‘The most spoken about urban page in the UK’, says one Instagram profile. ‘The UK's new #1 source for breaking news reels’, claims another. But hopping from one page to the next, it is hard to spot news; instead, what you do find is a rather bizarre collection of posts.
Clips of neighbourhood fights, confrontations in tube stations, rioting, posts nudging one to cash in on leaked courses by Andrew Tate, along with a generous dose of pornographic posts that seem to jump at you from nowhere. As if this was not enough, there are several posts promoting hate towards the LGBTQ+ community.
If you are someone who follows urban news and meme pages on Instagram like Pubity or YoungKingsTv, chances are you have come across these pages. And quite likely that Instagram has pushed content from these pages as suggested posts. Such news and entertainment pages are certainly not a rarity on Instagram where many partake in the virality game. Except in this case, we are talking about a whole network of UK-based bait ‘news’ pages linked to one another - and to a questionable pornography business.
Research by the non-profit The Citizens has identified at least 14 pages currently known to be part of this network, with a collective following of well over 1.2 million. (One of the pages seems to have been removed by time of publication, but the overall follower count still sits above 1 million.) More than half of the pages are ‘news’ pages, but the remaining are purely pornographic pages that advertise models and OnlyFans streams.
The ‘news’ pages largely fall under the imjustnews and balnews banners, with one of their main pages claiming to be putting out ‘real unbiased news’. In actual fact, the pages are a mish-mash of graphic content alongside hate-filled, one-sided and context-less posts that demonise various communities, particularly the LGBTQ+ community.
Not only is this hateful content capitalised within the bait news ecosystem, where charged and provocative posts are used to drive up engagement, but their audiences on the ‘news’ pages are continually signposted to linked pornography pages on Instagram. From there, they are directed to OnlyFan streams run by a modelling/porn company, Queen of Diamonds (QOD) Models. The streams generate money through subscriptions. And the entity also offers paid advertisement spots on its various ‘news’ pages.
According to the bio of one of their own instagram pages, both the ‘news’ and pornographic pages are run by the same admin, someone who goes by the name, Jay C. Jay calls himself a ‘London based Journalist/Director’ and also claims to be a manager with the QOD Models company.
Anti-LGBTQ Hate: Story Hour, Dresses & Labels
One particular narrative pumped out by the network is the age-old homophobic trope that LGBTQ+ people are threatening the safety of children and have an agenda to sexualise them. One post featured a vile video made by the Belgian far-right youth movement Schild & Vrienden, several members of which, including its founder Dries Van Langenhove, are facing criminal charges for racism, holocaust denial, and possession of arms.
The video falsely presents Drag Story Hour activities to be events where drag people tell children about their “sexual fantasies”. It labels them as perverts and goes on to say that they are “indoctrinating” children. In reality, drag story hours are simple story reading sessions that parents voluntarily bring their children to. But of late, several far-right groups are weaponsing the issue of children’s safety to target drag artists, and by extension trans people, and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly (even though a drag person may not be transgender or gender queer in any way).
Another post on these pages shows a clip where a few people dressed in traditionally female clothing (who may or may not be transgender), are being harassed by a man who asks them “do you know what you are?” The man from the video declares later in a post that “there’s no way my son will grow to think it’s right for a men (sic) to dress like a women (sic).” The balnews page endorses the behaviour, calling the man “a legend”. “Didn’t back down for no one. I rate that,” it added.
Yet another post shows an image of what is claimed to be a “textbook for kids in Germany”. The image shows animated drawings of couples of different sexualities being intimate, and the caption implies that young children are being forced to learn about sex and sexuality at an early age. But a close look at the text on the page suggests that it is a book intended to be a guide book for parents who wish to voluntarily teach their children about sex. It is not compulsory reading pushed onto children in German schools as the tweet implies.
“There is this conflation between someone who is transgender and a drag artist, as far as they (the far-right) are concerned,” Mhairi Grealis says. Founder of the CLIP Theatre, she runs an event called ‘Bring Baby Drag Bingo’. Previously, the company ran a few drag story reading sessions and were at the receiving end of such far-right aggression. She explains that it is in the far-right’s political interest to club and confuse a drag person with a trans person, in order to take aim at LGBTQ+ rights at large. And this strategy of building confusion and invisibilising differences between groups is seen with scores of posts on the pages in this Instagram network. As a safeguarding lead who has worked with children for 20 years, she says, “I don't believe for a minute that these people have any actual real concerns about the children.”
Our analysis finds that such out of context images and texts are a common feature of posts on these accounts. The posts about LGBTQ+ people often also appear with just emojis expressing shock, disgust and confusion. The use of emoji in these posts with no accompanying text could also be a tactic to bypass Instagram’s community guidelines with regards to hate speech.
Along with the narrative of deviance and sexualisation, LGBTQ+ people are also presented as criminals and rapists. Posts single out cases where the perpetrator happens to be gender queer (or has used a disguise to impersonate as someone from the opposite sex), giving a one-sided story, making it seem like LGBTQ+ people as a whole, by virtue of their gender identity, are a threat.
Where it all started
According to the QOD’s own website (now defunct), the porn company ‘Queen of Diamonds Models’ started operating back in 2013. The site claims that by 2015, they had a manager and ten models under their banner. While the company calls itself a “modelling agency” and a place for content creators and influencers, it has now primarily become a pornography business that runs OnlyFan streams almost daily.
While the website history indicates the company's presence since 2013, as per the listing in Companies House, started by Jah Power Charles (likely the same person as Jay C who runs the Instagram pages), the company ‘QOD Models’ was incorporated in November 2020 and struck off and dissolved in April 2022. So for most of its existence, it seems that the company was either off the books, or it could have been registered under a different name(s). Either way, after a “compulsory strike off” last year, the company ceased to exist legally under this name.
A dive into their social media, OnlyFans page and now defunct website suggests that the QOD brand initially started as a modelling and pornography business, and eventually became linked to this bait news ecosystem, which it feeds off and fuels.
“This appears to be a case where a company is harnessing the fact that hateful material drives engagement to also help their [pornographic] business,” Heidi Beirich, Co-Founder of Global Project Against Hate and Extremism says.
In recent years, the brand has only continued to grow; with their so-called ‘news’ operations on Instagram expanding. In fact, as recently as April 2023, they also seem to have started a new instagram page and website called The Upper Lip that puts out ‘satirical’ news. It is unclear if it is directly under the control of the same admin or not, but it is continually advertised as a page under their brand.
Controversy without cause
The Upper Lip site in its own words puts out ‘Stiff News You Can’t Trust’. Since the page was launched some months ago, even though it has not seen the proliferation of pornographic posts like their other pages, it has continued to put out posts with inciteful headlines in a bid to apparently ‘lighten public discourse’.
From ‘Child who ran away from drag queen act in school to be charged with hate crime’, ‘Teenage boy suspended from school after demanding pronouns be changed to your/mum’ to ‘Sadiq Khan blames soaring London knife crime on climate change’, the made-up headlines frame really sensitive issues as a simplistic outcry against a so-called “woke” left. While it is easier to make out the satire in some cases, they thrive in the confusion and controversy they create, much like their other Instagram pages. In fact, a headline for one of their recent pieces reads: ‘Disney criticised for not giving the little mermaid a penis: “this is literally genocide,” says ugly man in dress’.
While most of the content plays off far-right and alt-right tropes, the pages do seem to prize virality over political consistency. Some posts highlight police brutality against non-white minorities; others incite hatred against the same minorities it deems to support in other instances. When the pages touch on, say, the Israel-Palestine issue, they do it by trumpeting videos in which Jews and Palestinians are calling for the other community to be wiped out. None of these videos are verified and largely presented without context.
Overall, Imjustnews network’s strategy seems to be to use provocative and controversial content to drive up engagement. While some of the framing of the issues could be a reflection of the admin’s personal politics and ideology, the content also seems driven by the perceived virality value of posts. The page also actively advertises for submissions of viral content, including for pay; “If you have videos that belong to you, that you think can go viral… send them to us and you might get paid” is a frequently recurring comment.
“Given how much data is out there that polarising content and hateful material attracts viewers, this seems like a tactic that makes sense,” Beirich explains. “It is an unfortunate fact that content like this drives engagement, but we know from, for example Facebook leaks, that it does. This is for me the first time I’ve seen it used in this way for commercial purposes.”
Instagram’s blinding failures
The porn pages within this network (associated with the Queen of Diamond Models) have been active on Instagram at least since 2015, despite the fact they violate Instagram’s nudity clause.
Instagram says that “photos, videos and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks” are not allowed. And its community guidelines also state that “offering sexual services… [is] not allowed.” And yet, five of the pages under this network that publish pornographic content and advertise sexual services have remained active on the platform for years.
Instagram also has guidelines against hate speech. But as the investigation suggests, almost all of these pages have continued to run without any apparent trouble. Even when Instagram seems to have taken down one of its controversial pages, balnewsldn, they reinstated it apologising for “any inconvenience”. It is unclear why it was taken down, nor why it was reinstated Another page, balnewstv, which was quite active until very recently appears to have gone. We are uncertain if it was removed, deleted or has been temporarily disabled at this point.
This fits the larger pattern where Instagram and its parent company have failed to safeguard its users from hate speech and porngraphy. In fact, previous articles and reports have pointed out how Instagram has been unable to deal with the issue of porn on its site, despite the fact that it allows children as young as 13 years of age to be on the platform. In fact, a 2021 report by the non-profit Thorn, that surveyed American kids, found that even children below 13 years of age were using platforms like Instagram. They found that 40% of children aged 9-12 who were surveyed were using the app at the time.
This highlights the larger hypocrisy of bait pages that label transgender people as a threat to children continuously singpost to pornographic content - on a platform frequented by children. And of the time of writing, the platform's operators - Instagram and Meta - appear to have done next to nothing to take these pages down.
We reached out to Jay C for an interview. While he initially agreed to it, we could not make contact with him again. He has not responded to our subsequent request for comments. We also reached out to Instagram (Meta) for comment, but have not heard from them in time for publication.
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