In U.K. Vote, Online Disinformation Is the New Normal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If anything social media should be praised for offering an alternative that actually connects with so many people.
My memory of that time is that the nationalists were making a lot of claims during the campaign that they'd not laid any groundwork for, and which didn't hold water. Mostly of the form "after leaving the UK we'll still have access to X" or "Y won't change" but they hadn't actually asked anyone in the British government, so there was a lot of public back and forth over that, in particular, what it'd mean for Scotland to keep using the pound. Because they talked about future hypotheticals it is hard to say whether they were 'debunked' or not.
One claim I remember very clearly was that post-independence Scotland would be able to keep funding its much higher levels of government spending because of high oil prices. The media did question this claim, and it turned out rightly so: oil prices collapsed just months after the vote and never recovered rendering the SNP's financial plans irrelevant. Independence would certainly have meant rapid and dire cuts in spending.
However nothing I saw would have risen to the level of "disinformation", whatever that means. It was just people disagreeing on the relative merits and probabilities of things.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/
https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/
Fully sourced and referenced.
Stu Campbell isn't everyone's cuppa, but his writings on the shite, filth and corruption that went on during the Scottish Indyref in 2014 are reasonably bulletproof.
I'll happily admit that the one thing the SNP messed up on was the currency question and that they should have had the balls to say they'd launch their own currency and central bank, or create a Scottish Pound tied to the UK pound (at least for the first few years - and is not unusual, there are many dollar currencies tied to the value of the US$).
I can also answer questions on the balance of media exposure between pro-Union parties and the Yes parties (SNP and the Scottish Greens). Professor John Robertson (an academic who's work was to analyse media bias all around the world) of the West of Scotland University performed an analysis of this and when he presented his findings there were calls for him to be fired from his job - by BBC executives.
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc...
https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/
http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/B...
If Campbell wanted to criticise bad electioneering he would need to get his own house in order first. I don't think re-litigating the old campaign is necessarily a good use of time but the first page of his Blue Book has several exceptionally dodgy claims in it, really, claims I'd consider to both completely false and some are extremely offensive. How can he criticise his opponents for relying on "scare stories" when his own positions are on such thin ice?
e.g.
the only reason terrorists might attack us is because we’re part of the UK.
It's staggering to me nationalists really made this argument. Did Campbell miss the terrorists killing people in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia and many other places that aren't the UK?
This claim can only be rooted in delusional racism and hatred of the English, to believe that somehow Scotland wouldn't have the same problems as everywhere else in the world or that terrorism is a specifically English problem.
Many of the other claims don't make sense (e.g. "We don’t affect the outcome of UK elections"), are self contradictory (e.g. "Scotland is a country" but the point of the campaign is to make Scotland a country), or have been proven wrong by subsequent events (e.g. the oil wealth related claims). They're very far from bulletproof and remind me of why I soured on the SNP's campaign despite being a natural supporter of devolution and local government. There certainly are good arguments for Scottish independence, but the material in the Blue Book is a good example of mendacious and manipulative campaigning.
This inflates journalist egos, and leaves them more open to manipulation. They want to think they are important, not the publication. They have a personal "brand". There's always been some of this, but that "brand" was usually well earned, after decades of coverage, and used in a very humble way. When word came of how John Simpson "liberated Kabul", he was rightly denigrated. Now in John's defense it was a warzone, and people can speak too quickly.
"Celebrity" journalists, with personal following thanks to things like twitter, get "scoops" from "unnamed sources" which turn out to be lies, and spread them far faster than the truth can emerge.
This is the second part of the problem - speed. 20 years ago, news was gathered by journalists, and packaged into a well researched piece for the news bulletin at 6pm or 9pm or whenever. 24 hour news started to erode this, where speed was more important than accuracy, but things like Twitter completely destroyed it. It's no longer important to be right, it's important to be first.
News organisation, and the BBC specifically, had a duty to resist the noise of "social" media, and instead concentrate on being accurate. Channel 4 news still does this, but the BBC doesn't. Laura can do immense damage by errantly tweeting that a labour activist had got into a fight with the health secretary. Doesn't matter if they retract it later.
The final problem is the lack of challenging from presenters. Politicians can lie to millions of people and are completely unchallenged. There's a time for that - it's a "party political broadcast". In the news, if someone comes out with a lie, they need to be immediately told that's a lie, and not allowed to continue. If they keep lying, they should not be given any airtime at all.
And this stuff about lack of pushback is just in people’s heads - there’s massive pushback all the time. From this morning, for example.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/conservative-robert-b...
> The story, and the prime minister's weird and wooden response to it, provided the perfect chance for Labour to punch at one of the Conservatives' vulnerabilities
...designed purely to game search for the word "punch" after she publicly, falsely accused protestors of punching an advisor to Matt Hancock because senior Tories told her to. And even when provided with video evidence that this never happened, she wrote "doesn’t look like punch thrown" [1] rather than the true, factual sentence "no punch was thrown".
[1] https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1204091610843226112
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-punch-...
I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall.
However, what I would much prefer to see is much more moderate coverage of the different political parties. However, that would require that the political parties make moderate claims about each other, rather than just painting the other parties as the devil incarnate.
At the moment, media coverage of UK politics is dominated by outrage. I get it, outrage sells news stories to a very large proportion of the population. It puts me off, and makes me distrust the news. I'd like to see more "We think this policy would be best because..." and less "OMG the other party are killing babies as we speak." Social media does not achieve this.
This is a very “Judgement of Soloman” type stance to take, as it ignores the merit of the complaint each side is making.
I'm getting very little actual real reasonable information about what the politicians will actually want to do. The truth is, good things will happen and bad things will happen in the country. No political party can prevent that. They might be able to make a very small change, but that's it. They are all trying to make improvements, and they have different ideas on how to do that. Which one is right? Well, if we knew that, the parties would agree on it and argue about something else.
LSE study [1]:
> The results of this study show that Jeremy Corbyn was represented unfairly by the British press through a process of vilification that went well beyond the normal limits of fair debate and disagreement in a democracy. Corbyn was often denied his own voice in the reporting on him and sources that were anti-Corbyn tended to outweigh those that support him and his positions. He was also systematically treated with scorn and ridicule in both the broadsheet and tabloid press in a way that no other political leader is or has been. Even more problematic, the British press has repeatedly associated Corbyn with terrorism and positioned him as a friend of the enemies of the UK. The result has been a failure to give the newspaper reading public a fair opportunity to form their own judgements about the leader of the country’s main opposition.
Loughborough University study, as reported by Media Reform UK [2]:
> Research published by Loughborough University has shown that during the first two weeks of the campaign, Labour attracted by far the most negative coverage in the national press of all the major parties. The Conservatives on the other hand, unequivocally got the most favourable coverage. We might expect that, given that most national newspapers (including the three largest titles across both print and online) have endorsed the Conservatives during successive recent elections.
Media Reform UK study on claims of anti-semitism in the Labour party [3]:
> Looking at the overall figures in absolute terms, The Guardian and BBC television recorded the two highest number of inaccuracies (8 and 6 respectively), followed closely by The Sun(5). Proportionate to the volume of coverage, BBC television still featured the highest rate of inaccurate reporting and this position holds when incidences of misleading coverage are included.
[1] http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
[2] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/featured/wheres-the-impartial...
[3] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/La...
I once felt that this was true in the UK, particularly around the BBC. To some extent, there is still a bit of truth in it. But I don't think it would be possible to hold that view honestly any more after the current election campaign, and to do so would require willingly turning a blind eye to some particularly egregious behaviour.
It's not as simple as a blatant "bias", either. The UK's tabloid press has always been pretty sketchy in this regard, and the decline of the Telegraph, which is now a blatant organ of the Conservative party, is astonishing. The current thing that's happening is more complex – there's a weird mix of credulous establishmentarianism and an inflexible media culture that's making it hard to deal with the rapid change in the methods by which information is spread. I have no idea how to deal with this, but it's actually sort of frightening to watch how much it's deteriorated in even the past few weeks.
However, I will argue that this is partly/mostly because the main thing the political parties are feeding the media is negative messages. I'd like to see some constructive messages instead.
Even the political leaflets put into my letterbox are giving negative messages - "Anything but Boris", "I am the only candidate who can get rid of the Tories", "A vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Corbyn", "Don't let Labour destroy our region", etc. What I wanted to see was "We recognise this particular problem (for example, underfunded NHS), and we think the way to solve it is to take this particular action. We know this will have this other knock-on effect, but we believe this is the best choice."
The other thing I see in the political leaflets is of course empty promises. I think all of the parties have promised to save the NHS. None of them really say how, or why their method is better than the other parties' methods.
It's just a load of mudslinging at this point. I'd seriously vote for a candidate who just said "You know, our country is pretty nicely tuned at the moment. We could spend a bit more on this, or a bit less, depending on your political philosophy. But I plan to stop changing everything all the time." As it is, I might be spoiling my ballot. I'm in a safe seat anyway.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
All the newspapers in the screenshot are notoriously right wing, as is every other paper that gets mentioned, apart from the Guardian. I guess that one was included to make the biased sample seem less obvious, and since they happen to be quite neutral on Corbyn, so they don't offset the stats too much.
This study is the equivalent of only looking at "Fox News" and other similar news broadcasts, and drawing the conclusion that American media as a whole is very conservative and supportive of Trump.
I'd take the opposite interpretation. It probably says even more about bias that those are the sources available to choose from (though I'd also say the Mirror is left wing, the Guardian sort of centrist and who knows what's going on with the Independent though in further reduction of the free media pool they've just been bought by a right winger).
I wouldn't call it sampling bias if it reflects the actual existing reality, those are the media sources available (except in Scotland and NI) and they're biased against the opposition.
Although there are overall probably more left wing than right wing papers among the small ones (like the Daily/Morning Star, as you mentioned), there do seem to be more conservatives newspapers among the big names.
That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given the situation is the opposite when it comes to non-print media. I struggle to think of a news channel which is obviously conservative. I definitely wouldn't call BBC that, and others like Channel 4 are as openly left-wing.
As someone who predominantly follows television and online news, I haven't personally noticed any conservative bias in the available options, and even a slight under-representation if anything.
Also, more of the best-selling papers are right-wing than left, so it's natural there will be more.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/0...
Tories wanting to sell the NHS is fake news. It’s fear-mongering. Labour already sold the NHS essentially, allowing provisions of services by private companies. The Tories haven’t made any cuts to the NHS while in power.
So why do labour and their supporters keep touting rubbish?
As a Brit I've also found the rhetoric around the NHS to be depressing. People talk like one of the major parties has a manifesto pledge to shut it down, but there's no such discussion anywhere. One major party spends much of its time attacking policies the other doesn't actually have. This doesn't seem right.
I don't know who's behind it, but it's concerning.
The latest coordinated disinformation was around a photo from a hospital in Leeds where a 4 year old child had to lie on the floor of the accident and emergency department because no beds were available (primarily due to cuts to services from the incumbent government plus winter demand and general wider demand).
The health secretary yesterday visited a hospital to respond to the incident and the political editor of the BBC (the state broadcaster) tweeted a story provided to her by government sources that a Labour (main opposition party) activist had punched a Conservative (government) staff member at the protest. The story was picked up by the political editor of ITV and all the right-wing papers (Sun, Mail, Express) picked up and amplified the story including via push notifications within the space of a couple of hours.
Video then emerged showing that the activist in question had his back turned to the individual he was reported to have "punched" and the staffer had walked into the man's arm.
However there has been no exposure as to who these government sources were who spread a lie in order to distract from the original story about the 4 year old. The disinformation isn't online, or isn't solely online, it's coming from government departments and it is being spread by theoretically impartial media sources such as ITV and BBC. This is an election which has seen at least 4 violent assaults on opposition party members - we're through the looking glass now.
The risk I suppose is you need to avoid something like Singapore's Fake News laws where the government decides what is true.
The other change I think would be positive is replacing "unnamed sources" with a disclaimer, for example "people who may or may not exist or be telling the truth". It's important to be able to use anonymous sources but it should be made clearer to readers that anonymity has an associated trustworthiness cost.
Also, appears there's lots of dead cats being thrown around. I often find myself wondering how we have got to a place that feels so nuts. Nobody is talking to other people with whom they disagree, they are just screaming at them.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-jou...
For him to raise the concerns he has shows that there is something seriously wrong.
There have been no such cuts. This is a frequently made claim but it isn't true.
Here's a graph of the budget of the Department of Health:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/BA1A/production/...
As you can see it only ever goes up. This is in "real terms" i.e. with inflation taken into account.
Usually activists who make this claim and are put under a bit of questioning pressure will admit that by "cut" they mean the budget was increased less fast than they believe necessary, which isn't the same thing.
What is true is that the NHS has been severely underfunded (if they want to continue to provide the same services) and that services have been cut as a result. https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/
It may feel like there's less, because there's more people now, so the increase in services is offset by the increase in population. But that's also not a cut.
There's a fundamental design issue with any system that combines free healthcare with free movement. Neither party is interested in changing this situation, but Labour don't even pretend to try - they have adopted policies at their conference of essentially eliminating all immigration controls. It's hard to imagine what kind of budget a nationalised health service would require given no constraints on served population. Effectively it requires an infinite budget.
Health spending in every country has increased per capita (inflation adjusted), in the UK it has too. But in the UK, for 40 years, been way under that of countries like France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and of course the U.S. The rate of increase hasn't increased either.
This isn't an issue of (typically working age) immigration - indeed that offsets the problem. It's an issue of an increasingly older population costing more per head. In the UK there's also an issue that people stay in hospital too long because of a failure in social care.
In other words, a search for "Labour party" was showing https://www.costofcorbyn.com/ (a Tory-funded site) as the first result - i.e. the first ad.
They also registered https://www.labourmanifesto.co.uk/ and spread it around the day before Labour's manifesto launch.
And let's not forget them also changing one of their Twitter accounts to look like an independent 'fact checking' group during the first TV debate: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/19/tories-twee...
It is a worrying trend, and it's not just the Conservatives doing this sort of thing. It's odd to see just how many pro-Labour accounts reply to political journalist's tweets within mere seconds. Almost like bots are being used...
FWIW, spending isn't always massively different. In 2015 it was £15.6m for the Tories vs £12.1m for Labour (https://www.prweek.com/article/1380236/uk-general-election-s...) - not a huge difference.
I've had 6 weeks of adverts aimed at a target tory/labour seat I live very close to in the North West, all from 3rd parties. The first 5 weeks it was mainly unknown groups like "Working for UK" and "Campaign Against Corbyn", all personal attack adverts on Corbyn (leader of the labour party), and when I dig deep I find the people behind these new companies (often set up in the last month or two) are people like a Conservative Councillor in London, or an Ex Conservative MP from Surrey.
In the last week there have been some "tactical voting" adverts from more establish groups (peoples vote etc)
I guess this is a way for the conservatives to get around spending limits, I guess like U.S. "Super Pacs"
The Super Pacs is a good example - it does sound like the Tories are (worryingly) going down this route.
Labour (incumbent) have mostly been quiet in this HEAVILY remain-voting area, with a leaflet or two highlighting a "People's Vote". The LibDems have parachuted in a Tory defector, and have been absolutely going all out with the campaigning around "Revoke Brexit".
The Conservatives have been quietly content to stay out of the way and watch the non-Leave vote split between the former two.
Labour had no chance this year due to a shift in demographics, not to mention the fall in Labour vote share
Even if the source of the most recent dump has ulterior motives, there's no reason to doubt the NHS implications in particular.
I understand the article is mostly focused on Johnson, so I guess in order to appear balanced they had to throw the line about Corbyn in there, but it's interesting they don't have such need for a counter narrative when writing article 1459 smearing Corbyn.
For instance, take the knife attack mentioned in the article, which was carried out by a convicted terrorist who'd been released from prison. Prominent Labour MP* Yvette Cooper blamed the Tories for his release in a popular viral Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/YvetteCooperMP/status/120076129489225728... Her claims are lies. She claims that the new arrangements which replaced Labour's IPPs failed, but they didn't apply here - he was sentenced under the old rules which still had IPPs rather than their replacements. She claimed that the Appeal Court said that his release should be left to the Parole Board and blamed the Tories for the fact that it wasn't. They didn't say that, and it was a law passed by her party in 2008 which meant the Parole Board had no say. She implied the Tory replacement for IPPs allowed serious criminals to be released early without parole board assessment, when in reality it reinstated the parole board involvment Labour had removed. There's a good summary here which backs up all of these facts: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2019/11/30/10-thing-you-shoul...
So naturally, some Tories went after those claims - and the legal blogger who wrote the summary I've linked above promptly attacked their debunkings and not the original Labour claims, and that went viral too: https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/12008087678200463... In fact, that blog post above was written to specifically back up his claim that the Tories were liars. (He's technically right - that tweet is a little misleading, since the courts could avoid automatic release by imposing the IPP sentence that Yvette Cooper had falsely claimed the Tories had stopped them imposing - but it's pedantry. The claim being debunked was about what the Parole Board could have done after that sentence was handed down. That omission mostly just means the Labour claims were even more false than suggested.)
It gets better. Tory PM Boris Johnson wrote a 16-tweet thread so pedantically accurate and in line with his own claims that he couldn't discredit it as inaccurate anymore - so instead he accused Boris of stealing that blogpost which he'd written to debunk the Tory lies, implying this made the Tories the dishonest ones falsely claiming those facts supported their side: https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/12010764392500879... (Note he never technically said Boris was lying, just that it was "weapons grade shithousery"). He even used the fact that they both debunked that false claim about the Appeal Court - one which Yvette Cooper had made but the Tory debunkings had not - to back up this argument. Along with the fact they both linked to literally first answer you find when searching for information on parole for extended sentences. It turns out that thanks to inattentiveness and partisanship, you can not only convince people of the exact opposite of what your own evidence shows without technically lying, you can make them believe that the people who don't believe that are the ones who've been suckered.
Meanwhile, the BBC's coverage was vague he-said she-said stuff which didn't check anything, and the Guardian was (and still is) repeating the debunked claims. (I think they did eventually write an explainer which debunked most of the claims whilst carefully avoiding tying them to any party, but I can't find it lately.) Also, the more recent BBC headlines all insist that Boris Johnson is the one who politicised this act of terrorism.
* Technically there are no MPs since Parliament is dissolved for the election, but that's pedantry.
His main point was that if the Tories have been in power for 11 years and haven't even brought up changing the law on early release it's disengenuous for them to argue that it's Labor's fault. If they had cared about the issue, they would have done something about it, goes his argument. You don't seem to address this.
He further argues that Johnson's comments plagiarized his. If he wrote comments that the Tories wanted to publicize, wouldn't that contradict your assertion he never criticizes labor? Furthermore, you don't seem to address the plagiarism issue; if Johnson plagiarized the tweets it doesn't matter how well written they were.
You're right, and some back-and-forth between MPs liberally interpreting the truth, at least until caught out, has always been part of the campaign. The lies about the tories planning to recruit 50,000 new nurses for example, normally ou'd see them, they would be challenged, and then they would correct it in future interviews.
This isn't happening this time. Parties - mainly the tories - are doubling down on their lies, and ignoring anyone saying "that's wrong".
But even that is nothing compared to the fakeness that's been peddled. This again isn't new - lies about the Lisbon Treaty have been around for over a decade and still spread like wildfire online. The latest about the boy on the floor is full Orwell.
Informing people about what their government is planning in trade talks is "foreign interference", but pressuring that government to compromise healthcare so they can profit from it is... what?