By Ishtwan Kamel
09/10/2025
There are many cases when well-known influencers who have earned their fame and followers by exposing fakes actually use social networks for their own benefit and spread information that is clearly provocative or entirely untrue. The motive for such activity is obvious – the attention of subscribers and money, while the moral aspect loses its value.
The owner of a popular English-language account on the social network X known as Lord Bebo can be categorized such. His content consistently reproduces the Kremlin’s destructive narratives regarding Ukraine. The analysis of the shared content meets all Moscow’s requirements: from discrediting the political leadership and the Armed Forces to creating a negative image of refugees and instilling ideas about ‘total corruption’.
A number of Internet resources and British tabloids claims that the account Lord Bebo on X (www.x.vom/MyLordBebo) with over 700 thousand subscribers is used by a British citizen named David Cleves, a former councillor in Renfrew, Scotland, born in Renfrew and lives now in Bury, Greater Manchester. He is also known as the founder and head of so-called Unity News Network, the far-right media project with a legal entity also designated as postal: Fernhills Business Centre Foerster Chambers, Todd Street, Bury, United Kingdom, BL95BJ.
It should be noted that Unity News Network was established on April 24, 2018 and formally holds an active status, however, the history of submitting financial and corporate reports indicates a lack of systematic work. Most likely, David Cleves was unable to fill it with quality information and therefore focused on Lord Bebo project on X.
This version is confirmed by the fact that the content published for years on the unitynewsnetwork.co.uk domain was positioned as ‘alternative news’, but was characterized by sensational presentation and a tendency towards conspiracy theories. Professional observers of the British media market have repeatedly classified that platform as part of the right-wing populist field with a low standard of reliability, while the independent press regulator in the UK, IMPRESS, terminated its agreement with the project in 2022 after establishing violations of basic journalistic standards. Altogether, these factors reduce trust in the media environment associated with Cleves and explain the lack of transparent editorial responsibility for the content distributed on social networks.
This explains the editorial policy of the Lord Bebo channel, which specializes in protest and hate publications, actively criticizing the authorities in European countries and the USA, as well as virtually any event in the world. In particular, Lord Bebo pays special attention to Ukraine and covers events take place in it using a consistent set of narratives: ‘corruption as the norm’, ‘mobilization as repression’, ‘refugees as a burden’, ‘the army is ineffective’ and so on. Each separate thesis is based on specific events or their fragments; however the way the material is selected and composed serves not to explain the context, but to reinforce a certain emotional conclusion, which most often concurs with Russian narratives, although there are no references to Russian sources.
It should be understood that this is not just about a single account, but the mechanism of influence it embodies, where social networks can create the ‘necessary’ influence on the public agenda, in particular during election periods in the EU, the UK or the US. Thus, this should awake the need to recognize the scale of the problem and its impact, since the mentioned mechanism of distributing dubious posts may be an element of disseminating specially prepared disinformation.