The owner of a recruitment firm has been accused of being at the centre of a so-called “doxxing” campaign against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), anti-racism activists and business executives who recruit black, Asian and minority ethnic workers.
Tom Watson, from Worcester, is alleged to be behind an X account calling itself “Big Time Charlie”, which was deactivated shortly after he was named by the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
The account had almost 50,000 followers and had become increasingly prominent in recent weeks as RNLI staff found themselves being harassed and attacked online as far-right activists targeted them over their involvement in rescuing people trying to cross the Channel in small boats.
The account, which has a history of racist comments, appears to have been using AI to scrape data from LinkedIn and other sites to build a so-called Traitorbase. The Big Time Charlie account was removed almost immediately after Hope Not Hate alleged that Watson was behind it, and after the Guardian approached him for comment.
Like the posts on Watson’s LinkedIn account, the X account has frequently praised the hard-right MP Rupert Lowe. It also claimed to have donated £2,500 to Lowe’s Restore Britain party and joined its “Cromwell Club” for those activists who pay a certain level of donation.
Targets of doxxing by the Big Time Charlie account told the Guardian of the impact.
They included Chantelle Lunt, a Green party councillor in Merseyside who has already been targeted by the far right, and who made a report to the police after details about her were published online by the account.
She said: “Someone told me that I had been doxxed and when I went to look I saw that details about me appeared to be on a spreadsheet which included reference to other people who were involved in Stand Up to Racism.”
“The climate at the moment is horrendous and I’m no stranger to people targeting me and my family, but there’s a big concern when this information is actively put out there. You can see people engaging with it and actively encouraging each other.”
A spokesperson for a charity that was targeted told the Guardian: “This is another example of a cynical attempt to spread misinformation that has unfortunately gone unchecked on social media platforms.”
“This is an attempt to sow discord and division among communities and prevent organisations trying to help the most vulnerable communities in this country from operating at their full potential.”
“Time spent combating misinformation and bigotry is a distraction from these organisations’ programme work here at home, which actually makes a difference in the ordinary lives of people in the UK. Social media companies, the media and politicians have a responsibility to clamp down on misinformation and the division it causes.”
A number of businesses, big and small, were also doxxed on the account, which posted the photographs and names of executives who were said to have been involved in hiring minority ethnic staff.
A businessperson who was also targeted described their doxxing by the account as “bizarre”.
“Thankfully it doesn’t seem to have led to any problems, but it’s not something that you expect to have to contend with. It’s a pretty unpleasant thing to do, especially if it’s someone who is involved in their own business,” they added.
Watson divides his time between the UK and US and founded the recruitment firm Futura Energy Group, which describes itself as “a specialist recruitment and build-with talent partner for companies operating across AI”.
Archived online records show that the Big Time Charlie account originally bore the name Tom Watson, while a range of other evidence links him to it.
That included regular references by the account to being in Puerto Rico, where Futura is based according to its LinkedIn account, and references to working in recruitment for technical roles.
The Big Time Charlie account posted on 20 July that they were in Zurich and shared a photo taken in the grounds of the Vitznauerhof hotel. Two days later, Watson posted on his LinkedIn profile that he was in Switzerland and shared another image taken from the Vitznauerhof hotel.
Watson was approached for comment.
