General election: Were leaked NHS trade documents posted online by Russian trolls?

Fears of foreign interference in a critical election have once again been raised after a report suggested Russians were behind leaked documents appearing to show a Tory plot to sell off the NHS in a post-Brexit US trade deal.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn unveiled the 451-page leak at a press conference last week, but they were first published pseudonymously online over a month ago across various social media platforms. A Reddit user, named Gregoriator, posted them to a politics forum but they went almost entirely unnoticed.

A Twitter user of the same name then shared the cache of documents with various journalists and members of the Labour Party, however they once again received little attention.

These methods of dissemination are similar to those used by a Russian operation called Secondary Infektion, according to the report by social-media research firm Graphika.

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, said there was not enough data to provide conclusive proof that it was Russian actors who first leaked the memos, but said the correlation was “too close to be simply a coincidence”.

The consultancy firm also pointed to grammatical errors made by Gregoriator that apparently matched those made by Secondary Infektion in previous campaigns. The group, first uncovered by the Atlantic Council in June, used a network of accounts across dozens of social media platforms to spread disinformation online to “attack western interests”.

Russian social media interference in foreign affairs is nothing new, with the notorious troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency blamed for aggressive efforts to support Donald Trump during his 2016 election campaign. Pro-Leave propaganda was also spread by Russian-linked accounts during the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU.

Senior Tory Bob Seely, who is seeking re-election as the MP for the Isle of Wight, said the latest report raises the question of whether the Labour leader has become “an unwitting tool of a Russian disinformation campaign”.

Mr Corbyn dismissed this idea as a “conspiracy theory” and said that no one had challenged the veracity of the documents. The Independent contacted the owner of the Gregoriator account for comment on the report but received no response.

Graphika’s report does not call into question the authenticity of the documents, which Labour claims contradict Boris Johnson’s denial that the NHS is part of negotiations with the US.

Mr Corbyn described the election on 12 December as a “fight for the survival of our National Health Service” and said a Conservative victory could see parts of the public health service sold off to private US companies.

“Donald Trump himself said everything is on the table, including our National Health Service,” he said.

In a letter to the US president, who arrived in the UK on Tuesday for a Nato summit, the Labour leader said any future UK-US trade agreement regarding the NHS and other public services was of “profound concern to the British public”.