Is ‘disinformation’ really one of the biggest challenges facing London?
All power to the Lady Mayor and her newly assembled team of City leaders who want to shout from the rooftops about the strengths and assets of our great capital city. Dame Susan Langley will tonight launch a new campaign, Team UK, backed by some of the Square Mile’s biggest business and industry groups, with a rallying cry “to tell a clear confident story about what makes our country exceptional and to ensure the world hears it.”
A large part of the Lady Mayor’s job is to do exactly this: to act as London’s cheerleader-in-chief and to take that message to financial centres and cities across the globe. Dame Susan is performing this role with more flare and creativity than we’ve been used to, and any effort to rally London’s business leaders for an uplifting PR campaign should be welcomed and supported. But do these City chiefs have the framing quite right?
The Lady Mayor will present this new campaign as a response to the claim that “negative perceptions about London have risen by as much as 150–200 per cent over the past two years.” That’s the headline finding from research produced by Sadiq Khan’s City Hall, focusing on “misinformation and disinformation in London.” The study (or ‘rapid review of evidence’) looked at “London-related narratives on X between 2024 and 2026” and identified an increase (with occasional spikes) in social media content connected to a “London is in decline” narrative.
London’s challenges are very real
Some of it was real, some of it wasn’t. Much of it came from “a Sri Lanka-based content farm producing monetised AI generated posts and a Nigeria-based cluster impersonating UK media outlets.” Some of it came from Russian-aligned or Beijing-aligned ‘groups.’ It’s grim reading in parts, but it also acknowledges that its “findings should…be treated as indicative rather than comprehensive.”
It doesn’t feel to me like the basis for a campaign that brings together UK Finance, TheCityUK, the Investment Association and Canada Corporation. Apart from anything else, London does have problems: from housing to shoplifting – to say nothing of constant tube strikes.
The Lady Mayor is right to use her convening power to bang the drum for London, but she doesn’t need to echo a weak City Hall social media study to do so, and she certainly doesn’t need to risk giving the impression that there aren’t some very real problems in need of solutions.