An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has found that Danny Bones, a rapper presented online as a working-class Briton railing against immigration, is an AI-generated character. The persona fronts an anonymous "collective" called the Node Project, and the Bureau reports that a registered far-right party, Advance UK, paid that group to make its main campaign video for the Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester.
The character's videos lean hard on nationalist imagery: a march of men waving St George's crosses for his most-watched song, This Is England, a figure in black kit labelled as a deportation unit, and a staged scene in which he throws a man out of the country. His four tracks had passed 250,000 Spotify plays when the piece ran, with This Is England more than doubling in a month, and clips cut from the songs had drawn over 2.7 million views across YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram.
The party's two-minute film, a montage running from Anglo-Saxon warriors to the Beatles on Abbey Road, uses the instrumental of a Danny Bones track and borrows a line from another of his songs. It was screened at Advance UK's February conference, sat on the front page of the party's website and gathered close to a quarter of a million views. Both the party and the Node Project confirmed the payment. A senior party figure praised the collaboration, said more work would be commissioned and indicated the fee was substantial, adding that it would appear in the party's election returns. Further Node Project material followed on the party's channels in the weeks after, including a campaign clip built from AI images of its candidate Nick Buckley at different ages and another, with an AI crowd carrying union flags, urging people to register for the local elections.
Advance UK was set up last year by Ben Habib, a former co-deputy leader of Reform, and sits to that party's right; its platform includes reversing grants of asylum, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and scrapping the Human Rights and Equality Acts. Matteo Bergamini of the media literacy group Shout Out UK called it the first documented case of a registered UK party buying content from an AI influencer. Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Leiden University told the Bureau they had not seen the pairing before and warned that other political actors could copy it if it appears to work. The Green Party's deputy leader, whose party won the seat, called the trend a danger to democracy and to politicians' safety.
The Node Project runs a second synthetic character, a purple-haired young woman named Amelia. She began life in a Home Office-funded game that Shout Out UK built to steer teenagers away from extremism, was taken over by far-right users online, and was later claimed by Buckley as an endorsement. Bergamini expects such AI endorsements to multiply before the next general election.
Beyond the songs, the Danny Bones accounts share and tag figures such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe, and the verified X profile has backed Lowe's Restore Britain party and a proposed merger with Advance UK. After the Greens won the by-election, the character posted a complaint that the winning campaign had used Urdu and Bengali and that Palestinian and Pakistani flags outnumbered union flags. Lyrics released in January frame immigration as a deliberate plot to globalise the country, and the Bureau observes that while trained eyes can spot the AI, the videos are glossy, the voice passes as human and the production is better than much AI music.
The Bureau tested how hard the music is to make and produced similar-sounding tracks within minutes using widely available AI song tools. Leiden researcher Heron Lopes said work that once took months can now be made by almost anyone. Broderick McDonald of the Alan Turing Institute noted that music has long helped far-right movements build a shared culture, that audio remains the hardest content for platforms to moderate, and that platforms have options short of removal, such as downranking, labels and demonetisation.
Who runs the Node Project is unclear. Its website hides its owner behind a privacy service and gives a joke address in Reykjavik. By email, signed only "Node", it described itself as a small UK-based creative experiment with little revenue and no ties to any movement, and it rejected the description of its output as Islamophobic. The Bureau identified a man called AJ who promoted the project, appeared alongside the character in altered footage and paid for a TikTok ad featuring Danny Bones in February; he said he was only a supporter, and the project denied any link to him. A countdown timer had also appeared on the project's site asking followers to sign up for something unnamed. Bergamini described the set-up as "hate economics", where outrage can bring both money and influence, and asked how much of it is about income and how much is a trial run for future elections.
After the Bureau raised the accounts with the platforms, TikTok banned the Node Project for breaching its hateful content rules, saying the account had not been earning money there, and Instagram removed several videos without closing the account. YouTube added synthetic-content labels and said the channel could not monetise. Spotify said the tracks had passed human review, broke none of its rules and remained eligible to earn once they cross its 1,000-play threshold.
The Electoral Commission said it was looking at the findings and expects campaigners to label AI material so voters are not misled, but added that it has no power to regulate the content itself and would say nothing more while it considered the matter. Advance UK's spending on the Node Project's videos is due to be declared in its election returns.
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