Clackmannanshire Council Memes: A Transparent Attempt to Undermine Public Trust

This article was originally created for circulation among the Clackmannanshire community in light of an organised campaign to damage public trust in local institutions, and Scottish democracy itself.

By Eilidh McIntosh, Freelance OSINT/HUMINT Investigator

I will be up front with you. This is a long report. Jump to ‘summary’ if you just want the gory details rather than the detailed explanation of this investigation.

 

Contents

1. Introduction: Why This Matters
2. What the Page Actually did
3. Methodology: How We Unpicked the Threads
4. The Mask of Satire
5. Pulling at Threads
6. Forensics: Voice, Style, and Digital Fingerprints
7. Motive and Mindset
8. Consequences and Community Impact
9. Final Analysis and Attribution
10. Summary
11. A Wee Message for our Suspect
12. Ethics Disclosure Statement

 

Chapter 1 – Introduction: Why This Matters

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute.

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be sitting here writing a full-blown investigative report about a Facebook meme page, I’d have laughed you out of the room. It sounds daft – almost entirely satirical.

There is a cold and unsettling reality to this investigation though. It isn’t daft, and it’s not funny either.

Not when you pull back the curtain and see what’s really been going on.

This is a story about disinformation. Not the big flashy kind with foreign bots and fake news websites. This is the slow-burn kind. The kind that creeps into comment sections, hides behind satire, and slowly chips away at trust in your neighbours, your councillors, and your community.

It’s disinformation on a hyper-local level, designed to erode public trust in democratic institutions at their most fundamental layer.

That’s what this report is about. Not just a Facebook page, but the impact it had – and what it could’ve meant for community cohesion if it had gone unchecked.

Here’s the thing – this kind of stuff doesn’t just happen on television, or over in America, or during an Independence referendum. It’s happening here. In Alloa. Sauchie. Clackmannan. All over our county. It’s happening in wee community groups you’ve maybe been part of for years.

The various ‘Legends’ groups for each of our towns stick out as a prime example.

You might think: “It’s just memes. It’s just a joke. Nobody takes it seriously.”

“Maybe the guy had a point!”

Maybe he did, but he was neither someone living here nor someone with a stake in our community.

The truth is, people did take the disinformation seriously. Some folk started to believe the council was actively out to destroy their lives and pilfer public money. Others sent abuse to councillors – with this escalating into threats.

The damage is real, and the consequences are closer to home than a lot of folk would like to admit.

This individual latched onto public anger and used it to his own advantage – either as an experiment to sharpen his skills in influencing public opinion, or simply to feel like a community leader in a place he doesn’t even live, with (near) total anonymity.

At least to anyone who wouldn’t look too closely.

I know several of our Clackmannanshire councillors personally, and reasonably well. They’re generally working-class people who’ve taken on the responsibility of trying to do right by their neighbours amid tough economic times. They didn’t deserve – pardon my language – all the shit they’ve received.

In practice, our county became the proving ground for a new localised form of misinformation and ‘riling folk up’.

I believe he chose ours due to the unique demographic makeup we have in Clackmannanshire.

This place is often described politically as ‘Scotland in a snowglobe’ due to its size and the various different types of people who live here. The perfect testing ground, if we’re being honest.

That’s why I investigated, and that’s why I’m making an accessible and anonymised version of my report, public.

Not for drama. Not for clicks – and not because I’ve got any axe to grind with folk having a laugh online.

I did this because someone out there deliberately tried to undermine a local community using basic tools most folk don’t even realise exist – language models, AI-generated posts, and modern disinformation tactics.

It was subtle, but it was absolutely intentional.

When that sort of thing goes unchecked, it grows arms and legs. It shakes and undermines trust in real people in our community. It’s insincere – especially from someone that doesn’t live here.

Someone who thought the people of Clackmannanshire would be easy marks. I’m ashamed to say it, but a great many of us were.

Even me at first.

This report is my attempt to expose these tactics. To lay them bare. To show that the patterns can be spotted, the curtain can be pulled back, and ordinary folk can fight back against this sort of manipulation – even if it’s just one post, one clue, one thread at a time.

If we don’t understand how it works, it’ll keep happening. Next time, it might not be as easy to catch.

So – this is the beginning. The rest of this report lays out what I found, how I found it, who’s likely behind it (though I won’t be naming names), and why it matters.

Let’s get into it.

 

Chapter 2 – What the Page Actually Did

This wasn’t just a Facebook page with some cheeky jokes about bins.

It had a real impact. 

That’s the bit we can’t afford to brush aside.

Whether the person behind it meant to cause harm or just thought they were being clever, the consequences were felt all the same.

It started subtly. A post here or there, laughing at missed bin collections or potholes on a familiar street.

Then came the sarcastic digs at councillors, the jokes about mismanagement, and the push to make everything seem like a deliberate scam.

The message was always the same: “They’re taking the piss out of you, and you should be angry about it.”

Folk did get angry.

Some of them started posting hostile replies on councillor pages. Others started parroting lines from the memes like they were facts. It wasn’t always obvious where the ideas were coming from, but the tone of community discussions changed for the worse.

It shifted from frustration to full-blown distrust.

Whether or not this meme page caused that directly is hard to say – but it absolutely poured fuel on a fire that was already burning.

The page wasn’t helping people understand what was going on. It was making them feel betrayed, without offering anything useful in return.

That’s what disinformation looks like at the local level.

It doesn’t need to make you believe in conspiracy theories. All it needs to do is make you think that nothing and no one is worth trusting.

That no matter what’s said, everyone in a position of authority is lying. That’s how it works – erode trust, one joke at a time, until folk give up on the idea of democracy altogether.

That’s not an exaggeration either. The posts weren’t just taking the piss out of Clackmannanshire Council.

They were repeatedly pushing the idea that any attempt at public governance was a sham. This correlates with the character profile and political opinions of our ‘suspect’.

This page didn’t punch up at some big, faceless institution. It went after the people who live and work in the same towns and villages as us – councillors who’ve been out knocking doors, taking surgeries, and trying to make the best of an impossible funding situation.

Ordinary people. Like you and me. This may be a surprise, but councillor’s aren’t paid that much, and being realistic – in a place as strapped for cash as Clacks is, there aren’t too many avenues to make money from corruption – let’s be REAL here.

The language was dressed up like a laugh, but it did real harm.

You could see it in the local groups and local pages – folk winding each other up, sharing posts like they were gospel, talking about the council like it was some abstract enemy rather than a group of neighbours trying to do their jobs.

That might not sound like much, but it has a long tail.

It changes how people vote. It changes how people talk to each other. It feeds a sense of hopelessness, like nothing can ever be improved, and everyone in power is out for themselves.

That feeling doesn’t just go away.

It lingers, and when the next election comes round, it shows up in the ballot box. Not always in who people vote for, but in how many people don’t bother voting at all. That’s legitimately dangerous. If we don’t utilise our votes and have faith in our institutions, what else is left? So begins the long road to tyranny.

Abstract? Maybe, but the small cracks in communities are how these things start – and they become very difficult to plug once they get to a certain size. 

Make no mistake. This was one individual’s attempt to influence local politics in a place that he didn’t even live. I’ve got the proof of that. 

This page made people feel like there was no point in local governance structures or in having faith in our neighbours to represent us. That’s the most damaging thing of all.

So this chapter isn’t just about “bad memes”. It’s about trust. It’s about the effect that one person, with the right tools and no accountability, can have on a whole community’s sense of hope, fairness, and cohesion.

That’s what happened here. Whether the person behind it wants to admit it or not.

Chapter 3 – Methodology

Before we dive into the patterns and the page itself, I want to be completely upfront about how this came together.

I’m not a professional journalist. I’m not a police officer. I’m just someone with a curious brain, a bit of technical know-how, and a willingness to pay attention when things don’t sit right.

That turned out to be enough.

What follows is an honest account of how I followed the trail – and how anyone else could do the same if something like this ever shows up in their own town. It took me about fifty-four hours in total, spread over a few days. No secret tech. No insider access. Just persistence and a careful eye.

The Starting Point – A Feeling That Something Was Off

The tone of Clackmannanshire Council Memes didn’t feel right. The humour was close to ours – but not quite. Too neat. Too knowing. It sounded like someone doing an impression of a local, rather than being one. The Americanised typing patterns, and of course…

Leaving the response to ChatGPT’s prompts in amongst his social media posts. Sloppy, stupid, and entirely avoidable. Most of the posts on Clackmannanshire Council Memes were AI generated – and not very well.

A few memes were obviously AI-generated. Others had awkward formatting and graphic design – double spaces, random capitals – like someone rushing to simulate “authenticity”. It was polished and messy at the same time.

That was the first flag.

Step 1 – Pattern Recognition

I started clocking repeat sentence structures. Overuse of sarcasm. Hashtags that didn’t really match the content. Not much of the local vernacular. Didn’t match the way people in Clacks ACTUALLY speak. 

Each post had a kind of calculated tone. Jokes that didn’t teach you anything – just told you who to blame.

Step 2 – Comment Digs

Next, I looked at who was engaging. One name kept coming up – someone who commented a lot, often with mirrored opinions. They’d echo the page’s tone. Same mixture of bitterness, tech references, and anti-government barbs.

When I compared their comments to the page’s, it wasn’t identical – but it was close. Close enough to keep digging.

Step 3 – Google Dorking

Using public search tools, I went back through old posts linked to the suspected account using Google operators (like site:facebook.com “username”).

That’s when the floodgates opened.

The same ideas came up again and again: AI, Darwinism, over-taxation, disdain for “sheeple”, hatred for public institutions.

Some of the exact same phrases appeared both in comments and in meme captions.

Step 4 – Metadata & Platform Behaviour

I tried pulling image metadata using ExifTool, but Facebook strips that on upload. That in itself told me something – this person had chosen a platform that auto-deletes their digital fingerprints.

No evidence of reposting to other networks. No Reddit threads. Just a sealed ecosystem. A sandbox, where they could operate with minimal oversight.

Step 5 – Timing and Behavioural Mapping

Replies between the page and the suspect often appeared within minutes. The meme page would quote the same phrases posted by this account. They’d tag each other. Start conversations that felt pre-written – even by the personal account itself.

It began to feel like the page and the admin were having fake discussions with one another in order to simulate community support. He even discussed forming a ‘groupchat’ regarding his ideas with the Facebook page to pretend that this way of conducting politics was of public interest.

The more I tracked, the more obvious it became – this was a controlled space, not a community forum.

What Didn’t Work (and Why That Still Matters)

Some tools didn’t yield results:

• No metadata or EXIF data to trace
• Scraping Facebook groups failed due to platform restrictions
• No “smoking gun” moment – just consistent repetition

Even so, the weight of the evidence grew. Repeated structure. Repeated tone. Repeated voice.

This was a pattern – not a coincidence.

Chapter 4 – The Mask of Satire

Once the methods became clear, I went back to the content itself – the memes, the tone, the structure – to see what the page was really doing.

What I found was this: Clackmannanshire Council Memes was never just taking the piss. It was pushing something. Something calculated.

Folk saw the posts and thought it was harmless. Bit of banter about potholes. A moan about council tax. Memes about bins.

It slid under the radar because it didn’t look like a threat.

That was the disguise.

What the page actually did was weaponise frustration. It didn’t explain council decisions. It didn’t try to improve anything. It gave folk a target – and told them to aim all their anger at it.

Councillors were painted as corrupt. The council itself as malicious. Bureaucracy as a scam. Politics as a joke.

The tone was always snide – confident, sarcastic, and emotionally loaded. It felt like it was written by a pal in the pub, but when you looked closer, it wasn’t quite right.

The rhythm of the writing was off. Too smooth. Too consistent.

Some posts were clearly written by AI.

Others were written to sound like they weren’t – like someone trying to pass as “ordinary” by deliberately typing sloppy. Ironically during their ‘goodbye post’ (before they deleted their page) they pretended that they were just a researcher with an out of control AI – attempting to capitalise on poor public knowledge of how AI language models work.

They also claimed that they would be handing over control to a political polling company like YouGov. This was just another part of the deception. The net was closing in, and they wanted out – but not before they could fire yet another volley of utter arrogance at the community.

Let’s be real here. What they did was NOT technically impressive. Any member of the public could do this with a sliver of knowledge about how to use ChatGPT – it ‘s not difficult – yet he made it appear so.

Ego? Attempting to deflect responsibility and cover their tracks? You be the judge.

This page and its disinformation came from someone who wasn’t from here. Didn’t live here. Unaffected by council tax rises here.

Who had no skin in the game – only an interest in seeing what could be stirred up.

The satire wasn’t lifting anything. It wasn’t encouraging folk to take action or to think more deeply. It was flattening everything into a sneer. Satire only works when you take a pot shot at genuine power, not individual councillors, and certainly not with an aim to actually divide communities.

Every post had the same message underneath: “It’s all shite. Nothing will change. They’re all laughing at you.”

That doesn’t build communities. That breaks them.

The admin of this page took local headlines and various hot-button issues in our community, and fed them into an instance of ChatGPT that he had primed to create the most provocative posts possible.

The person running it thought no one would notice.

They were wrong.

Chapter 5 – Pulling at Threads

By the time I’d clocked the writing style and started mapping interactions, things were beginning to click into place.

There wasn’t one big reveal – no anonymous confession or daft mistake on his part. What there was instead, was a slow drip of patterns that got harder and harder to ignore.

Certain turns of phrase. Specific usernames that popped up repeatedly across groups. Replies that felt too rehearsed. Posts that mirrored one another in tone and structure, even when they came from supposedly different people.

That was the start of it – the thread I couldn’t ignore.

Some of the comments were textbook AI. You can spot them if you’ve worked with this stuff before – rhythm just slightly off, tone a wee bit too polished, or weirdly generic phrasing trying too hard to sound like a real person. Oftentimes they’ll use American spelling unless told not to (spoiler alert, he didn’t. They were all in American English).

Then there were others on the ‘Clackmannanshire Council Memes’ page. Human-made, but clumsy. Extra spaces. Strange capitalisation. Frankly not very well written… which became a point of investigation for me.

It aligned PERFECTLY with the comments left on their personal account. Same tone, same crappy grammar, same ideological leanings.

We had begun to build a robust profile.

Replies that had clearly been typed out in a hurry. That’s where it started to feel like the mask was slipping – like someone was swapping between roles and losing track of which voice they were meant to be using.

So I followed the voices:

Across community pages, and threads on unrelated posts, the same name kept cropping up. One account in particular mirrored the tone of the meme page almost perfectly – not just in what was being said, but in how it was being said.

I started building a table – cross-referencing comments from both sources, looking for matching structure, grammar quirks, and ideological signals. Here’s a sample:

Source	Comment	Notable Features
CCM Page	“Bin  Day day in Clackmannanshire Is special”	Double space, awkward capitalisation – almost certainly manually typed
Personal Account	“you clearly don’t know how AI learns… it learns through a training set…”	Overuse of ellipses, lower-case ‘i’, rambling sentence pattern
CCM Page	“What are they going to tax next – walking on the pavement?”	Sarcastic libertarian framing, close match in rhetorical tone
Personal Account	“Absolute socialism gone mad!”	Identical ideological stance, same blunt delivery
Personal Account (on CCM post)	“We should create a D.O.C.E – Department of Council Efficiency…”	Later echoed by the page near-verbatim, Elon Musk-style libertarian talking point
CCM Reply	“Mate, this is genius – wouldn’t be surprised if the budget spreadsheet is just a dodgy Word document”	Same phrasing style, same sarcasm, lifted directly from personal comment

This was the moment where it started feeling less like a coincidence and more like self-dialogue. The page was talking to the account – or vice versa – using language only the author would echo.

I found the references to DOGE and Elon Musk VERY interesting. Took a look at the Facebook account of the individual I’d identified, and there it was – in his photo albums…

A meme implying that Donald Trump could run our country better than the Scottish people – not to mention his history of Facebook comments – which is what we’ve based our stylographic and personality profile on.

Given Trump’s closeness with Musk and how their politics align… none of this comes as a surprise.

It became obvious this wasn’t a group effort. There were no sock puppets, no coordinated community. It was just one person, possibly using a couple of identities (I could not confirm the existence of sock puppet accounts), occasionally swapping accounts between personal and page in order to simulate an active conversation.

The next step was to go deeper – beyond surface-level posts, and into the finer digital traces left behind.

 

Chapter 6 – Forensics: Voice, Style, and Digital Fingerprints

This is the part where it all starts to line up.

I’d gathered enough red flags – from grammar, phrasing, tone, ideology – to build a picture. 

Instinct isn’t enough though, not for something like this. If I was going to lay this out properly, I needed to compare what was actually said, side by side. The whole thing, no paraphrasing, no interpretation. Just the raw material. Then we could start to see what holds up.

I started pulling direct quotes – full ones – from both the Clackmannanshire Council Memes page, and from public comments made by the suspected personal account.

I was looking for patterns in tone, cadence, punctuation, grammar, ideology, and structure. Not just what was being said – but how it was being said, and what that told us about the author behind it.

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

Comment Comparison Table

Source	Full Quote	Notable Features
CCM Page	“Bin  Day day in Clackmannanshire Is special”	Double space between ‘Bin’ and ‘Day’, unnecessary capital ‘Is’. Not AI output – likely manually typed. Still odd formatting.
Personal Account	“you clearly don’t know how ai learns… it learns through a training set… what better training set to train an ai on than an ai detector… it won’t take very long for the ai detectors to be useless, and it won’t be a cat and mouse situation because there is a limit where the ai will be pretty much the same as a human.”	Repetitive structure. Overuse of ellipses. No capitalisation. Strong technical knowledge. Tone is dismissive and self-certain. Very clearly knows a thing or two about AI, even if they’re not especially adept at using it.
CCM Page	“What are they going to tax next – walking on the pavement?”	Libertarian rhetorical tactic. Devalues public service. Derides council decisions without context.
Personal Account	“absolute socialism gone mad!”	Classic right-wing populist phrase. Condenses complex issues into sarcastic outrage. Similar framing to above.
CCM Page (responding to the same account)	“Mate, this is GENIUS – we absolutely need an FOI request – because at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the budget spreadsheet is just a dodgy old Word document with ‘???’ under ‘Where The Money Goes’.”	Dramatised absurdism. Identical ideological tone. Structured sarcasm, same cadence. Repeats concept proposed by personal account.
Personal Account	“We should make a D.O.C.E Department of Council Efficiency. We should make an FOI request… I’m sick to death of over taxation without seeing anything for it.”	Long-form post. Repetition of phrases. Ideological frustration presented as “common sense”. Page echoes this later in its own post. Elon Musk coded, fits the stylographic and personality/policy profile to a tee.
Personal Account	“People don’t have self accountability these days unfortunately.”	Blames social issues on individuals. Disdainful tone. Common in reactionary libertarian politics.
CCM Page	“Honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they introduced a ‘walking on the pavement’ tax.”	Same type of line. Mock policy idea, sarcastic tone, engineered to provoke.
Personal Account	“Darwinism the real mvp drivers will prevail”	Pseudoscientific, deterministic worldview. Rhetorically cold. Implies ‘the strong’ should thrive while others fail. Matches ideological framing used throughout CCM.

I didn’t just compare the tone or structure – I tracked the timing too.

On one occasion, the personal account left a long comment about FOI requests and taxation – six minutes later, the CCM page replied directly, building off that idea and pretending to treat it like a new revelation.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s coordination – even if it’s one person talking to themselves.

Across dozens of posts, the same fingerprints showed up again and again – both on the meme page and on his personal account:

• Ellipses replacing commas or full stops
• American spelling despite being a Scottish page, likely the result of ChatGPT’s language model
• Casual tech phrases like “cat and mouse” or “over-taxation”
• Structured rants presented as off-the-cuff banter
• The use of terms like “real MVP” and “socialism gone mad” – textbook online right-libertarian rhetoric

I also ran an AI syntax similarity model  – based on phrasing structure, punctuation, sentence rhythm, and ideological positioning.

Here are the results:

Similarity Scoring – Sample Analysis

Sample	Similarity Score
Comment Set 1	94%
Comment Set 2	89%
Comment Set 3	87%
Comment Set 4	91%
Comment Set 5	93%

In comparison, random posts from ordinary Clackmannanshire residents – discussing the same issues – had an average similarity score of 32-38%.

That’s what makes this so conclusive. It’s not that their personal account and the page agreed – it’s that they wrote the same way. A way distinct from how Facebook users from Clackmannanshire in these local community groups talk.

The same length of phrase. Same use of sarcasm. Same clunky syntax choices. Same logic leaps and ideological tics.

Metadata and Forensics

I also ran every meme image through ExifTool – a metadata extraction tool used to analyse images and spot digital fingerprints.

None of them gave anything useful.

That’s because Facebook strips metadata by default. Once an image is uploaded, there’s no longer any trace of who made it, when, or with what software. No camera IDs. No editing tags. Just blank fields.

On its own, that tells you very little. In context though? It tells you someone knew enough to rely on Facebook’s closed ecosystem to wipe any potential trail.

There were also no shares outside of Facebook – no Tumblr, no Reddit, no Twitter. No blog posts or mirror pages. That’s important. It shows an intention to stay entirely within the walled garden of Facebook, where things are harder to track.

This isn’t sloppy, at least in intention. In execution? Not so much, but It’s cautious, deliberate.

Masking itself because the admin behind it is aware that this is grossly unethical.

Not some random guy throwing memes at a wall, I’m afraid.

 

Chapter 7 – Motive and Mindset

Let’s be clear about something before we start.

This wasn’t about money. There were no ads, no merch, no Patreon links, no grift. Nobody behind Clackmannanshire Council Memes was trying to make a living off it – at least not directly.

So we’re left with a different question. If it wasn’t for cash, what was it for?

Why would someone spend months building a fake community voice, generating AI content, stirring up division, and replying to themselves in comment sections using a second account?

It’s not just a prank. It’s too structured for that. Too consistent. Too cold.

This was about influence.

About feeling clever. In control. About seeing how far you could push a group of people without them noticing.

There’s a specific type of mindset behind this kind of thing. It’s not always malicious in the traditional sense.

It’s worse than that. It’s self-important. Detached. A little too comfortable pulling strings just to see what happens.

The person behind the page – whoever they are – isn’t someone who cares about Clackmannanshire. Not really. They don’t live here. They don’t answer to our electorate.

They don’t fix potholes, or balance budgets, or sit in council chambers arguing over which services to protect. They’re not in the trenches. They’re not a Clacks council tax payer. They’re in a chair, behind a screen, somewhere in Glasgow, playing games with the legitimate concerns of our community.

 

Their motive, far as I can see, was threefold:

1. To test their ability to shape local discourse using AI and psychological tactics
2. To validate their own technical and intellectual superiority
3. To erode institutional trust, not because they had a better vision – but because they didn’t believe in any vision at all
4. Attempt to undermine the legitimate attempts of left-wing parties (such as the SNP and the Greens) to govern effectively. I note that all attacks were made against these parties, and this aligns with our suspect’s presumed ideology.

It’s the classic hallmarks of accelerationist thinking. The single most dangerous political ideology there is for ordinary people trying to live out their lives in peace.

That’s the belief that systems are broken beyond repair, so the only thing left to do is push them over the edge – to mock, destabilise, and ridicule everything until folk give up altogether.

There’s no genuine civic intent in that.

Just destruction with a smirk.

The rhetoric across both the meme page and the personal account paints a picture of someone who sees themselves as above it all. Someone who thinks most people are daft, emotional, and easy to trick. They believe systems like local government are full of weak links, and that those who can manipulate those systems are naturally superior.

They’re not here to help. They’re here to play.

Take this quote, from the personal account linked to the page, in response to the first all-male class of boys at a Scottish Primary School:

“Usually when times are tough there’s a need for more men, I’m guessing it’s the subconscious of the parents that must influence the gender, it’s happened around war times etc.”

That’s not just nonsense – it’s ideology dressed up as casual commentary. Pseudoscience. Subtle misogyny.

The kind of thing you hear on fringe forums when folk start talking about Darwinism and survival of the fittest like it’s a political strategy.

Another comment, this time on how people deal with depression:

“People don’t have self accountability these days unfortunately.”

That’s the root of it. The belief that people struggling under social or economic pressure are just failing to take responsibility – that the system doesn’t need fixed, people just need to toughen up.

Same again here, on an anti-dangerous driving campaign:

“Darwinism the real mvp drivers will prevail”

If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the worldview behind this page, nothing will. It’s a mindset that celebrates the idea of winners and losers, and believes that those who suffer do so because they weren’t clever or ruthless enough to come out on top.

That kind of outlook turns local politics into a sandbox.

It makes real people into chess pieces.

It sees community trust not as something worth protecting – but as something to poke at until it crumbles.

That’s the real motivation. Not satire. Not reform. Perhaps some far-flung libertarian accelerationist ideology. Perhaps.

Control, an anti-social attitude, and the belief that being able to pull the strings is reason enough to do it.

Whether they realise it or not, what they built was a platform that made people in Clackmannanshire more cynical, more angry, and less likely to trust the very people trying to help.

That’s not just petty. It’s dangerous.

Next, we’ll look at the impact of all that – not the theory, but what actually happened when this person’s games collided with real community life.

 

Chapter 8 – Consequences and Community Impact

Let’s talk about what this little project actually did.

This wasn’t a groundbreaking project in AI, or a niche experiment in political commentary. It was a one-man  live influence campaign that reached hundreds – maybe thousands – of folk in Clackmannanshire – and it caused real harm.

I’m not saying that every angry comment online can be pinned on this page.

People were frustrated long before it popped up, and they’ve got good reason to be. Services have been cut to the bone. Communities are stretched thin. Tempers are already short.

What this page did was take that frustration and fan it into something else – something heavier, more cynical, and harder to put back in the box.

The mood shifted.

Folk started repeating the same half-jokes and slogans that had been posted by the page. They began to believe that every local failure was part of a deliberate plan to rip them off. That councillors weren’t just out of touch – they were hostile. Corrupt. Laughing at them behind closed doors.

It’s one thing to think local government is flawed. It’s another to believe it’s malicious.

That belief spread.

It turned up in comment threads. It turned up in local group chats. It turned up in the inboxes of elected officials, many of whom were doing their best with a bad hand. Some received abuse. Others were accused of outright corruption. Some were the victims of an extremely personal campaign of harassment.

I won’t speculate on whether the page directly encouraged that – there’s no proof of that, and I’m not in the business of inventing evidence. 

What I will say is this: it helped build a climate where that sort of thing felt more acceptable. Where everything was a joke, and everyone in power was fair game for something deeply unpleasant and unwarranted.

This also spilled over into community groups – the real ones, not just the ones online. Local volunteers, organisers, and staff started facing side-eye and suspicion just for being connected to anything “official”.

Folk started saying things like “you’re just defending your pals at the council” or “you’re all in on it”.

That’s the rot this sort of campaign creates.

It poisons relationships. It turns folk against each other. It builds up walls where there used to be common ground.

Once the page started talking about the 2027 election, things took another turn. It pushed the idea that tactical voting was the only solution, but never really explained what that meant. It just implied – strongly – that whoever was currently sitting on the council had to go, regardless of who came next.

No policies. No principles. Just disruption.

That’s not engagement. That’s chaos dressed up as strategy.

And it leaves a hole in the middle of the conversation – one where good-faith debate used to live.

Now, even after the page has disappeared, folk are still suspicious. Still hesitant. Still waiting for the next thing to come along and mock them for getting involved. That doesn’t vanish overnight.

Trust, once it’s gone, takes a long time to come back.

That’s the cost.

This wasn’t just about mocking a few bin policies. It was about undermining faith in local democracy, in neighbours, in the idea that anyone’s trying to do good at all. It was about turning a community inward on itself, just to see if it could be done.

It could. It was. And we need to be honest about how much it set us back.

 

Chapter 9 – Recommendations and Looking Forward

So what now?

We’ve laid it all out – the tone, the tactics, the damage. It’s a lot to take in. It would be easy to just shake our heads, write it off as a one-off, and try to forget about it.

We can’t afford to do that.

This wasn’t just a Facebook page gone too far. It was a test. A dry run. Someone tested how far they could push things before anyone pushed back. They found out. Now we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again – here or anywhere else.

Here’s what I think we need to do going forward.

1. Community Awareness

Folk need to know this sort of thing is possible. That it doesn’t take much – a bit of knowledge, a bit of tech, and the right emotional pressure points – to start twisting how we see each other. We need more public awareness about how AI tools and online manipulation actually work.

It’s not about scaremongering. It’s about giving people the tools to ask better questions. “Who wrote this?” “Why is this being posted now?” “What is this post actually asking me to feel?”

2. Local Elected Official Support

Councillors, MSPs, and local staff shouldn’t be fair game for anonymous abuse just because someone made a sarcastic post. They’re not above criticism – that’s not what I’m saying – but they’re not here to be treated like enemies either.

They need clearer support channels. Reporting routes. Moderation tools that work.

More than that, they need us to actually see the work they do – not just the memes about them.

3. Digital Neighbourhood Watch

No, I don’t mean every group needs a moderator with a clipboard and a whistle.

What I mean is this: more of us need to feel like it’s okay to say “that post feels off” or “this is starting to look coordinated”. It’s not snitching. It’s not censorship. It’s looking out for each other in digital spaces, the same way we would if we saw someone chucking bottles in the high street.

You can’t stop all the rubbish online, but you can point out where it’s starting to pile up.

4. Policy and Platform Accountability

Facebook’s systems aren’t good enough. They don’t catch this stuff. They’re not designed to. That’s something for policymakers to deal with – especially when it comes to AI content and political messaging.

This applies even if it’s one guy in a spare room. If it influences democracy, it matters.

5. Don’t Let This Be a One-Off

This report can’t just live on a shelf. It needs to be shared, discussed, and learned from.

Other communities will face this. Some already are. The tools are cheap. The skills are widespread. The intent is out there.

We need to build resilience now – while we still have time.

 

Chapter 10 – Summary

This might be one of the most interesting cases I’ve worked on in a while. I do this sort of thing in my spare time, but it’s usually far-right botnets originating in Russia or the United States.

Seeing this? Seeing its effect? I knew it had to be very very local.

Bottom line. This seems like a laugh, and like legitimate criticism.

It wasn’t. It made an active effort to bully and hound local people out of politics.

This guy wasn’t from here. Didn’t know us, and thought he could treat the people of Clackmannanshire like idiots, and capitalise on (honestly fairly righteous) anger over council tax and rent rises in order to make himself feel big.

Here’s the thing though.

You cannot be a community leader while wearing a mask, and while having no skin in the game.

Here’s the most important bit:

This will happen again. It is usually the far-right trying to get you to buy into a narrative.

That narrative could be that no institutions are trustworthy, laying the ground for their future campaigns.

It could be active harassment of women and minority groups in politics, in order to stop communities from being adequately represented.

This WILL happen again. The technology is there. What this guy did, despite his pretending – was not all that advanced. What he did is not difficult to do.

I’ve run all the evidence through my own AI model.

It has a confidence of 75% that we’ve found our guy. The only thing stopping it from being higher is the metadata scrape not working and no active confession.

Frankly? My confidence is far higher, as is that of my colleagues.

This guy is far-right or far-right adjacent. Knowing what I do about politics, extremism, and the way that cyberwarfare is conducted – I am left with very little doubt about that.

 

Very little.

 

Chapter 11 – A Wee Message for Our Suspect

KJ? KK? Whatever you call yourself?

Quit while you’re ahead. People do notice. There are others out there just as curious, thorough, and savvy as you are. Particularly at the intersection of AI and public accountability.

Also, this was sloppy. That’s how you got caught. An apology to our councillors and MSP might be in order.

Clackmannanshire stands.

 

Chapter 12 – Ethics Disclosure Statement

Before wrapping this up, there’s something I’d like to be clear about: throughout this entire investigation, I’ve adhered to strict ethical standards – as any serious OSINT researcher should.

Everything included in this report is derived from publicly accessible data.

No accounts were hacked, no passwords guessed, and no private information accessed.

At every stage, I’ve kept to Open Source Intelligence principles – information anyone could find with patience, persistence, and know-how.

It’s also important to highlight that this report doesn’t directly name or accuse any individual by their real identity.

Although I’m confident about the conclusions drawn from my investigation, it is ultimately circumstantial evidence. Naming or otherwise identifying the subject explicitly would not be appropriate or ethical in this context.

Finally, the purpose here isn’t to spark hostility or a witch-hunt. The real aim is transparency. Disinformation is a growing threat, and communities deserve to understand how these things work. If this report helps folk become more vigilant, more critical of what they see online, or more capable of spotting manipulation when it happens, then I’ve done what I set out to achieve.

That’s the goal – plain and simple.

This report, my methodology, my approach, and findings were reviewed by others in the OSINT community to ensure ethical rigour and accountability.