The obscure Russian-linked ‘news’ website that is fuelling violence on Britain’s streets

Before the fire and fury in the English seaside town of Southport, there was a name – Ali Al-Shakati.

Al-Shakati has never existed, we now know, but that didn’t stop an obscure, Russian-linked fake news outlet from naming him as a 17-year-old supposedly Muslim asylum seeker responsible for the murder of three schoolgirls at a dance school in the town.

Police officers clash with protesters during an “Enough is Enough” protest rally in London.Credit: AP

Channel3 Now, a website that masquerades as a legitimate American news outlet but acts as an “aggregator” for real news stories as well as fake viral claims, published the claim on the back of speculation which appeared to have started on X, formerly known as Twitter.

What had begun as a trickle then became a flood, sending the conspiracy theory pouring out through social media anew, where the name was boosted by thousands of other Russia-linked accounts before being repeated by authentic Russian state media, which cited Channel3 Now in its reporting.

The claim was meanwhile picked up by far-Right figures such as Tommy Robinson – founder of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, which played a major role in instigating the riots in Southport and then around England this week – and notorious influencer Andrew Tate, whose posts about Al-Shakati garnered millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.

By Tuesday, the conspiracy had gone mainstream and as news of the attacker’s supposed identity spread, anger grew, sparking the riots that rocked the Merseyside town that evening before spreading out across the country.

Police were later forced to confirm that the suspect’s supposed name was false. The real suspect was named in court as Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006.

Exactly how this little-known website found itself at the centre of the chain of events is “very, very messy and uncertain”, says Stephen Hutchings, a Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and the principle investigator at (Mis)Translating Deceit, an anti-disinformation project.

There are many like it, who post hundreds of stories a day with a pro-Russian or anti-western slant intended to sow confusion and destabilise society in Britain and elsewhere, Hutchings explains, and why this one, in particular, gained such traction following the attack in Merseyside may never be fully understood.

But what is known, he says, is that Channel3 Now belongs to a complex web of modern-day information warfare that stretches from the grief-stricken streets of Southport all the way back to the Russian city of Izhevsk, some 800 miles east of Moscow – and an obscure YouTube channel seemingly set up by amateur car rally enthusiasts more than a decade ago.

The website Channel3 Now.

The channel’s first videos, aired in 2012, were posted with Russian titles and generic thumbnails, and showed drag racers gleefully thrashing their cars about in a snowy Izhevsk.

Like so many accounts set up in the early 2010s, when YouTube took off as a major online streaming platform, the channel went dead for several years after its owners presumably grew bored with it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it became active again and was renamed Funny Hours, Hutchings says. Rather than its original car-fan content, however, it was posting English-language videos about Pakistan upon its reboot.

Disinformation expert Dr Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, said that the sudden change in content published by the account suggested it had been “hijacked and repurposed” – as opposed to it being formally part of a Russian disinformation operation from the off.

Hutchings agrees, and believes that the takeover was carried out by Russian-linked actors suspected of being behind Channel3 Now as a way to shield their identities. In 2016, three years before the YouTube account’s possible “hijacking” appeared to take place, a Facebook page used to share its content was set up with the same name: Funny Hours.

A police car is set on fire as Far-right activists hold an Enough is Enough protest in Sunderland.Credit: Getty Images

The videos uploaded were bizarre. They included one focused on a tiger being beaten to death and a match report on Manchester City’s women’s team.

But a couple of years ago, things shifted. The organisation appeared to have been rebranded as Channel3 Now and the videos it shared began to resemble those of a professional news channel. Last year, channel3now.com was registered as a web domain.

Content shared on the site in the run-up to the stabbings in Southport included news pieces that appeared to have been ripped straight from British and American newswires, but also stranger stories too: a very brief obituary for American singer Shifty Shellshock, who died last month, and a piece accusing NFL player Xavien Howard of “having four women pregnant at the same time”.

Hutchings says there is a simple explanation for the bizarre online output of both the YouTube channel and the news website. While “there is clear evidence that it does have some kind of link to Russia, the Russian state outsources a lot of its online activities to semi-autonomous operations which it pays to do its work, but which are given free reign,” he explains.

“These operations feel the need to justify their often quite generous payment and rely on the same tactics that other online figures do, namely clickbait,” Hutchings says. “And a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory drives a lot of traction towards pro-Russian or anti-Western disinformation, especially one that taps into popular prejudices.”

This site is one of several “proxies” and hardly the most successful, says Hutchings, adding the Kremlin has long been “busily involved” in stoking dissent in Britain and elsewhere through such projects.

More renowned examples include the Voice of Europe website, which “has been empirically traced to specific Russian figures”. Sites such as these often amplify posts by authentic anti-immigrant or conspiracy theory accounts, says Hutchings, rather than spitting out their own original lies.

Channel3 Now, for its part, was first registered under a Lithuanian domain in 2023 and it has been reported that the site’s IP address is owned by two Pakistani nationals – further evidence that “while it would be foolish to deny that Russia is likely stoking some of the tension here, it’s more tricky to claim that the state is doing so in a targeted, closely coordinated manner”, Hutchings says.

Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle after disorder broke out in Southport.Credit: Getty Images

What is clear following the riots on the streets of Britain this week is the scale of its impact. An X account used to share Channel 3Now’s articles has just 3000 followers – yet on the same platform, posts “speculating that the [Southport] attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner” generated at least 27 million impressions, according to Jones.

While the fake story undoubtedly reached huge numbers of real people, the startlingly high number of impressions likely came about because “many of Channel3 Now’s followers will not be real people but actually bots who reshare things that seem to be gaining traction online”, explains Hutchings.

A deep dive into the organisation’s website indicates it is attempting to pass itself off as a normal media outlet, seemingly in pursuit of credibility. Some of the articles published on Channel3 Now appear to be pulled from mainstream news sites and reputable, internationally significant agencies such as the Associated Press. Others are “repackaged using AI” in what Hutchings describes as an “authenticating device” designed to make the site seem trustworthy.

On Monday, it appeared to have named the Southport attacker as Ali Al-Shakati after the name was cited by commentator Bernie Spofforth, whose X account @Artemisfornow regularly shares conspiracy theory material and has a large following. Channel3 Now picked up the story just two minutes after Spofforth’s own post, which has now been deleted without further explanation.

While he doesn’t know with “one hundred percent certainty” whether the Ali Al-Shakati story was picked up by an automated programme or by a person, it “probably originated with someone real” who saw the viral potential in the story and its divisive nature, says Hutchings.

A protester is detained by police during the ‘Enough is Enough’ protest in Whitehall, London.Credit: AP

Yet who it could be is impossible to tell. The site has a single-named author, called James Lawley, whose LinkedIn account states that he owns a gardening company in Nova Scotia, Canada. The site is routed through a Massachusetts-based service that anonymises website ownership details.

A reverse search using Lawley’s image turns up no results except his LinkedIn page, and his listed company, A Cut Above Halifax, has no other mentions online – all of which suggests he may in fact not be a real person.

Further complicating efforts to understand Channel3 Now and its inner workings, the site’s YouTube channel mysteriously disappeared from the internet after the Southport attacker’s supposed identity was disproven.

Meanwhile, the organisation’s website released a statement apologising for its “misleading information” which “did not meet our standards of reliability and integrity”.

A fight breaks out between anti-fascists, left, and other people protesting in Blackpool, England.Credit: AP

This is only another “authentication device”, Hutchings says. “If they see themselves as having any future beyond this, then they need to give the impression that they made an innocent mistake and called it out for what it is.”

Certainly, as the threat of renewed violence looms large over Britain this weekend amid plans by the far-Right to hold rallies in dozens of cities across the country, the questions about Channel3 Now and its role in our information ecosystem remain pertinent.

As recent days have shown, a fake news site and its conspiracy theories need not really be convincing all of the time to sow chaos. It only takes a single spark to start a fire.

The Telegraph, London

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