Leaked NHS documents presented by Corbyn are linked to Russian hackers

The leaked classified documents used by Jeremy Corbyn as evidence the Conservatives would put the NHS “on the table” in US trade talks, have been linked to a Russian disinformation operation on Reddit.

Reddit has announced it banned 61 accounts following an investigation of suspect activity, which bore similarities to Russian hacking operations uncovered by Facebook earlier this year.

Information from the investigation into the “Secondary Infektion” campaign on Facebook was used to identify suspect accounts on Reddit.

“We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it, and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.”

The company said in a statement: “We were recently made aware of a post on Reddit that included leaked documents from the UK.”

The 451-page dossier is believed to has been posted to Reddit by a user named “gregoratior” back in October and then reposted by a second account.

Pockets of accounts had worked together to “upvote” the posts using vote manipulation to make them more visible to users of the platform, it added.

These accounts had posted in different regional subreddits and in several different languages.

“As we have done with previous influence operations, we will also preserve these accounts for a time, so that researchers and the public can scrutinise them to see for themselves how these accounts operated,” Reddit said.

Speaking at a news conference last month, Corbyn presented the documents claiming that they “leave Boris Johnson’s denials [that the NHS would be for sale] in absolute tatters” and touting them as “evidence that, under Boris Johnson, the NHS is on the table and will be up for sale”.

Labour has refused to discuss how the party obtained the leaked documents or ties to the Russian campaign.

There are currently no suggestions the documents were false or doctored in any way.

The Reddit post, titled “Official-sensitive: Great Britain is practically standing on her knees working on a trade agreement with the US”, were only seen by a handful of users before Corbyn came forward with them.

“I suspect that this publication will make some noise, so that’s why you probably don’t have much time to look through the internal secret documents that contain specific details of the upcoming FTA between the UK and the US,” the Reddit user wrote.

“Three years, six bilateral meetings of the UK-US Trade and Investment Working Group (TIWG), 12 chapter-level discussions, 451 pages of reports. A detailed analysis and processing of such an amount of material will require a lot of time, knowledge and definitely more than one pair of eyes, so I’m dumping this here.”

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