Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a £7m international tourism and investment campaign aimed at promoting London abroad while countering what City Hall describes as coordinated disinformation networks spreading false narratives about crime and safety in the capital, including content originating from extremist groups and state actors.
The campaign, delivered by the Mayor's growth agency London & Partners, will target audiences across Europe, the US and Asia from September, promoting London's culture, heritage and investment credentials. It was announced during a four-day trade mission to Singapore and Tokyo, where Khan unveiled a digital billboard at Suntec Singapore.
The announcement was accompanied by new research examining the scale of disinformation targeting London on social media, with particular focus on Asian markets. The research found that Japanese and Chinese-language accounts have been mirroring and translating English-language anti-Islam and anti-immigrant content using a templated format, with some months seeing more than 15,000 posts on X in Japanese claiming the capital is "lawless" and under "Islamic governance."
City Hall said the pattern involves multiple accounts posting near-identical content within short timeframes to drive engagement-based revenue. Examples cited included a US Embassy security alert being systematically misrepresented as evidence that "London has fallen," and AI-generated imagery used to inflate attendance claims for the Unite The Kingdom rally. The research also flagged verified X accounts posing as news outlets to amplify false claims for engagement.
This builds on earlier GLA research which found hostile narratives portraying London as dangerous or in decline had increased by 150 to 200 per cent over two years. This included a Vietnam-based Facebook network of at least 42 pages with a combined following of around 1.25 million, identified as using repeated AI-generated imagery. The Mayor's office said it had also identified involvement from extreme right-wing networks, pro-Kremlin and pro-Beijing groups, MAGA-aligned accounts, and content farms based in Sri Lanka and Nigeria.
Khan said disinformation about London had become "a money-making industry pushing lies about our capital and preying on people's fears around the world," and that the new campaign was intended to "fight back on a global scale."
The release notes that Khan has previously written to major social media companies asking them to identify and remove coordinated fake networks, and has met with British ambassadors and high commissioners to discuss the international impact of misinformation about crime levels in London, which City Hall states has the lowest homicide rate per capita since records began, and a lower rate than other UK cities.
Ros Morgan of the Heart of London Business Alliance, representing more than 500 businesses, said social media was "increasingly being used as a platform to amplify negative and often false narratives" and that some politicians and commentators were "fuelling those perceptions rather than championing" the city.
Tourism contributes more than £41bn annually to London's economy and accounts for over a quarter of UK tourism jobs, according to the release.
