a national-social state to which he would never have contributed. While the brave and loyal taxpayer accepts various privations (and must be content with the distant promise of enjoyment dangled by a huge pornographic industry, from the front pages of the daily press with a large circulation), the migrant profiteer is then guilty of the general “civilizational collapse.”

It should be noted that neither Robinson nor Musk, nor Zemmour, nor Bystron, manage to refer, even in a cosmetic and opportunistic way, to which concrete social dimension of the problem could be displaced on the “civilizational” terrain. Typically, this is a case of fantastical avoidance and recoding of a truly terrible reality; the systemic neglect and abuse of millions of children in the United Kingdom, most often suffering in the silence of words they do not have, the impoverishment of all protection, care and follow-up structures, and exposed to a whole repertoire of sexual abuse and violence, a dark continent of which the dedicated organizations claim to perceive only the small emergent area. [1]

This imaginary of “rape” (and all its dark charge of repressed appetites) is thus that of a primitive jouissance at the origin of the “civilizational” collapse to which “multiculturalism” is working. It goes without saying that it remains — and must remain — disconnected from any issue of male domination, criticism of patriarchy and gender violence in order to be recoded against critical feminist thought (domestic, sexual and sexist violence — including rape — feminicide, socio-sexual relegation or the violence of child poverty that befalls millions of “our daughters” never seem to have the same rank as a mobilizer of affects here – and in truth, here do not exist, or no longer exist, at the end of what bears the features of a sadistic voyeuristic erotic reconfiguration that also seems to presume a certain fatality of rape in the last instance).

In this perspective, the “multiculturalist” left, feminists and anti-racists, as soon as they question the protective authority of fathers, brothers and husbands (over “our daughters”), and as soon as they defend the rights of migrants, are attributed a direct responsibility in the “social, moral and civilizational disaster”. Or, to quote Robinson in his video “The Rape of Britain: Part One”: “No country in the world is unaware that our government, our social services, and our police forces are sacrificing a generation of our daughters at the hands [sic] of the altar of multiculturalism [...]; There are still young girls, in every city and every big city, who are taken from us, taken from their mothers, as sex slaves at the hands of Islamic gangs.” This same motif can be found almost word for word in the intervention of Petr Bystron, of the AfD, and his defence of “our struggle” in Europe “for 2000 years”: “We don’t want our daughters, our sisters, to be raped. We don’t want our brothers, our friends, to be stabbed when they defend them.”

Elon Musk, in giant screen version, “clarified” the fundamental problem in his own way: “what I see happening here is a destruction of Britain, initially a slow erosion but rapidly increasing erosion of Britain with massive uncontrolled migration. A failure by the government to protect innocent people, including children who are getting gang raped. It’s unreal.”

For Musk, “there’s so many on the left that want to just crush debate and put people in prison just for talking, as you [Robinson] were, just for speaking their mind.” And in addition to how “the government did nothing and tried to hide it – they tried to hide these horrific crimes” there’s the violence of the left, designated as responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk three days earlier in the United States: “The left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean, let that sink in for a minute. That’s who we’re dealing with here.”

We understand then, if it were not clear enough, that it is against the “woke mind virus” and its logic of “cancelling” terror (to “prevent debate and put people in prison”) that the banner of “free speech” has been unfurled, as a perfect This is evident after several years of generalized anti-woke political and media moral panic, and three days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, attributed to this same “murder party”.

In the conclusion of this exchange, Musk confirms Robinson’s idea that the left is the occult force capable of controlling governments, and of organizing mass migrations from which it would then draw electorates that it would otherwise be unable to gather among the “authentically” national populations. “There’s a massive incentive on the left to import voters. So, if they can’t convince their nation to vote for them, they’re going to import people from other nations to vote for them… thus depriving the citizens of their democratic power. It’s really a voter importation thing.”

Here, more or less term for term, we find the classically anti-Semitic conspiracy imputations – but for someone who uses the Nazi salute, this cannot really be surprising – directed by the Hungarian far right against George Soros in 2017: Soros, the liberal “Jewish financier” supposedly working for the dissolution of national identities by putting his fortune at the service of a vast manipulation of migrants to Europe. This same motive, always accompanied by the quick but explicit reference to George Soros, is at the heart of a long interview offered on the far right and ardently pro-Israel GB News channel.

It should be remembered that this same victimhood of the “invasion” is the one that animated the neo-Nazi perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in October 2018 (eleven dead). For the killer, Robert Bowers, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was responsible for the arrival of Central American migrants and “evil Muslims,” which “likes to bring in invaders who kill people from here. I’m not going to stand by and watch my people being slaughtered.” The delusional justifications for the mass killings perpetrated by Anders Brevik in Norway in 2011 on young left-wing activists (71 dead) and by Brenton Tarrant in a mosque in New Zealand in 2019 (51 dead), were no different.
The origins of British racism

We can remain brief on the origin of these rhetorical figures and motifs. They have a long tradition in the history of ethno-nationalist paranoias. But above all, they have a history of recent and incessant activation by the political forces of the British two-party system over the last twenty years. In this respect, and as has already been indicated, Labour social democracy has left behind a uniformly toxic legacy since the 2000s, between the validation of the neo-Nazi British National Party’s “just concerns” in terms of the allocation of social housing and the lexicon of the “invasion” and “submersion” of the schools by the children of migrants and asylum seekers. This language has been promoted by ministers (Labour Home Secretaries) in office. In 2010, Labour’s election programme devoted a section to “crime and immigration: strengthening our territories, protecting our borders” to prepare “the next stage of national renewal”. In 2015, the merchandizing of the party’s conference offered mugs with the inscription: “Controls on immigration: I’m voting labour”.

This endless catalogue of nationalist and racist one-upmanship reached a new critical threshold when the Labour prime minister since June 2024, Sir Keir Starmer, a staunch Zionist and avowed supporter of the Palestinian genocide, hastened to express the first tribute to the American racist ideologue, Charlie Kirk. It should be noted that the condolences of Starmer and Kemi Badenoch (leader of the conservative opposition) also focused on the question of “freedom of expression” in the name of which openly racist and sexist remarks and the obscurantism that inspires them must have their place in the public debate (which cannot be applied to denunciations of the genocide and Palestinian solidarity, as we have had ample opportunity to understand).

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and on the eve of the “freedom of speech” demonstration called by Tommy Robinson, Badenoch declared: “The murder of Charlie Kirk is a blow to everything that Western civilization stands for: open, vigorous debate and peaceful protest.” For Boris Johnson, Kirk was nothing less than “a shining martyr for freedom of expression.”

Three weeks later, Badenoch announced the “hardest border closure plan Britain has ever seen,” which included withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the repeal of the Human Rights Act of 1998.

In this way, in Britain, the various shades of the far right can continue to content themselves with continuing and prospering the work of political formations that have long been hegemonic and are now both in the grip of a crisis of legitimacy of unprecedented gravity. The debt is therefore great to the Labour-Tory tandem, its multi-recidivist anti-foreigner legislation, its attacks on civil liberties, its “anti-woke” moral panic, its genocidal complicity and normalization.

This is perfectly reflected, among other things, in the mediocrity of these far-right propagandists. The exchange between Robinson and Musk, the interventions of Zemmour or Bystron have no rhetorical charm, not even the slightest danger, even, of any rhetorical charm. In this respect, 13 September carries with it the possibility of a pleasure in a nullity of which the imaginary of the “rape of our daughters and our sisters” could be an attempt at correction as sordid as it is desperate. At this point, perhaps it should be admitted, rhetorical brutality devoid of the slightest sophistication, of skill, is sufficient as a manifestation of the sheer desire for the use of force, while the Trumpist ICE militias, the fascist exaltation of Israeli genocidal power, or the giant riots and rabbles in Britain and now Ireland, show the future.
Tech, fossilism, armaments, Israelism and the heyday of neofascism

The rise of the British far right manifests itself in two obvious ways. The demonstration of 13 September is one of them; the considerable lead in opinion polls for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party is another. Between Robinson and Farage is the false contradiction and the real complementarity that can exist between a delinquent-martyr who has long had no party other than his own online brand, and a notable determined to fit into an institutional framework within which he can claim to embody a majority succession.

The first, Robinson, won the support of Musk, who himself broke with Trump, to the detriment of the second, the billionaire having judged Farage too “weak” on the issue of immigration.

The official far right is now divided between Reform UK (Farage) and Advance UK, a split from Reform UK led by Ben Habib, joined by Robinson since August 2025. But at this stage, their nuances can be considered minor in view of the scale and continuity of the forces now engaged in supporting this new political configuration.

Robinson, whose audience and wealth are linked to social networks and his sales of “manifest” books, owes Musk for having regained his “freedom of expression” on a new X account, owned by Musk, whom he also thanked for the payment of legal costs (not confirmed by Musk himself).

But it is to Israelism, among the most fanatical, that the former British neo-Nazi, converted into a “free speech martyr”, frenzied Islamophobe and unconditional admirer of Israel (for which he has declared himself ready to fight in the event of war), owes a large part of his prosperity.

His sentence to thirteen months in prison for illegally filming and posting on Facebook the trial of Muslims accused of sexual assault (hence the banner of “free speech” against a woke justice system won over to the “migratory invasion”), earned Robinson an international far-right campaign “Free Tommy” (relayed by many Russian accounts as well as by Trump himself), with the support of the pro-Russian right,

Israeli-American Daniel Pipes’ ultra-Zionist Middle East Forum (MEF) paid for the legal costs and the organization of three demonstrations in support of Robinson at a cost of $60,000.

The Gatestone Institute, a pro-Israel think tank, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a far-right organization that describes itself as a “school of political warfare” against “the fifth column,” have published articles in defence of Robinson. In addition, the Gatestone Institute and the MEF both benefit from the largesse of Nina Rosenwald, co-president of a financial investment firm (American Securities Management), who claims to be an “ardent Zionist” and is known as the “sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate.”

Earlier, tech billionaire Robert Shillman, a regular donor to pro-Israel institutions, hired Robinson by the Canadian far-right organization Rebel Media in 2017-2018, awarding him a scholarship estimated at around $85,000 per year. This position was also accompanied by three assistant posts, each paid $2,500 per month. Robinson’s personal estate is estimated to be somewhere between £1 million and £3 million.

In October 2025, the verdict of a new trial was postponed following the official invitation extended to Robinson by the Israeli minister in charge of the diaspora and speaker of the Knesset, Amichai Chikli. There are many precedents of this kind, dating back to 2003 and the reception given by Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister, to the neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini, an admirer of Mussolini and the apartheid wall then being built around the West Bank. However, the arrival of an influencer with no other title than that of an ex-Islamophobic hooligan is clearly a departure from the diplomatic decorum that was once de rigueur. The initiative, however, has sparked anger and incomprehension in Israel itself, and even in British Jewish community organizations, which are usually so loyal to Israel.
What place for Reform UK?

What about Reform UK and its leading figures? Farage, honorary chair, and Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK (which, unlike the other parties, has private company status), have distanced themselves from the “thug” Robinson. But like Robinson, Farage and Tice are the devoted and utterly servile relays of forces more determined than ever to do without standards and constraints that are far too cumbersome (fiscal, legal, environmental and so on), however weak or cosmetic they may be.

Farage (wealth estimated at between £3 million and £5 million) and Tice (£40 million and a tax-avoiding patriot), two authentic men of the people, both have their own programme on the conservative and Islamophobic channel, GB News, launched in 2021. In this context, both had plenty of time to challenge the reality of climate change, “absolute garbage,” according to Tice.

With this deep conviction, and for the good of all, the leaders of Reform UK defend the exploitation of Britain’s gas potential, knowing that “we’ve got potentially hundreds of billions of energy treasure in the form of shale gas,” according to Tice. It would then be “grossly financially negligent to a criminal degree to leave that value underground and not to extract it.”

Combining actions with words, Reform UK MPs, in council assemblies where they have won a number of majority positions since the last local elections, decided to repeal carbon neutrality targets and eliminate references to the “climate emergency” that have been integrated into the orientations of such assemblies in recent years. Budgets were then reallocated to other priorities, while continuing to receive subsidies earmarked for energy transition policies. Recently initiated guidelines and policies in the counties of Durham, Staffordshire, Kent, Derbyshire, and West Northamptonshire have been annulled.

But this determination in the denial of climate change and the derailment of the few existing efforts in terms of energy transition corresponds strictly to what could be expected from a “party” almost entirely in the hands of the fossil fuel industry. An investigation published in the New York Times in March 2025 showed that of the £4.75 million obtained in 2024 by Reform UK, 40% came from individuals known to have “openly disputed the reality of climate change, or from holders of investments in fossil fuels and other polluting industries”.

Other researchers have shown, for the DeSmog website, that between December 2019 and June 2024, Reform UK collected more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests and climate sceptic figures, including, for example, Terence Mordaunt, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organization at the forefront of challenging work on climate science. This amount corresponded to 92% of total donations to the Reform UK business party. Most of these contributions also come from accounts registered in tax havens.

But the conflict of interest can be even more caricatural; Tice and Farage are employees of a chain, GB News, whose owner, Paul Marshall, owns £1.8 billion in shares in the fossil fuel sector, including Shell, Chevron, Equinor (Norway) and more than a hundred others. The DeSmog investigation also showed that in 2022, a third of GB News anchors had openly questioned climate work and half had denounced climate initiatives.

Reform UK is also the recipient of donations from an arms company, QinetiQ, which is a major beneficiary of the increase in state spending in the defence sector. “80% of QinetiQ’s revenues related to armaments come from British taxpayers alone,” according to the Byline Times, a windfall of public money which the company’s main shareholder, Christopher Harborne, redirects in part to the benefit of Reform UK, of which he is the main financier. Harborne donated nearly £14 million to Reform UK between 2019 and 2024, and paid for Farage’s two recent visits to Trump, in 2024 and 2025 at a total cost of nearly £60,000.

Between Robinson and Farage-Tice, we understand the whole issue and the meaning of “freedom of expression”: to maintain anti-migrant moral panics, by disrupting legal procedures if necessary, and to spread the myth of Islamization and the “rape” of the West; to be able to challenge climate research for the benefit of the fossil fuel lobby in the context of manifest conflicts of interest, and to defend all logics of oppression, up to the point of genocidal horror, by continuing to present oneself as a victim of feminist, anti-racist, or pro-Palestinian censorship, all in the service of the “freedom” of extraction, escape, exploitation, pollution and manipulation, conditions for the “expression” of an absolute capital.

Various components of the British far right could therefore be able to take over from the discredited parties, those who have made their bed but who still intend to ensure their survival with new anti-refugee, Islamophobic one-upmanship, and reformist sadism as proof of managerial credibility: the hell of cruelty and indifference inflicted on the children of Gaza comes from afar.

These are undoubtedly the symptoms of the transition from a decrepit parliamentary neoliberalism to the oligarchic order which is now on the way to reaching its full political fulfilment. In which case, it must be admitted, defending this indefensible requires a very great “freedom of expression”, purely fabricated, unencumbered by a justice system that is still capable of independence, a media and a press that are still free, scientific research that still assumes its critical vocation, and by any political demand for equality.

There is some good news, however, to emerge from the ongoing shipwreck of the parties that have dominated British political life until now: the deep, right-wing and sectarian Labourism, inspiring an almost universal disgust, may finally give a real chance to the emergence of a left-wing, socialist force, this time no longer condemned to the kind of peripheral and ephemeral agitation in which so much enthusiasm and momentum have inevitably ended up running out of steam and withering away until now. It remains to be seen, and to follow, the social democratic revival represented by the British Greens and, even more, what could become of Your Party, launched by MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, whose announcement alone during the summer received nearly a million messages of support and membership requests. Enough to do. Well, maybe.

Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.

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Footnotes


[1] Read the National Audit Office report, “Pressures on Children Social Care,” 2019. Also, the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse report, S. Kewley and K. Karsna, “Child Sexual Abuse in 2023/24: Trends in Official Data,” June 2025. According to the two authors, “The number of children who are victims of sexual abuse is much higher than what is brought to the attention of public bodies. Based on available survey data, we 

Thierry Labica  is a lecturer in British Studies at the University of Nanterre and a member of the NPA.


International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

BBC crisis or coup? Either way, it’s a right-wing hit job

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward 


The true scandal isn’t just the right’s distortion of BBC bias, it’s the rot within the system that allowed this farce to happen.

The vultures barely waited for the body to go cold. By Monday morning, the smug right-wing press were crowing over the resignations of director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness amid accusations of bias.

“Beeb boss quits over Trump lies,” shrieked the Sun.

“BBC bosses quit in disgrace,” cheered the Daily Mail.

The next day, they had the added bonus of plastering their front pages with Donald Trump’s threat: “Grovel – or I’ll sue you for $1 billion.”

The hysteria began in the BBC-averse Telegraph, no less, which was handed a loaded gun in the form of an internal “dossier” written by Michael Prescott, a former political editor of the Sunday Times turned PR executive. Until June this year, Prescott sat as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.

The 19-page document, sent to the BBC board, alleged “serious apparent bias,” including “rogue LGBT+ reporters” censoring debate on trans issues, BBC Arabic giving “extensive space” to Hamas, and, its smoking gun, that Panorama had doctored a Trump speech to make it appear that Trump had encouraged violence on January 6.

Prescott’s anti-BBC report contains doctored quote

As the right took the moral high ground over Panorama’s allegedly misleading edit of Trump’s Capitol Hill speech, a new twist in the fast-moving story revealed that Prescott’s own report contains misleading quotes.

In the document, Prescott writes:

“Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: ‘We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.’ It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it.”

However, as James Ball reports in the New World, this is not what Donald Trump actually said. Prescott has heavily edited the remarks, altering their meaning.

Ball also explains how just as Prescott notes that television has rules requiring broadcasters to make clear when a quote has been edited or abridged, the same standards apply in print. When shortening a quotation, an ellipsis should be used. Prescott has not done so.

“In a fair world, Prescott’s apparent error would be seen as at least as serious as the original supposed mistake made by Panorama,” writes Ball.

And just as revealing as what the dossier included is what it left out. There’s no mention of the corporation’s coverage of politics, business, education, health, the royal family, domestic affairs, climate change, crime, or even Ukraine.

“Did Prescott ever think to ask whether the same objections that he raised over the treatment of Trump might be applied to the BBC’s treatment of Putin?” asks journalist David Aaronovitch in an op-ed in the Observer that questions the impartiality of the document at the heart of the controversy. .

“So Prescott zeroes in on the culture war plus Gaza agenda. Because these seem to be the things that bother him, not because these are all the things a conscientious adviser might be bothered by,” he adds.

Prescott’s dossier is looking less and less like a whistleblower’s warning and more and more like a political grenade.

Prescott bailed out of journalism 24 years ago for a lucrative career in corporate PR and serves as managing director at Hanover Communications, a PR company with links to the Conservative party. Official EU and UK lobbying disclosures seen by Byline Times show Hanover represents a number of US tech and entertainment giants, including Oracle, Apple, Meta and Paramount. Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally and Republican megadonor, who recently briefly overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, helped build the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’ personnel database for a future Trump administration. Ellison’s son David now chairs Paramount Skydance, following a merger with the entertainment powerhouse that owns CBS.

And it gets worse.

Prescott’s post on the BBC’s editorial board was reportedly secured under the influence of Sir Robbie Gibb, BBC board member and co-founder of GB News.

Gibb’s fingerprints are everywhere. A self-described “Thatcherite Conservative” and former Downing Street communications chief under Theresa May, now sits in judgment over BBC impartiality. Trump, according to his lawyer, is “very fond” of GB News’s “fair and accurate reporting.” Its co-owner hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall, who also owns the Spectator and UnHerd, has previously called for the BBC to be sold, describing it as squatting “like a giant toad in the middle of the UK media landscape.”

The right’s punching bag

For years, the BBC has been the right’s favourite punching bag, too ‘woke,’ too ‘globalist,’ too unwilling to parrot the culture war lines coming out of Westminster and Mar-a-Lago alike.

Davie’s resignation was the scalp they’d been waiting for.

Never mind the details, the facts, that Senate, Congressional and legal investigations into Trump’s conduct on January 6 concluded he bore responsibility for the insurrection that followed.

Just slap ‘disgrace’ across your front page and tell your readers you ‘told them so.’

Yes, Panorama made an error. The failure to re-edit a mis-spliced Trump clip was serious, but hardly a scandal of world-historical proportions. As Sky’s former political editor Adam Boulton observed, summarising long speeches through edits is standard practice, and the overall impression that Trump encouraged the riots, was correct.

Yet when the Murdoch-owned Times publishes a fake interview with a former New York mayor during an election campaign, no one called for heads to roll. The Murdoch empire has spent decades attacking the BBC, while paying billions to settle phone-hacking and corruption cases.

This crusade isn’t about media standards, it’s about power.

And never mind that the Telegraph, the very paper that has fanned the outrage, is mired in its own chaos. Its long-running sale saga, tangled in political interference and editorial controversy, remains as turbulent and uncertain as ever.

And the Daily Mail, that immigrant-baiting, NHS-undermining tabloid, never apologised for its fabricated “Beergate” story that falsely accused Keir Starmer of breaking lockdown rules with a pre-pandemic photo.

Where were the cries of “fake news”? Where were the demands to “grovel or be sued”? Interestingly the most recent survey that I’ve seen, finds that while 60% of people trust the BBC for their news, that falls to 24% for the Mail.



Which brings us on to Boris Johnson. The former prime minister who was actually found guilty of breaking lockdown laws, urged readers in his Mail column to boycott the licence fee unless Tim Davie offered a “convincing explanation” for its supposed bias. The corporation, he thundered, had been “caught red-handed in multiple acts of left-wing bias.”

This is the man who tried to install Paul Dacre, the former Daily Mail editor, as chair of Ofcom, the UK’s supposedly independent media regulator. Dacre, a long-time scourge of the BBC, bombed his interview so spectacularly that even a government eager to please the press couldn’t save him. Despite efforts to give him a second chance, he eventually withdrew.

Analyses that ‘sinks without a trace’

And while the right scream “leftist bias,” evidence points the other way. A Cardiff University study found Reform featured in 49 BBC News at Ten bulletins between January and July this year, whereas the Lib Dems, who have 72 MPs, featured in just 35 bulletins.

The Centre for Media Monitoring found BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza gave Israeli deaths 33 times more attention per fatality than Palestinian ones. As Politico’s editor Alan Rusbridger notes: “Such analyses tend to sink without trace. Is this, in itself, a form of bias?”

Rusbridger raises another crucial point – who exactly sits on the BBC board, the body that received Prescott’s “dossier.” Of its 13 members, which according to Prescott dismissed his concerns, five, including chair Samir Shah, are appointed by the government. The rest are heavy on business and private equity backgrounds but light on journalism.

The committee overseeing editorial standards is equally conflicted. Three insiders, Shah, Davie, Turness, sit alongside Gibb and former BBC COO Caroline Thomson. Prescott, notably, served as an adviser to this same group. It’s an uncomfortable tangle of those enforcing standards and those accused of breaching them, a “motley bunch,” as Rusbridger describes it.

Gibb’s record speaks for itself. In 2020, he helped lead a consortium to buy the Jewish Chronicle, a paper accused of, on occasion. publishing fabricated stories about Israel’s war in Gaza. Several senior columnists resigned from the newspaper this year, including Jonathan Freedland, who said the paper “too often reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgments political rather than journalistic.”

Yet Gibb remains a supposed arbiter of impartiality within the BBC, appointed by Boris Johnson and confirmed by Rishi Sunak.

Who guards the guardians?

So who guards the guardians? As Rusbridger put it: “If I were a BBC journalist, under such intensive scrutiny and fire, I’m not sure I would be terribly comforted by these governance arrangements…. I’d wonder why such close editorial scrutiny should have been entrusted to three key people who themselves rejected journalism in order to enjoy lucrative careers in corporate and political communications. Who, bluntly, would you trust more to be impartial on the Middle East—Robbie Gibb, Michael Prescott or Lyse Doucet? Why should the PR professionals who turned their own backs on journalism sit in judgment on the latter?”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump grins like the cat who got the cream. In a statement praising the Telegraph for “exposing” BBC corruption, his team declared the corporation “100% fake news.”

The true scandal isn’t just the right’s distortion of BBC bias, it’s the rot within the system that allowed this farce to happen. Prescott’s dossier, leaked from within and weaponised by the press, shows how corporate lobbyists and political operatives have captured the very machinery of media accountability.

Outside Broadcasting House stands a statue of George Orwell, inscribed with his words: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

The irony is gut-wrenching. Those who claim to defend truth are the ones strangling it. If they succeed, we may as well take the statue down.

The question remains: will ‘Auntie’, unlike the American broadcast media, be bold enough not to cower to Trump and his demands? As Alan Rusbridger observes, there’s only one way for the BBC to salvage some dignity from the smoking rubble of the past week – with a four-word message: “See you in court.”

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

Sir Ed Davey blasts Nigel Farage for teaming up with Trump to attack the BBC

Olivia Barber 

11 November, 2025 
Left Foot Forward 

"I think people need to see through Nigel Farage, and see through Donald Trump and realise what they’re trying to do to our great country."

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has slammed Nigel Farage for joining in with Donald Trump’s attacks on the BBC.

Trump has threatened the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit after it resurfaced that a BBC Panorama documentary had spliced together two clips from a Trump speech to make it look like he had encouraged the January 2021 Capitol riot.

On Sunday night, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and BBC News’ CEO Deborah Turness resigned.

Farage claimed during a Reform press conference yesterday that the BBC had stitched Donald Trump up “on the eve of a national election” by airing the Panorama episode.

In Trump’s speech on January 6 2021, he said: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

This line in Trump’s speech has been repeatedly pointed to as evidence of him having incited the riots.

The Reform leader mentioned having spoken to Trump on Friday, who he said was angry at the BBC.

Farage then went on to attack the BBC: “I mean people talk about election interference, what the BBC did was election interference.”

He also said that if Reform wins power at the next election, he will “defund the BBC from its current model, be in no doubt about that”.

“The licence fee, as currently is, cannot survive, it is wholly unsustainable,” Farage, who has a GB News show, added.

On Sky News, Davey said condemned the Reform leader’s comments.

Davey said: “Nigel Farage is basically teaming up with Trump to criticise the BBC, it’s shocking, it’s unpatriotic, it’s wrong. It shows he wants Trump’s America, with his attacks on free media, coming to the UK.”

Asked if he understood why Farage had said the BBC committed “election interference”, Davey said that comment was “too extreme”. He said: “The interference we have seen in elections has come from Nigel Farage’s friend Vladimir Putin.”

He said that Russia has interfered with UK elections in the most “appalling ways”, yet Farage calls Putin “the world leader he most admires”.

“I think people need to see through Nigel Farage, and see through Donald Trump and realise what they’re trying to do to our great country.”

The Lib Dem leader has written to prime minister Keir Starmer, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Farage calling on them to condemn Trump’s attack on the BBC.

He has also called for BBC board member Robbie Gibb, who was appointed by Boris Johnson and is a longstanding Tory supporter, to be removed from the board.

Reports have suggested that Gibb “led the charge” in claims over systemic bias at the BBC.

Tories criticised for saying BBC should ‘grovel’ to Donald Trump

Basit Mahmood 

11 November, 2025 

Left Foot Forward


Speaking on Times Radio on Tuesday, shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said the BBC must pull out all the stops to avoid leaving licence fee payers facing a huge legal bill.

Senior Tories have been criticised for saying that the BBC should apologise to President Trump after he threatened to sue the corporation after it edited one of his speeches.

The Republican has threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion, following claims Panorama “doctored” footage of a speech he made to his supporters before the Capitol riots on January 6, 2020.

The BBC has apologies with two of its top figures, including the director-general, resigning amid concerns about impartiality – notably the editing of a Panorama documentary from October 2024.

The corporation has until Friday at 10pm to respond to the president’s legal threat, however given that the documentary was not aired in America, legal experts believe Trump’s chances of success are limited. However, that hasn’t stopped senior Tories from demanding the BBC grovel and apologise to Trump.

Speaking on Times Radio on Tuesday, shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said the BBC must pull out all the stops to avoid leaving licence fee payers facing a huge legal bill.

He said: “If you look at the complaint he’s got, the TV programme, the Panorama programme, he probably has legitimate claims to say, look, this was wrong and definitely requires and demands an apology. So I would advise the BBC to grovel here.

“They need to make sure that they communicate very clearly that they got this wrong and that they apologise. And then I think probably we need to all appeal to Donald Trump to make it clear that it’s licence payers, it’s taxpayers, that would suffer then because of the bad and poor decisions made by a bunch of left-wing journalists and anti-Trump journalists and make it clear that they should be the ones held to account.”

Asked later how the BBC should respond, Nigel Huddleston told GB News: “Well, with a big apology and grovel because they were wrong, and Donald Trump has a perfectly legitimate concern here. It wasn’t could be perceived to be misleading, it transparently was.”

Social media users were quick to criticise Huddleston’s comments, with one user writing: “Just watched this pathetic specimen on Sky News. If the likes of Nigel Huddleston was in office, Trump may as well be installed as UK President. What a grovelling little shit.”

Another added: “Thank God this moron is only the Shadow culture secretary otherwise his actions would humiliate us on the world stage. Do not give an inch to the corrupt, lying scumbag Trump – the BBC should apologise for the edit but that’s it, there is no case to answer beyond that.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

How right-wing attacks have led to resignations at the BBC

Olivia Barber 

10 November, 2025 

Left Foot Forward News

"This is the most abysmal, pathetic thing. The BBC head resigning because the corporation is not supine *enough* to the far-right."

The UK right-wing media and American right are taking delight in the resignations of the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness.

The Telegraph has published a series of attack lines against the BBC over the last week.

First, they reported that an internal BBC memo written by ex-Murdoch journalist Michael Prescott which raised concerns that Panorama footage put two parts of a Donald Trump speech together so he appeared to encourage the Capitol Hill riot in January 2021.

Prescott also accused BBC Arabic reporters of “anti-Israel bias”.

On Friday, The Telegraph published comments from former prime minister Boris Johnson saying: “Davie must explain or quit”.

In his Daily Mail column, Johnson’s piece led with the headline: “Until BBC boss Tim Davie either comes clean on how Panorama doctored Trump’s speech – or resigns – I won’t be paying my licence fee.”

In a lengthy statement attacking the BBC, Trump thanked The Telegraph for “exposing” corruption at the broadcaster, while his press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the BBC “100% fake news”.

Trump has now threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion.

As Sky’s former political editor Adam Boulton, pointed out, the overall impression that Trump encouraged the riots was true. Other journalists have highlighted it is common practice to “splice together” sections of a long speech to summarise it.

While right-wing critics accuse the BBC of “left-wing bias,” evidence suggests the broadcaster has given more attention to Reform UK’s MPs than to the Greens or Liberal Democrats.

A recent Cardiff University study found Reform featured in 49 BBC News at Ten bulletins between January and July this year, whereas the Lib Dems, who have 72 MPs, featured in just 35 bulletins.

The BBC has also been criticised for its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, with a recent Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) study showing that Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths.

David Yelland, former editor of the Sun wrote on X: “What has happened today at the BBC is nothing short of a coup, a national disgrace, the corporation’s board has effectively been undermined and elements close to it have worked with hostile newspaper editors, a former PM and enemies of public service broadcasting. The only honourable players here are Tim Davie and Deborah Turness.”

Journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot said: “Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough…”.

Journalist Ian Dunt said: “This is the most abysmal, pathetic thing. The BBC head resigning because the corporation is not supine *enough* to the far-right.”

Political editor of Byline Times, Adam Bienkov, wrote on Bluesky: “The BBC’s senior leadership resigning en masse over one dodgy edit in one programme, simply because the right wing press demands it, tells you everything you need to know about where the power really lies in that relationship.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

Op-Ed: Trump vs BBC – So what? So this.


By Paul Wallis
EDITOR AT LARGE

DIGITAL JOURNAL
November 15, 2025


Image: - © AFP/File Justin TALLIS

In a not entirely surprising twist Trump is now saying he’ll sue the BBC for up to $5 billion. Trump says he was defamed by a somewhat iffy BBC edit of “Trump A Second Chance?” on the long-running BBC show Panorama.

The BBC has apologized but doesn’t agree with the defamation argument. Trump says the BBC is “fake news,” a term he basically coined for any and all negative press. Not much has changed.

Note: It’s unclear whether any actual formal proceedings are currently in place.

Whether or not UK law will entertain Trump’s idea of defamation is another matter. The highly litigious US is a very different legal environment to the UK. At least it’s supposed to be. The issue is what constitutes defamation and what isn’t, edits aside.

Let’s leave out the legal arguments. There is another issue here that isn’t getting much attention. The right to sue, rightly or wrongly, is not in question.

The question of such high punitive damages, however, is very much an issue that may haunt global media for decades to come.

Important: Note that a court may award damages as it sees fit, not necessarily the amount claimed by the plaintiff. Claims for damages are usually subject to intense dispute.

Can such litigation be simply thrown out by the court?

Yes, it can.

Will such a high-profile case be simply thrown out?

Very probably not.

The case would have to be heard in full, even “on principle.”

There’s an important possible legal precedent that could well affect global media.

The high-stakes damages are very much part of the bigger picture.

If this case is successful and becomes an instant legal precedent, what follows?

Where do you draw the line, let alone make the distinction, between simple reportage and someone’s personal interpretation of the same reportage?

Expect fireworks if this case proceeds.

__________________________________________________________

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

 

Breaking Rust: AI artist tops US chart for first time as study reveals alarming recognition stats

Copyright Instagram - Breaking Rust

By David Mouriquand

Published on 14/11/2025 - EURONEWS

An AI-generated music persona has topped the US Billboard charts for the first time, at the same time as a “first-of-its-kind" study from French streaming service Deezer reveals that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real music and AI-generated music.

It’s a first, and not one worth celebrating.

A song generated by artificial intelligence has topped the charts in the US for the first time, as a country “artist” named Breaking Rust has landed the Number 1 spot on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart.

The viral track, ‘Walk My Walk’, has over 3.5 million streams on Spotify - a platform on which “he” is a verified artist and which has prior form when it comes to giving AI-generated bands a platform.

Other Breaking Rust songs like ‘Livin’ on Borrowed Time’ and ‘Whiskey Don’t Talk Back’ have amassed more than 4 million and 1 million streams respectively. And if you just cringed your way into a mild aneurysm when reading that last song title, you’re only human.

Not all that much is known about Breaking Rust, apart from “his” nearly 43,000 followers on Instagram and a Linktree bio that reads: “Music for the fighters and the dreamers.”

How profound.

Any gluttons for clichéd dross who choose to head to the Instagram page will find several generic AI-generated videos of stubbly cowboys looking like factory-reject Ben Afflecks walking on snow-covered train tracks, lifting weights and holding their hats under the rain. In other words, stereotypical Outlaw Country fantasies that reek of fragile masculinity and necktie fetishes.

Still, fans are clearly loving it, seemingly unbothered that the “Soul Music for Us” glaringly lacks, you know, a soul.

“Love your voice! Awesome song writing! I want more” reads one comment on a video, while another writes: “I don’t know if this is a real guy but his songs are seriously some of my favorite in life.”

“I LIKE THE SONG, NO MATTER WHO CREATED IT!” screams one comment on YouTube.

Some listeners also appear not to realize that Breaking Rust isn’t human, as fans are complimenting the lyricism (strewth!) and even asking the “artist” go on tour.

Related

This is not the first time that an AI-generated act has debuted on Billboard’s charts. One notable example is Xania Monet, who made headlines in September when the tracks ‘Let Go, Let Go’ climbed to No.3 (Gospel) and ‘How Was I Supposed To Kow’ peaked at No. 20 (R&B).

Created by Telisha “Nikki” Jones using the AI platform Suno, Monet has been a particularly visible AI “artist” – one which even triggered a bidding war to sign “her”. Hallwood Media, led by former Interscope executive Neil Jacobson, ultimately won and signed Monet to a reported multimillion-dollar deal.

Who knows whether the same will happen for Breaking Rust, but the chart-topping success does signal a continuing shift in the music industry.

Related

There have been concerns about the use of generative AI in all creative sectors – from Hollywood with the writer and actor guild strikes and the creation of the so-called AI actress Tilly Norwood to the recent internet meltdown over Coca-Cola making their Christmas adverts entirely AI-generated. And the more AI-created bands and musicians continue to proliferate, the more real human artists will struggle to break through – let alone generate revenues from their craft.

As Josh Antonuccio, director of the School of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University, recently told Newsweek: “Whether it’s lyrical assistance, AI-assisted ideation, or wholesale artist and song creation, AI-generated content is going to become a much more common reality and will continue to find its way into the charts.”

He added: “The real question starts to become 'will fans care about how it’s made?'”

Indeed, the success of Breaking Rust comes as a new, “first-of-its-kind" study has found that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real music and AI-generated music.

The survey, conducted by French streaming service Deezer and research firm Ipsos, asked around 9,000 people from eight different countries (Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US) to listen to three tracks to determine which was fully AI-generated.

According to the report, 97 per cent of those respondents “failed” - with 52 per cent saying they felt “uncomfortable” to not know the difference.

Related

• French streamer Deezer reveals that 28 per cent of music uploaded to platform is AI-generated

The study also found that 55 per cent of respondents were “curious” about AI-generated music, and that 66 per cent said they would listen to it at least once, out of curiosity

However, only 19 per cent said they felt that they could trust AI, while another 51 per cent said they believe the use of AI in music production could lead to “generic” sounding music.

“The survey results clearly show that people care about music and want to know if they’re listening to AI or human made tracks or not,” said Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. “There’s also no doubt that there are concerns about how AI-generated music will affect the livelihood of artists, music creation and that AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to train their models on copyrighted material.”

Earlier this year, artists including Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Dua Lipa and Elton John urged UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to protect the work of creatives, with Sir Elton posting a statement saying that “creative copyright is the lifeblood of the creative industries”. He added that government proposals which let AI companies train their systems on copyright-protected work without permission left the door “wide open for an artist’s life work to be stolen.”

Sir Elton previously claimed that AI would “dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings”, a statement backed by thousands of real-life artists who continue to petition the music industry to implement safeguards related to artificial intelligence and copyright.

In February, more than 1,000 artists, including Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn and Radiohead, launched a silent album titled 'Is This What We Want?', in protest against UK government plans that could allow AI companies to use copyrighted content without consent.

The album, featuring the sounds of empty studios and performance spaces, was designed to be a symbol of the negative impact controversial government proposals could have on musicians' livelihoods.

Kate Bush, one of the leading voices in the protest, expressed her concerns by saying: "In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?"

The question still stands and feels more urgent than ever, considering the chart-topping sounds of Breaking Rust.

Give us empty studio sounds over soulless cowboy platitudes any day of the week.

These videos of Ukrainian soldiers are

deepfakes generated from the faces of

Russian streamers


A number of videos have been circulating online that claim to show tearful Ukrainian soldiers who claim they were mobilised against their will. In reality, these videos are all deepfakes generated using the faces of Russian video game streamers.


Issued on: 13/11/2025 -
By:The FRANCE 24 Observers/
Quang Pham

These videos, which claim to show Ukrainian soldiers refusing to fight, were actually generated by artificial intelligence. They were posted on social media on November 2, 2025. © X


At first glance, the video that has been widely shared on X and TikTok since November 2 is a tearjerker. It claims to show a young Ukrainian soldier – more boy than man – crying and saying he doesn’t want to go and fight:


"They mobilised me. I am leaving for Chasiv Yar [Editor’s note: a town in the Donetsk oblast, or administrative region, in eastern Ukraine]. Help me, I don’t want to die. I am only 23. Help me, please.”

"Ukraine is sending its young people to the slaughterhouse,” commented one social media user who posted the video on X. This user commonly shares both anti-Semitic and pro-Russian views.

This video of a crying Ukrainian soldier was generated by artificial intelligence. © X


This video isn’t the only one – dozens of similar videos have also been circulating on other social media platforms, especially TikTok. These videos claim to show Ukrainian soldiers deployed against their will to Pokrovsk, an important strategic town in the Donbas region that is the epicentre of a Russian offensive:

"They are bringing us to Pokrovsk, we don’t want to go, please.

Someone help us, please.

We don’t know what to do, they are bringing us by force.

My god, mama, mama, I don’t want to."

These videos of young Ukrainian soldiers claiming that they don’t want to be deployed to Pokrovsk were all generated by artificial intelligence. They were posted online on October 31, 2025. © X, TikTok

Fake videos generated by artificial intelligence

While it is true that the Ukrainian army has been reckoning with a growing number of desertions in recent months and that many Ukrainian men do want to avoid serving, these videos are fake. They were all generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

There are a few clues.

First of all, the videos of Ukrainian soldiers claiming that they don’t want to be deployed to Pokrovsk feature a watermark: an image of a small cloud and the word Sora. That’s the visual logo – or signature – of Sora 2, an artificial intelligence video generator created by OpenAI which puts these watermarks on generated videos in an attempt to prevent them from being used out of context.

These fake videos of Ukrainian soldiers being deployed to Pokrovsk feature the watermark of artificial intelligence video generator Sora. © X, TikTok


The video of the 23-year-old soldier supposedly being shipped off to Chasiv Yar doesn’t have a watermark. However, we have previously reported in another article that the Sora AI watermark can be removed. And there are other clues that this video, too, was generated by AI.

First, the description of his circumstances that the soldier gives doesn’t align with how conscription actually works in Ukraine. The soldier claims that he was conscripted when he was 23. However, the Ukrainian parliament set the age for military service in Ukraine at 25. People under that age can volunteer, but they can’t be conscripted.

The helmet that the soldier is wearing also features anomalies – clues that it was generated by artificial intelligence. The man is wearing a NIJ IIIA ballistic helmet (which offers protection against 9mm bullets). However, there are differences between the helmet the “soldier” is wearing and the real helmet, which you can see on a specialist site. For example, a screw that appears round on the real helmet looks deformed in the AI-created video. The helmet in the video has a round piece that doesn’t appear on the real model. AI has a tendency to add elements when it is generating images of objects.

At left is the fake video of a 23-year-old soldier. At right is an image of a real Fast NIJ IIIA ballistic helmet. Our team outlined the differences. © X, Antam.fr.


All of these videos of fake Ukrainian soldiers came from the same TikTok profile – "fantomoko". This account’s watermark appears on these videos.

The profile, now offline, seems to have published mainly fake, AI-generated videos. A large number of the videos shared by this account feature the Sora 2 watermark as well as the hashtags #fakeall and #sora2.

This is the TikTok profile of fantomoko, featuring dozens of AI-generated videos depicting fake Ukrainian soldiers. © TikTok

The Russian streamers whose identities were stolen

Italian fact-checking outlet open.online first reported a strange detail about these videos and the identity theft behind them. They seemed to be created from the faces of Russian streamers – users who stream themselves live on social media – in this case, while playing video games.

The Sora 2 AI video generator only takes a few seconds to create "deepfakes", which appear to show real people speaking with real voices but in fact are artificial.

The supposed 23-year-old soldier featured in the video was created using the face of kussia88, a Russian streamer with a Twitch profile that has 1.3 million followers.

The soldier complaining about being shipped to Pokrovsk was generated using videos of Russian streamer Aleksei Gubanov, known as "JesusAVGN". Gubanov actually opposes Russian Presdient Vladimir Putin’s regime and is now based in the United States.

Our team spoke to Aleksei Gubanov, who was horrified by the way his face was used to create these videos:

“I have no connection whatsoever to these videos – all of them were created by someone using the Sora neural network.

Moreover, I personally drew attention to these videos during my recent livestream, and I warned my audience that someone is deliberately trying to sow discontent in society by spreading such content. These materials play directly into the hands of Russian propaganda and cause serious harm to Ukraine, as they quickly gain a large number of views – and people, unfortunately, tend to believe them.”

The Centre for Countering Disinformation, a body linked to the Ukrainian government, spoke out about the video of the 23-year-old soldier. They described the video as fake news that “promotes the narrative of conscription at the age of 22-23” despite the fact that the age of military service is still 25. The aim of this disinformation campaign? "To sow distrust within Ukrainian society, disrupt mobilisation efforts and discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the international community,” the organisation said on X.

This article has been translated from the original in French.