Many analysts and observers have known this from the lead up to the 2019 election but now researchers have put all the evidence together and their suspicions have been validated. In what is a very concerning conclusion the present government were able to attain an 80 seat majority using lies and disinformation. Effectively the UK public was asked to vote on what is now identified as a mass of untruths and manipulation.
The report focused specifically upon:
Online advertising
Television news
Case Study
The following key outcomes were discovered:
- The extent of false or misleading advertising by the Conservative Party was seven times that of Labour over the course of the campaign.
- False online advertising was heavily skewed towards the final week of the campaign and reinforced by an unprecedented number of non-party campaigners advertising on Facebook.
- Both Google and Facebook failed to remove ads long after their claims had been comprehensively debunked by fact checking organisations.
- Several ads not removed by Google directed users to the website ‘labourmanifesto.co.uk’ run by the Conservative Party.
- Even when ads were removed by Google, they had already run for an average of 7 days with a potential reach of millions.
- False and misleading claims by the Conservative Party were significantly amplified by the mainstream press but also challenged – to some extent – by television news.
- Whilst television news journalists did question the veracity of some Tory claims, there was often a significant time lag from when they were first reported.
- The framing of the fake news issue on television obscured the vastly disproportionate role of the Conservative Party in producing and disseminating falsehoods.
The report’s main author summarises the findings here:
Overall, the evidence collected strongly suggests that disinformation was an endemic feature of the Conservative party campaign.
Although it does not make comfortable reading for the Labour Party either, the extent and frequency of misleading online ads by Labour were a fraction in comparison with the Tories.
Over the course of the campaign, the Conservatives ran a total of 167 adverts across Facebook and Google which were either subsequently removed due to breach of the platform’s advertising policies and/or featured misleading or inaccurate claims as debunked by Full Fact.
These ads ran for a cumulative total of 1,038 days which is the closest proxy measure for exposure and reach (both Facebook and Google only provide indicative ranges for the number of impressions generated by each ad).
The equivalent figure for Labour was 139 (which included 78 days worth of ads run by Welsh Labour removed by Google due to breach of policies).
For a summarised version of the report and the report itself.
The next time someone tells us we live in a democracy just share this with them and ask them to explain how that is.
Jason Cridland
PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH
