How Russia's pink slime is poisoning online news: That's the name given to the growing number of local sites which pump out a sinister mix of apparently harmless stories alongside hatchet jobs and propaganda for the Kremlin

Aside from being a knight of the realm, 'Sir Patrick Tristram Bijou' claims to be a UN ambassador, investment banker, philanthropist, 'judge with the International Court of Justice' and the author of no fewer than 25 books, including vampire thriller Blood In The Darkness and the erotic intergalactic romp Passionate Alien.

Considering this glittering CV, perhaps it was no surprise that earlier this year, a supposed news site called the London Post published a glowing profile of this individual under the headline: 'Sir Patrick Bijou on the Future of Global Finance.' 

Who better to opine on such matters, after all, than the esteemed polymath? There is, however, a catch.

Sir Patrick Tristram Bijou is not real. In fact, 'Bijou' is the alter ego of a convicted fraudster called Eric Danison, who was jailed for 11 years in 2010 for duping investors over a £14million property scam.

Danison, originally from London, confirmed to the Daily Mail that he has since changed his name by deed poll. How did this fraudster end up being feted in a bizarre profile on an obscure local news website – and why precisely should we care?

The answer lies in an extraordinary and deeply murky story of how shady Russian interests have hijacked a swathe of Britain's local news industry to advance their own political agenda and even destabilise our democracy. 

It involves a string of businesses with close ties to the Kremlin as well as a motley crew of elusive company 'directors'.

It even takes in the British far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who has regularly appeared on the London Post, which lavished praise on him for his book Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam, which was later banned on Amazon and eBay. But more on him later.

At first glance, the London Post appears legitimate - but not one of the more than 25,000 stories published since 2017 bear the name of a journalist

At first glance, the London Post appears legitimate. The masthead is professionally designed, there's a phone number for readers to ring in with story tips, and every day a handful of innocuous stories land on the homepage.

This month alone there have been articles on everything from 'biodiversity in the River Thames' to a government minister visiting a local social enterprise, poetry readings at a special-needs school and even a feature on 'The Many Sides of the British Christmas Jumper'.

But look closer – and all is not as it seems. Despite publishing more than 25,000 stories since 2017, not one bears the name of a bylined journalist. Instead, the pieces are mysteriously all attributed to 'LDN-Post'. 

And when the Daily Mail dialled the so-called tipline earlier this week, an automated message revealed the phone number had not been connected.

A deeper trawl through the London Post's archive reveals, in addition to the 'Bijou' story, a number of bizarre pieces unrelated to local London news, including one from December called 'Best Ukrainian Brides Sites': essentially, a list of pornographic platforms on which men video-call young women in eastern Europe.

Another, from earlier this month, carried a glowing profile of a watchmaker whose business was struck off four years ago.

It should have become clear by now that the London Post is not a normal – or even a real – news offering. Rather, it is accused of running a so-called 'pink slime' operation.

The term originates from the meat industry. Pulverise the offcuts and gristle from slaughtered animals – the bits hardly fit for dog food – treat it with ammonia, chemicals and filler, and you end up with 'pink slime': a cheap processed meat-adjacent substance that can be pulped into anything from chicken nuggets to beef burgers to bulk them out.

In 2012 American journalist Ryan Smith first applied the unappetising term to the media industry as a way of describing news sites that appear legitimate but in fact churn out low-quality, nowadays often AI-written stories, while simultaneously peddling political propaganda and advancing vested interests.

In Britain alone, there are now thought to be at least 100 'pink slime' websites, publishing tens of thousands of articles per year, many copied directly from each other.

For example, the London Post's article on Bijou has been reproduced in various iterations by other alleged pink-slime outlets including London Loves Business, CEOWorld and WebWire.

Mr Danison ('Patrick Bijou') denied to the Daily Mail having paid for any 'pink slime' articles about him and claimed he had in fact been contacted by a 'journalist' from the London Post for the article – despite the fact the London Post does not appear to have any journalists. Clearly, any coverage of his fictitious alter ego is helpful to him. 

But some of the London Post's articles are of highly negative significance to the people named in them.

Notably, in 2024 the outfit ran a piece headlined 'Corruption Networks of Uzbekistan: From Washington to Tashkent' in which it accused Uzbek businessman Ovik Mkrtchyan of, among other things, embezzling state funds, money-laundering and seizing state assets.

The businessman accused the London Post's publisher – more of whom later – of defamation. No defence was offered in court and he won by default. He was awarded £105,000 in damages and a similar sum in legal costs in July this year.

So why does the London Post carry such articles? The point is that Google, other search engines and, increasingly, AI models, read and 'scrape' the data from these websites to determine what information to tell their users.

And, inevitably, whatever Google chooses to prioritise and whatever an AI model tells its users are these days more or less accepted as the 'truth'. 

The Daily Mail understands that the website has about 50,000 monthly visits, many of which may be generated by computer bots rather than real people. But these sites don't rely on organic traffic, and certainly not on any Londoners visiting them to get their 'news'.

Rather, they exist to sow information – often false – across the internet, so that this can later be picked up by search engines, social media accounts and by AI chatbots, which faithfully regurgitate it as gospel.

The algorithms behind the AI models and search engines wrongly determine that these sites host plenty of ordinary and apparently genuine local content, such as charity fun runs or news about apprenticeships, and therefore treat fictitious stories on Uzbek businessmen and obscure fake knights as being of equal value.

This week, the Daily Mail asked Britain's most popular AI model ChatGPT: 'Who is Sir Patrick Bijou?' The bot faithfully replied: 'Sir Patrick Bijou is a British-based investment banker, fund manager, author and philanthropist', mirroring the language and false information of the London Post's 'story'.

The correct answer, of course, would have been 'Sir Patrick Bijou is the alter ego of convicted fraudster Eric Danison' – but any one of the billions of people who use ChatGPT would be none the wiser.

And this can have serious repercussions in the real world. 

'In some jurisdictions, just a couple of [negative] news articles might be enough for somebody's [bank] account to be flagged or put on hold,' says Dr Steven Buckley, lecturer in digital media sociology at City St George's, University of London.

Pink-slime 'journalism', then, is a sinister tool used to defame or promote individuals, businesses, states and whatever else its proponents wish. 

'It looks like a local news website. It uses the same template for all the different local communities that it serves. But it does not have local authors,' says Dr Christine Lepird, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. 

'It's pushing different partisan viewpoints, and the ultimate goal is for it to be picked up by social media.'

This sort of 'black PR' can eventually become accepted as fact. Which brings us back to the question of who actually runs the London Post. Here things get very murky indeed.

The Daily Mail has established that the outfit is owned by a company called '2Trom', which claims to be a 'British newspaper and digital publisher'. 

On 2Trom's website, it claims to be based out of offices in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire; while on Companies House, it is registered to a different address in Harlow, Essex.

The firm also owns numerous other 'local news' operations, including Essex Magazine, Leicester TV, The Daily Brit, London TV, Manchester TV and Midlands TV – all apparently pink-slime outfits similar to the London Post.

Russia links? The London Post celebrated Tommy Robinson's anti-Islam book, Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam- which was banned on Amazon and eBay

According to its own website, '2Trom News Group is primarily owned by Viktor Tokarev, Moscow Media Group & BE Group'. Who they? The Daily Mail has uncovered now-deleted website data for the 'Moscow Media Group' which shows that the company previously claimed to operate as a PR firm working on projects with agencies of the Russian Federation, including President Putin's personal office.

According to an archived webpage, a subsidiary called Moscow Media Group Brainstorming previously worked 'in co-operation with the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, various ministries and departments'.

As for 'BE Group', this is believed to be an Israeli firm based in Gibraltar – a useful place to set up a business because under local laws, directors don't have to be resident there. It has no online presence. 

As mentioned, 2Trom has one human director called 'Viktor Tokarev', but we have established that it also has a former director called Mathetes Chihwai, also known as 'Matthew Martino', who resigned in 2023.

Tokarev is listed as a Russian national on Companies House. But, given how easy it is to set up a firm in Britain, we cannot be sure he exists. 

'No one has any proof Tokarev is a real person,' said a source we spoke to who has been investigating 2Trom for years. 'But I know for a fact that even if he does [exist], he will be a nobody – probably a real person working in an online 'bot farm' [pumping out misinformation online] somewhere in Russia or central Asia, creating stories for the pink-slime websites. He won't be the true power-broker. Those people will be serious.'

As for Chihwai/Martino, a Zimbabwean national now 34, he appears to have since rebranded himself as a social media influencer and posts pictures of his seemingly lavish lifestyle to Instagram under the handle @eastghettoybx.

Back in 2017, Martino – then claiming he worked in the film industry – set up the 'Matthew Martino Benevolent Fund Trust', an unregistered charity that claimed to support 'filmmakers, actors and individuals studying or working in performing arts'.

That same year, Martino appointed Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who styles himself 'Tommy Robinson' – to the position of 'Goodwill Ambassador'. 

This was around the time the London Post celebrated Robinson's anti-Islam book.

The London Post even carried Robinson's charity appointment with an article declaring the activist had 'turned philanthropist'. 

A press release at the time claimed of the agitator and convicted hooligan: 'A keen supporter of the world of media and the arts, Robinson will be responsible for briefing the Board of Trustees on initiatives within the arts we can work on to support more young talent'. Robinson himself declared he was 'humbled and honoured'.

The London Post, then, offers tantalising evidence of Yaxley-Lennon's ties to Russia. In June this year he turned up in Moscow on a trip funded by the billionaire Musk family, where he met Elon's father Errol and claimed of Putin's autocracy: 'I've come to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilised society here.' 

Robinson declared: 'Russia is not the enemy of Britain.'

And here the net widens still further. Yaxley-Lennon is also a known associate of Edward Weinhaus, an American lawyer and cryptocurrency enthusiast who sponsored, likely to the tune of several thousand pounds at least, the activist's 'Unite the Kingdom' rally in summer 2025, assisting with the 'livestream' of the event.

Weinhaus has also served as legal counsel to the world's biggest pink-slime operation: Metric Media, which operates 1,200 local news sites across the US and last year alone published no fewer than 1.3 million articles.

This week, the Daily Mail visited the two addresses associated with 2Trom. On its website, the firm claims to operate from The Pixmore, a 'business centre' in Letchworth Garden City where desk space can be rented for as little as £210 a month. 

Of the more than 50 companies named as operating there, 2Trom was not among them. There was no evidence of the company ever having been there and no one we spoke to working at the premises had ever heard of 2Trom or the London Post.

As for 2Trom's supposed address registered with Companies House, when the Daily Mail visited the residential property in Harlow, Essex, the door was answered by a young woman who said she had nothing to do with 2Trom and had only heard of the company because around 'a dozen' people had come to her door to inquire about it over recent years.

One thing is for sure. Whoever is truly behind 2Trom has gone to great lengths to avoid detection.

According to the World Economic Forum, misinformation is the second greatest threat to the world economy over the next two years, below 'geoeconomic confrontation' but ahead of cyber-insecurity and armed conflict.

As the number of pink-slime operations in the UK alone tops 100 – their lies spread ever wider by AI chatbots – misinformation is also a threat that can seemingly no longer be contained.