This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Matt, you're not sitting next to me in your beautiful chair today. No, I'm in Cornwall on holiday with the family. I'm actually calling you from the laundry room. You are coming out of a laptop sat on a baby high chair and the microphone is on an ironing board. One thing, I presume you haven't bought your Belieba merch with you on your trip, obviously. No, no. Anyone who watched the top comment YouTube of last episode will have seen that Matt was indeed wearing his I Love Justin Bieber top. Yeah, usually I have like a suitcase just for my Bieber merch, but we didn't have him in the car this time, so I'm a bit bummed about that. Have you seen there's these videos of little girls kind of age one, two, three, watching Justin Bieber's Coachella set and sort of like falling in love with him, like doing like little eyes, like hearts, the new generation of Beliebers. Which makes me feel old because it's like Bieber fans now have babies. Like you. Oh yeah, true. Okay, we're not actually going to talk about Justin Bieber on this episode of Top Comment. We're going to talk about the hijacking of the mainstream media, aren't we, Matt? And these kind of fake websites and other things exploiting the media. And we're going to talk about the Beckstein files, which is this social media driven obsession with the sister of a famous influencer who is accused of grooming one of her students. she's a teacher. If you have been scrolling on the side of TikTok that I am on, you will have been hearing a lot about Hayley Beck. Hayley Beck is the sister of a really popular influencer called Noah Beck. He sort of shot to fame on TikTok in that first round of influencers during the pandemic, doing dancing videos, being part of kind of influencer houses, all that kind of stuff. He's really into soccer, football as well. So he does a lot of content about that kind of thing. And the reason that his sister is popping up is because she and another teacher have been accused of having a relationship with at least one student. There are also allegations relating to inappropriate behaviour with other students. Police have recommended that a charge of pandering be brought against Hayley Beck. But we'll obviously say from the get go that she hasn't been charged yet. And her lawyers have said that she has committed no crimes. All right. Before we get into the whirlwind of TikTok reinterpretations of what's now been called the Beckstein files, what are the actual facts? What do we know about this? OK, so what we do know is that there was an investigation that was conducted by the police and it was looking into allegations of encouraging a person to engage in prostitution. So allegedly giving a student over $600. And then what happens in Arizona is that the police have got to propose whether they think the person or people should be charged and what they should be charged with. And then it's up to prosecutors to decide what they want to do. In this case, they kind of did an initial investigation and they were essentially asked to kind of go and investigate again and get more evidence. The kind of latest report that they've released is just like absolutely jammed with like Snapchat messages, back and forth messages on text, different things that were said during police interviews, like interviews with family members, all of this stuff. Hayley Beck doesn't work at the school anymore, but Matt, there are ample students who are coming out now making TikTok saying like, this was my experience of being at school with Hayley Beck. All right, this is my story on Hayley Beck. As you can see right here, I was in her class. Yeah. The whole Hayley Beck case just hits a little close to home. I don't even think I shared this in my previous videos, but I went to high school with her. And the most interesting thing, and I guess the content that I have been consuming a lot of, is all like people reading out the police reports. Like they read out, like they're reading out like the text messages, like in character. It'll be like, Hayley said this. And then the alleged victim said this. He said at the crib out front. She said, ugh, it's so sus doing it during the day. But okay, whatever you say. He says, come inside. Nah, chill. Car it is. Ely said, if no one was home, then yeah, preferably that. But I guess I'll settle for being a rebellious teen. It's like almost like a sort of dramatization of it. Right. That reminds me a lot of the post-Charlie Kirk assassination in which you had another situation where the police released files and evidence, including like a chat log between Tyler Robinson, the suspected killer, and his roommate. And people were acting that out on TikTok as well. So it's kind of like social media using raw police intelligence as a kind of script for a drama that plays out en masse. Okay, so obviously there's 50 pages of digital communication, Snapchat messages, Instagram messages, iMessages. but what people really seem to have focused on is this handwritten letter. Yeah, so it's this letter that appears to have been written by Hayley Beck to the alleged victim and it's almost written like a text, like it's written in text slang and so quite a lot of people have been sort of taking the mick out of the way that it's written. When they executed the search warrant at Hayley Beck's house, they found a handwritten letter in her apartment and I going to read it to you word for word okay The exact letter that Ms Haley Beck the loser wrote a child that she taught in high school Your prob's going to think this is cheesy as hell, but you know I'm a words girly. I know, I know you aren't dying. Plus you're literally just a text away, but I had little notes from people when I was away studying abroad. It's kind of crazy to look back and realize in my two years of knowing you, our relationship has changed so much. Like, bro, you're the first person that got me to smoke weed. You're always going to have that title. So we're locked for real. Even though sometimes my advice or input is unsolicited, I'm happy we can talk about things. Even though you never say it back, I love you and wish you the best. Love, HB. Like, there are some really, really, really cringey bits. And I think actually, I mean, so much of the dissecting of the Beckstein files, quote unquote, is people basically like laughing at Hayley Beck and then kind of coming to all these conclusions about what she must be like as a person. Was she cool in high school? Was she not cool in high school? Why would you do something like this? Obviously, kind of going way beyond the fact that these are allegations. There's not been a decision made yet on charges. Like there are a few TikTokers I've seen who've been like, I've stayed up all night. Like you must watch my video. Here's like a flow chart of what happened and here's more of the evidence and here's what she said to police. And they will be racking up hundreds of thousands of views for this content because it's basically like having a sort of like gossip on steroids. But perhaps the most concerning part is that because these open source sort of documents, etc, include quite a lot of details, including like the first names of people's parents and things like that, very quickly, social media has identified who they believe the victim to be and are sharing clips of him in a way that you'd imagine the police are probably not so keen on. What we're seeing here with the Backsteen files is a much smaller scale version what we saw with the Epstein files, where when the government does the rare thing of releasing raw evidence, raw unfiltered evidence, which includes everything, some legitimate claims, some claims of people who may have paranoid schizophrenia and are calling up the FBI to say that Jeffrey Epstein is a cannibal and eats babies or whatever it is. All of that is released at the same time to the internet. And it's up to the internet to then pour over it and come up with their own theories. And a lot of blatantly false conspiracies came from that recent dump of the Epstein files. And this is why the government almost never would release unfiltered intelligence to the public. There's a reason that they don't ever do this. I think the Epstein files is unprecedented in terms of the scale of that unfiltered intelligence being released to the public to pour over. But in this, it's turned into a hobby for people on TikTok to go through the files, which, you know, it's impressive because like I struggled to get people to watch like a 20 second TikTok video. They're going through like pages of police reports. And for some people, some reason people are eating it up. There are positives to that open source thing, right? Because there is, you know, transparency can be good. It's good if people can see the evidence, but particularly when you've got a huge amount of evidence like this. So it's a lot to go through. Most people won't go through it. They're then relying on TikTokers who are essentially collating it for them. It's not really getting mainstream coverage because there's not been a decision on charging yet so you know the media wouldn't necessarily cover it until there's a decision made about whether this amounts to a crime or not ultimately the allegations here are really really serious that are being leveled at these teachers and really serious accusations of abuse of power and the seriousness of it all feels like it kind of disappears and then you've got like kids popping up who are you know only just 18 understandably wanting to kind of like get involved and say oh look this is my experience of it this is what happened but but without even necessarily maybe realising the impact of that too, especially on the people at the centre of this. Like imagine going on your TikTok feed and you are the person who is at the centre of these allegations and you find that there are just like endless videos about you or about your family member who's been affected or whatever and you can't really do anything about it. And also I imagine it affects any kind of future jury trial, right? Yeah, because although a lot of these TikTokers are just reading stuff out and saying this is the evidence, ultimately like people are pretty much making up their minds live on video or on camera about like what they think has happened and who they believe to be guilty and you know it's like a lot of this evidence is really quite shocking like some of these conversations you are quite shocking and you can see why people are responding to them how they are and she also obviously pops up in quite a few of Noah Beck her brother's TikToks and so people have gone and dug out like any video where she talks about being a teacher or school and then there are also videos of like students filming her making TikToks and so on and so forth and so So there's so much content about her, which also explains why she's being focused on rather than the other teacher who is not the sibling of a TikToker, nor seems to post very much online themselves. Terug and sometimes even before, up to $7,95 per month. NL ziet, slim bekeken. the facts will confirm her innocence. from people listening to Top Comment. And I had this link that was sent to me by a couple of different people, actually. An account called London Cleaning 19 sent me a DM saying, sending you this fake news link to an AI site, which seems to have something to do with Nigel Farage, but I think this is a fake news item. And then I had the same link sent to me by another person, a woman called Hannah, via email, who said that she'd seen it popping up as well. And I decided to take a bit of a look at it because when I clicked on it, I was like, wow, this really looks like a BBC News article. Like the bit of the website, like the bar at the top, the different sections, the headline, the font, even the names of the reporters who've allegedly written this not real article are people that actually do work for the BBC and write stuff for the BBC website. And essentially the headline is, quote, you're lying to millions of hardworking Britons, how Nigel Farage exposed the Bank of England's elite secret on live television. And it's got this image of Nigel Farage pointing his finger at a sort of AI generated version of the governor of the Bank of England. And Fiona Bruce, who presents Question Time, is in the middle. And then the whole article is about this incident that never happened. Before we get into the reasons of what this is really for, I think the first kind of dead giveaway is the idea that question time, like Nigel Farage would use his time on question time to, I mean, what this says here is Farage accused Bailey of preaching to the public about strategic budgeting while on a high salary. He then promoted an AI investment portal, sparking debate. Will AI investments lead to bonanza or fraud? It's like the idea that he would take this dog leg in the ridiculous. I mean, first of all, just the fact that it's like quite deliberately divisive, I think is worth noting. That doesn't tend to be the BBC style, I hope and think. And then I think trying to just click around on the website. So like click on the tabs, click on any of the links and very quickly that then takes you to this page of this company that's involved in cryptocurrency and you think, oh, OK, hang on, this is not real. Like you can't navigate the website like a normal website. There's also lots of random bits of bold text that don't really make any sense. Also, just like the general kind of analysis bits of the article are repetitive. There's obviously a kind of push for this cryptocurrency site thing, which makes you think, oh, hang on. I obviously know the BBC website very well. Even the people who are on the byline, they don't write about British politics. They write about American politics. So for me, that was a massive tell already. So who's behind these articles? What is the company? What's their aim? What are they selling. When you were able to scroll to the bottom of this fake article, it's now not available under the same link that it was before, which doesn't necessarily mean it's been taken down, but suggests that it could be using a different URL or it's regenerated itself. And at the bottom, it basically talks about how brilliant Redmond Valnex is, which is the page you get taken to if you click on anything within the article. So if you try and click on one of the tabs at the top. And according to their website, Redmond Valnex, established in 2022, was founded with a clear objective to make sophisticated crypto trading accessible to everyday users. This is a thing, isn't it, Matt? And I think that's what's so interesting about this page, because when I first got sent it, my immediate reaction was, oh, hang on a second. Could this be part of an influence operation? Like we know that sometimes they'll make fake BBC articles or fake media content in order to mine political outrage and push an ideological agenda. But actually more common than that is to mine that political outrage, which will get clicks and views and likes because people will go, oh, I love Nigel Farage or I hate Nigel Farage. Click on it. And then they go down and they think, oh, OK, what's this crypto thing? And that is actually perhaps the most effective use of these kinds of fake accounts. But the unintended consequence is they are actually still kind of fueling some degree of political outrage. That's exactly it. And this is increasingly defining a lot of the Internet. There was a recent study that showed that 35% of all new websites created between 2022 and 2025 are AI generated or assisted. And there is increasingly the sense that the search results page is dominated by AI generated websites because they're so quick and easy to generate. I come across as an investigative journalism all the time. Say I'm investigating someone who's trying to launder their own reputation and they've been accused publicly of a crime. what they can do now is hire a service to publish hundreds of AI websites about them. So when you Google them, what comes up is the AI websites about them, not the crime that they allegedly committed. And this is an increasingly normal tactic, isn't it, Matt? Just exploiting the media because you know that people might be more inclined to click on it and engage with it. It's even more effective when it is a bit outrageous and when it gets people to react, as we know, because that's how the algorithms work. Something that's been popping up on my feed recently have been AI-generated videos showing people doing Vox Pops, like where journalists go out and ask people questions on the street and stuff. And they will often be very deliberately talking about Sharia law or halal meat or immigration or divisive topics. And they get racking up loads and loads and loads of views. And like maybe a lot of people start off thinking, oh, I want to kind of grow my whatever it is, business or company or scam. And so I'm going to create some of this content. And then they're kind of like, oh, and I guess it is making people angry. It's quite a kind of interesting phenomenon that you might be kind of causing division in society and actually all you want to do is like sell stuff. Yeah, I mean, every controversial figure has a crypto product attached to them, whether that's Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, the Trump family. Yeah, yeah. These are all people who have mastered the art of getting engagement online. And as you pointed out, the easiest route to that engagement is controversy. And that is what the algorithm's like. And crypto has provided the easiest way to translate that fame garnered through controversy into money It seems that this AI company Redmond Valnex is just going straight to the consumer with this fake content masquerading as the BBC and using Nigel Farage because he is a controversial figure who will garner more of a following, more attention, and then put some hyperlinks into their AI product and they're guaranteed to get at least some raise in price in whatever the product is that they're selling. And the fact that it's Nigel Farage that's been chosen for this article is worth us chatting a little bit about as well, because to your point there, Matt, it's interesting to think about how they decide which story are we going to fake in order to get people to click on it? And which are the figures? Like if you did the same article about, I don't know, Ed Davey, who leads the Lib Dems, I presume you'd get way less clicks because he's just not as like divisive or clickable in the same manner as Nigel Farage. Yeah. So basically what you're saying is that crypto is essentially pushing us further towards the dead internet theory, which is that like most of the internet is fake trolls, fake websites, AI slop, and there's a financial motivation for it. And the kind of side effect of that is if the crypto world is using controversial stories to do that, then that just inflames every problem in society and leads us further into chaos. People think of divisive content as being synonymous with like political campaigning or something that has some kind of political aim. This sort of like engagement nihilism we've chatted about before, where actually all people care about is how they can exploit the outrage in order to turn it into money or something of value to them. Takes us to this whole new point where it's still having the intended consequence in some cases of dividing people. But that's actually not what they're setting out to do in the first place. And as fake journalism is on the rise, powered by AI, real journalism continues to be under attack, including by AI, as we saw just this past week when Peter Thiel announced a new company that is going to use AI to go after journalists and articles. At the same time, you have AI-driven websites plagiarizing real news websites, it appears, in order to use a kind of sloppified version of their real journalism to create local ad space. So recently Futurism, which is a digital news site in the US, published an article that there's a kind of AI website called National Today that is plagiarizing all of its original journalism at a huge and vast scale, stealing their quotes, their reporting. It's filled with inaccuracies, but it gets clicks and it dominates the search engine results. And then this AI company gets local ad space as a result. It's worth saying as well that I've contacted Redmond Valnex and put these various points to them, including about the fake website, and they have not responded to my requests. So I came across this video, and I literally have no idea what it's about. This is the Mercer Affiliate House. All of us do different styles of content. I do skits. I really do any style of content. I do mostly bottom of the funnel, but I'm trying to get more at top of the funnel. I do mainly lives and then top of funnel for my content videos. I do mainly middle of funnel and skits, but I'm trying to get a lot more into top of funnel. Just do anything that prints money, to be honest. But I've looked into it and basically these kids, they're saying like, I'm funny sketches and top of the funnel. Like I'm like, you know, user-based content and bottom of the funnel. Basically, like all of marketing is a funnel. And at the top is people who are trying to engage with you on social media without even coming close to selling you something. They're just trying to hook you into there to follow them. And then you're like further funneled down to the content creators who then sell you stuff. So the reason this is kind of dystopian is it shows you how all of social media is basically a giant funnel. And even if you think that you like following someone because you just like them, they might just be the top of the funnel for some kind of envelope marketing scheme that eventually gets you to the bottom of the funnel. And what we want to do is convert you guys to the bottom of the top comment funnel. And you can do that by, what am I going to say next? And you can do that by getting in touch, by like, comment, subscribe, by sending us a WhatsApp, plus 44-330-123-9480, or sending us an email, topcomment at bbc.co.uk. Get in our funnel. I'm Jamie Bartlett and for BBC Radio 4 I'll be looking at how fakery took over the world No, no, hang on, hang on, sorry You're not Jamie Bartlett, I'm Jamie Bartlett Oh really? Well who am I then? I'm afraid you're not real pal You're just an imitation chatbot I created to help me make this series on modern fakery and why it's everywhere Sounds good, what's going to be in it? Well, there's a lot. 1980s professional wrestling, dodgy academics, AI psychosis, COVID vaccine sceptics. What's it called? Everything is fake and nobody cares. With me, Jamie Bartlett. And me, Jimmy Bartlett. Listen first on BBC Sounds. to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side.
