As its name suggests, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK does not stand candidates in Ecuador. So why are so many X accounts loudly boosting the party and trashing its rivals apparently based in the South American nation?
Campaign group Hope Not Hate has uncovered a weird number of X users with such trip-off-the-tongue names as Yvonne1388552, jennifer_h3134 and fartharda95990, all shown to be based in Ecuador and relentlessly pushing Reform propaganda.
All constantly praise Farage, share each other’s posts and rubbish Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, dubbing him “Halal Rupert” after halal food was allegedly served at the recent wedding of his son Angus to Yasmin Mezran, the daughter of Karim Mezran, an eminent Libyan scholar and senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
One Ecuador-based Faragist, ‘UK Patriot’, regularly reposts the likes of Matt Goodwin, Richard Tice and Nadine Dorries, telling the folk of Makerfield from the South American sunshine: “If Reform can squeeze Restore’s vote. Then Reform has a chance. Besides, the margin of error is 4.8%. Voting Restore helps Starmer.”
Another, Jennifer Homer, whose avatar is a Manchester United club badge, reposts pretty much anything from Farage, Lee Anderson and the official party account, and described Farage as a “true leader” following his incendiary live broadcast calling for “pure cold rage” in the light of Henry Nowak’s horrendous murder.
And another, just going by the name of Kimberley, was this week curiously invested in a by-election to Westmorland and Furness Council in Cumbria, where Reform took the seat from the Conservatives – all they were talking about, presumably, on the streets of Quito!
It’s difficult to know what’s going on here. One possibility is that, for some reason – possibly to escape Keir Starmer’s proof-of-age demands to look at muck on the internet? – a large number of Reform influencers have chosen to set their VPNs to Ecuador. Another is that there really is a large immigrant community of Brits in the country choosing to devote all their free time to amplifying Farage’s party.
A third, of course, is that somebody has been buying support from bot farms in Ecuador, which was a hub for online disinformation during the Covid pandemic. Rats in a Sack, though, will have no truck with such teorías de la conspiración!*
*Conspiracy theories
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