Danny Bones is a working-class British rapper with a rapidly growing online following. His content has garnered millions of views.
He raps about immigration, national identity, and a broken Britain. One lyric accuses opponents of trying to “rid you of your heritage.” The video for his most popular song, This Is England, shows him leading a crowd of men carrying St George’s crosses with their fists in the air.
Another shows him in black military gear with the words MASS DEPORTATION UNIT on the back. A third shows an Asian man in a crowd saying to the camera “We are here” before Danny Bones, in a union jack mask, replies “Not for long.” It cuts to a clip of him throwing a man to the ground and deporting him.
At first glance, he appears to be a rising rapper courting controversy. However, Danny Bones is not real. He is an AI-generated persona – the front for an anonymous influencer “collective” called the Node Project. It has been revealed that some of its Danny Bones content was repurposed for the recent Gorton and Denton by-election campaign by the far-right party Advance UK, which paid the Node Project to produce its main campaign video.
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This was reported to the Electoral Commission, which informed us it is “considering the information in line with its remit.” Findings were also shared with social media platforms, prompting TikTok to block the Node Project’s account and Instagram to remove several of the group’s Danny Bones videos.
Matteo Bergamini, who runs the political and media literacy organization Shout Out UK, said: “What you can say with pretty much absolute certainty is that this is the first documented case of a registered party in the UK paying for content from an AI influencer who promotes ‘slopaganda’.”
Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party, which won the by-election, stated: “The rise of far-right AI-generated content is corrosive to democracy and puts politicians’ safety at risk.”
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Set up last year by former Reform co-deputy leader Ben Habib, Advance UK sits to the right of Nigel Farage’s party. Its policies call for the reversal of asylum grants and residency rights; withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights; and the repeal of the Human Rights Act and Equality Act.
In the weeks before the party contested last month’s Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester, a two-minute video appeared across its social media accounts. It has since been viewed nearly a quarter of a million times and until earlier this week fronted Advance UK’s official website as its flagship political video.
The video was shown at Advance UK’s February conference, where the party launched its culture and immigration policies. Habib informed us it received an ovation from the crowd.
It presents a patriotic montage of British history: Anglo-Saxon warriors, soldiers fighting in the Second World War, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road. “This is Britain, where freedom was written,” says a deep-voiced narrator. “Built in defiance, paid for in blood.”
The soundtrack is the instrumental from a Danny Bones track, and the line about “where freedom was written” comes from the lyrics of another. The video was produced by the Node Project.
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Advance UK and the Node Project both confirmed the party paid for the video.
A senior figure at Advance UK told us that the Node Project was “a joy to work with” and said the party plans to commission more content from them. They did not disclose how much the party paid but suggested the Node Project’s work was not inexpensive. “If somebody wanted to commission them to do something, it would be a significant amount of money,” they said.
The party added the spending would be declared in its election returns.
In the following weeks, Advance UK posted more Node Project content. One was a campaign video for the party’s by-election candidate Nick Buckley, which used AI-generated images of him at different ages. Another, featuring AI-generated imagery of a man leading a crowd carrying union jacks, urged viewers to register for local elections.
“I think that’s probably the first time I’ve seen that,” Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, analyst and editorial manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said about the crossover between an AI influencer and a political party’s campaign.
“It will be interesting to see whether other political parties adopt this strategy, and whether it helps with outreach.”
Heron Lopes, a researcher at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, said it could signal the beginning of generative AI tools being used for extremist political propaganda. “If other political actors perceive it as successful, we could see this tactic spread more widely.”
The Node Project also uses a second AI persona, a young purple-haired woman named Amelia, who appears in various Danny Bones videos and standalone clips. The character was originally created by the political and media literacy organization Shout Out UK for a Home Office-funded video game designed to steer teenagers away from extremism – but was then co-opted by the online far-right and became a viral sensation.
In February, Buckley announced on social media that he had been “endorsed” by her.
Bergamini told us that Amelia and Danny Bones are part of a broader trend of AI characters endorsing political candidates. “It’s safe to assume these tactics will continue to grow in regularity as we get closer to the next general election,” he said.
‘I am England’
Danny Bones’ songs include lyrics about globalization, high taxes, poverty, and immigration. The lyrics to Shut Up, released in late January, suggest immigration is a deliberate conspiracy: “To globalize the planet, use division for their mission.”
His four tracks have more than 250,000 Spotify streams, with This Is England having more than doubled its numbers in the last month. Each track is also cut into YouTube Shorts, TikToks, and Instagram Reels, collectively viewed over 2.7 million times and picked up and repurposed by other creators across social media.
Alongside the music, Danny Bones’ accounts tag and repost far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe. His verified X account – which shows him leading what appears to be a nationalist march – has posted messages of support for Lowe’s new Restore Britain party and a proposed merger with Advance UK.
After the by-election result last month, Bones posted on TikTok: “Green Party just won Gorton and Denton. Lord help us. Campaigned in Urdu and Bengali. Palestinian and Pakistani flags everywhere. Not a Union Jack in sight.”
In another post, a self-shot video shows an Asian man in a crowd saying to the camera “We are here” before Danny Bones, in a union jack mask, replies “Not for long.” It then cuts to a clip of him throwing a man to the ground and deporting him.
A third video intercuts battle-scene clips from historical wars with images of British nationalists in a street of Muslim-owned businesses. Bones addresses the camera directly: “I’m watching my country’s culture, demographics rapidly change, and I’m supposed to just be cool with it? Nah, forget that. This is England. I am England.”
If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll probably be able to spot that these videos are AI-generated. But to the untrained eye, they are neatly edited, glossily produced, and the man at the heart of them appears convincingly real. His voice sounds human enough. And the production quality of his tracks is good – much higher than you might expect from AI music.
However, the material is surprisingly straightforward to produce. Using widely available AI music tools, we created stylistically similar tracks within minutes.
Before these tools existed, Lopes said, creating this type of music would typically take months. “Anyone can produce it,” Lopes said. “Kids could produce it.”
Broderick McDonald, a researcher at the Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security, said music has long played a role in far-right organizing, helping build “social trust” and a shared culture around a movement. Material is being created with fewer and fewer guardrails, as trust and safety teams are reduced across the industry, he said, while “audio is still the hardest form of content to moderate effectively.”
The Node Project’s TikTok posts, for instance, amassed millions of views before they were removed due to our reporting.
But social platforms do not have to remove content altogether, he explained. “There are light-touch technical options,” McDonald said. “You can downrank it so fewer people see it, add warning labels, allow community notes – or demonetize it.”
Who’s behind the Node Project?
There are few public clues about who runs the Node Project. The site uses a domain privacy service and lists its address as a penis museum in Reykjavik – a long-running joke in anonymous online circles.
When we contacted them, they told us they are based in the UK and are “a creative experiment exploring music, visual storytelling, and emerging AI tools” that is not currently generating meaningful revenue. They said they were run by “a small group of creatives” and were not “tied to any label, movement, or organization.”
All correspondence with us was through email and signed simply “Node.” Advance UK would not specify who they dealt with.
However, we did find one person who appears closely connected to the project – a man named AJ.
On his Facebook profile, AJ promotes the Node Project, links directly to its social channels, and includes a public review of it. We also found two corresponding TikTok accounts that posted Node Project content, including videos that appear to show AI-altered footage of a man resembling AJ alongside Danny Bones.
TikTok’s ads library indicates that a video of Danny Bones was paid for as an ad by AJ in February. When TikTok and Instagram took action against the Node Project’s account, AJ soon posted on Facebook: “We got [sic] our TikTok account banned and some IG posts taken down.”
Nonetheless, when we approached AJ, he denied being part of the Node Project and said he was just a supporter who wanted to help Danny Bones “gain visibility” and “spread the word.” He stated he had “no knowledge of the internal workings” of the Node Project and had not made money from supporting it. He also said a Node Project T-shirt shown on his social media was a one-off prototype.
Explaining why he often used “we” and “our” when talking about the Node Project, he said: “I say ‘we’ as in we as [a] movement.”
The Node Project also denied any connection to AJ or his linked accounts, saying he was “simply someone online who shares or reposts the content.” It stated that any third-party reposting, promotion, commentary, or merchandise images should not be taken as evidence of “affiliation, ownership, control, or involvement.”
It also rejected the characterization of its content as Islamophobic, calling that “a very serious label” and “not an accurate or fair description” of the project or its output.
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