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LONDON — London Mayor Sadiq Khan is working with the Foreign Office and the Square Mile to counter a rise in “online disinformation” about the British capital and allay the concerns of spooked investors.
“The foreign secretary and I've discussed this,” Khan told POLITICO as he kicked off a week-long trade mission to Singapore and Japan with the launch of a £7 million counter-disinformation campaign.
International firms and diplomats are “reporting back to our diplomatic corps issues around news they've seen on social media,” Khan said.
Embassy officials are saying businesses are nervous about investing in the capital, tourists are thinking twice about visiting and parents are wary about sending their children to study there because of disinformation they’ve seen about the city online, Khan said.
London’s mayor visited the Foreign Office in March alongside Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley to discuss the issue and has spoken to ambassadors and high commissioners from across the globe.
The anti-London rhetoric focuses on three issues, Khan said.
“Interestingly enough, one is in relation to concerns around crime. Second, in relation to London being quote unquote ‘taken over by immigrants’ and thirdly, it's in relation to London having some sort of Sharia law,” the mayor said in a phone interview on Monday, pointing to a religious dispute settlement system that isn't legally binding in the U.K.
U.S. President Donald Trump told the U.N. General Assembly in New York that London wants “to go to Sharia law” ahead of his second state visit last September. Khan called the president’s statement “ridiculous nonsense” at the time.
“If you're a nativist, if you're somebody who is a state-backed actor, whether it's Russia or China, or a MAGA influencer, you hate the fact we're liberal, progressive, multicultural, and successful,” Khan said in the interview from Singapore, where he unveiled a 203 foot digital billboard promoting London at the Suntec Singapore convention center.
London is pushing back in “a coordinated, one team endeavor: central government, regional government, local government, private sector, public sector working together, playing tag to talk up our great city,” Khan said.
Susan Langley — the leader of the City of London Corporation, the governing body that runs the capital’s financial district — has joined Khan in Japan this week to help shift the narrative. Langley is “coordinating on tackling disinformation on London” alongside Khan, said a spokesperson for the City of London Corporation.
If a distorted view of the capital is broadcast across the world “it is an economic issue,” Langley told large corporate investors and diplomats — including those from Oman, Qatar and Bahrain — during a black-tie Mansion House dinner early this month. London is one of the safest cities in the world, she said. “We cannot let others write our story.”
As Khan tours Asia with a trade mission of more than 30 London firms — including transcription app Trint, music collaboration software firm Bonza Music and identity verification platform Sumsub — he is planning to “bust those myths and to rebut some of these falsehoods about our city.”
He is touting new police data showing that mobile phone thefts have nearly halved in central London, the rate of homicides per capita fell to the lowest rate in London's history in 2025 and that teen homicides are the lowest this century.
“I'm not saying London is perfect. We do have challenges we're responding to,” Khan said, but he points to the fact that the city won the 2026 World City Prize — recognizing outstanding achievement in urban development and strategic leadership — in March, that something is going right.
The number of online posts documenting false narratives about London has skyrocketed from 900 in 2008 to more than 258,000 in 2024, alongside a rise in suspicious accounts, according to a City Hall analysis, citing research at King’s College London.
The analysis “has shown a combination of bot farms spreading this stuff, but also people as far away as Vietnam, Japan, Sri Lanka, basically setting up these industries to spread lies about London,” Khan said, pointing out that people are making money spreading falsehoods.
“The way the algorithms for many of these social media companies work is they amplify, monetize, and reward negativity, division, and poison. I call it the division dividend,” Khan said, adding that he’s speaking with social media companies and “demanding they do much more” to fight the spread of disinformation.
“People with an ulterior motive spreading misinformation, disinformation, and lies,” Khan said. “One thing that does annoy me is when you get British politicians, British commentators unpatriotically repeating some of these lies about London.”
Read the full article at Politico Europe →
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