For three years, TikTok has been banned in the Palace of Westminster. You’re not allowed to instal it on a government-issued phone or use it on government wifi networks, because its parent company is Chinese and there were concerns that the extensive data harvesting it conducts (as all social media companies do) might be feeding something more than just an advertising model. It was therefore a little ironic that, when the MPs of the Foreign Affairs Committee asked social media executives to give evidence to their inquiry into “disinformation diplomacy”, the only one who showed up in person was the lobbyist from TikTok.
Attending the session by video link were representatives from Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) and X (formerly Twitter). The inquiry is the committee’s attempt to explore “the most pressing disinformation threats to democracy”, a subject with which it’s fair to say social media companies are well acquainted. It was chaired by Emily Thornberry, who has a manner – the convivial barrister delivering blunt questions with a smile – well suited to diplomacy.
Here was an opportunity to take part in a sport that is played well in parliament: saying outrageous things with a straight face. The Chinese government, you may recall, didn’t allow TikTok either – it was created solely for export to the West, replaced in China by a heavily regulated app called Douyin – and in the US it is owned by a joint venture linked to companies linked to friends of Donald Trump. And yet here was Ali Law, TikTok’s lobbyist (apologies, director of public policy for northern Europe), talking with the deepest concern about “hostile actors trying to influence democratic elections” and large-scale operations coordinated to “impact public discussion” in the UK. Who could be responsible for such operations? Hmm, hmm, I wonder! Hold on to your chins, everyone, we’ve got some thinking to do!
The X lobbyist (director of global government affairs), Wifredo Fernandez – “Wifi” to his friends, according to his LinkedIn profile – sat somewhere in the world in front of a whiteboard in a meeting room. Thornberry asked him if his company had a UK representative. Her team, she said, had tried to make contact, but the person in question was on maternity leave and seemed to have been replaced by a chatbot. Wifi said he would look into it, though I’d be surprised if it became a top priority. This is a company that, when it was bought by Elon Musk, set its press office email to respond to all enquiries from journalists with an emoji of a little smiling turd. Nevertheless, Wifi reassured the committee that at X they “prohibit misleading or manipulated media that could cause public confusion or harm”. Meanwhile, on X itself, his boss, Musk, retweeted a cartoon depicting the conspiracy theory that most votes for Democrats are fraudulent.
Meta’s representative, David Agranovich, has the job title “director of global threat disruption”. Imagine having him as a friend or family member: “Dave is such a cool uncle! He disrupts threats around the globe!” He does this by working for Mark Zuckerberg. Dave used the phrase “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” to describe the kind of threats he takes on, although “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” would also work as a description of social media itself – or the lobbying industry, for that matter.
On the wall behind Agranovich was a framed print of a patent drawing for Arthur Scherbius’s Enigma machine, a device with two identities: one of the most important landmarks in cryptography, and also one of the Nazis’ most powerful weapons. A lot of things can be seen like that, in two quite different ways. For example, Agranovich told the committee that while his employer does make money from the ads bought by people conducting influence operations, this is “very small… a couple of hundred dollars here and there”. Another way of looking at it could be that misdirection is an important part of Meta’s revenue stream. In December 2024, internal documents suggested it was serving fraudulent ads to its users 15 billion times a day, accounting for more than 10 per cent of global revenue. Press Gazette reported that Meta appeared to be making more from publicising online scams than the entire UK news media makes from legitimate marketing.
The three lobbyists worked for different companies, but they referred to each other repeatedly as “colleagues”. They spoke very reasonably and very quickly. The TikTok lobbyist spoke so volubly that he had to take sharp little slurps of breath at the end of sentences, leaving no room for interjection. Russia, he said, was the disruptor country, followed by Iran, and then he paused for a moment. “Nothing from China?” Thornberry asked with an encouraging smile. His response was deft, abstract. When asked for a specific example of Chinese interference, he said: “I’m happy to go away and point towards it.”
One question that social media has definitively answered for the world is this: were all those parents who posted pictures of their children on social media wrong to do so? What we now know is that these pictures are used to train large language models. If you share them with the tech companies of the US and China, they will shred your family photos, digest them, and regurgitate them in any way that allows for profit. In the case of Grok, the AI behind X, this has included creating tens of thousands of sexualised images of children. If you looked through this library of horror – if you could stomach it without going mad – you would eventually find one that looks like a picture of your child. And that is because, in a roundabout way, it is.
When this was raised by the committee’s MPs, the X representative’s smile clicked off, replaced by deep professional concern. “We’ve implemented a whole host of measures,” he said, “to ensure that incident does not occur again.” He maintained that X is a place “to seek the truth, to engage in interesting discourse and debate”. When MPs complained that their own “For You” feeds were soaked in the divisive politics of the American hard right, he replied: “It’s really interesting to get your perspective on that.”
My own subjective experience of X’s default “For You” feed is that it feels like a procession feed of viral videos scraped from other sources and intercut with posts designed to provoke a certain kind of anger. Here’s a cool clip from an old film! Here’s why the “multi-faith prayer rooms” in airports are an Islamic conspiracy! Here’s an amazing cheeseburger in Japan! Here’s why wind turbines are evil! Here’s an amazing way to slice a cucumber! Here’s a black person committing a crime! Here’s someone turning a shipping container into a swimming pool! Here’s why young women in offices don’t have real jobs! X is not the internet. It is an attention prison, seemingly designed to change people’s minds, and which is apparently quite successful in doing so: a recent study of nearly 5,000 X users found that over seven weeks, those who viewed the “For You” feed were more likely to become sympathetic to the politics of US Republicans.
The X lobbyists listened to the MPs as they talked about bias, disruption and incitement, nodding and smiling. “You have a mechanism to provide feedback,” he responded. And, for once, he was right: you can always just turn it off.
[Further reading: Louis Theroux stares down the manosphere]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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