Why our work doesn’t stop when we hit Publish

Take yourself back to 11 March 2024. Beyoncé was top of the UK official singles chart with ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’, and we had just published a fact check showing that NHS England incorrectly claimed 3.4 million children in England were “unprotected” against measles.

We knew that publishing and promoting the fact check would raise awareness of the claim, but would it prompt NHS England to correct it and ensure accuracy in its publications? Would the fact check be seen by media editors and government ministers who had the power to stop the incorrect claim from misinforming people at a national scale? Frankly, they were a lot more likely to hear Beyoncé than us.

In situations like this, it’s vital that we intervene. In order to improve the information environment, we need to ensure that those with the greatest influence are asked, guided - and if needs be - pressured by us to do so. This is a focus of the work I do at Full Fact.

How interventions work

I grade claims that we see, and if they pass a threshold, I organise action to minimise the harm that the claim and claimant could cause. I prioritise intervening on false, misleading or unevidenced claims made by prominent people or institutions, asking them to act fast. I advise them how to make sure that: (i) the claim is no longer accessible, for example by correcting it, and (ii) people who saw/heard the original claim are informed with due prominence. I may also ask them to reflect on the incident and take action to improve the information environment.

Long story short: in this instance - with help from the Office for Statistics Regulation and an influential Select Committee member - we managed to engage NHS England directly to secure a correction to their claim, and prompt them to work out ways to avoid making similar errors in the future. NHS England helped us to secure corrections to ministerial statements that had contained the claim, and they ensured that a related government post on X got deleted. We also secured corrections or clarifications from five national newspapers, as well as Associated Press.

We’re proud of work like this, but we recognise that these sorts of breakthroughs need to be brought about much faster - and more widely - if people are to be able to trust what they are seeing and hearing more readily.

The ‘long story’ that I summarised had a happy ending, but it took months to play out. All the while, countless people were misled by the original claim. Sometimes we’re able to secure a correction within a day of a claim being spotted, but too often this isn’t the case and the effort goes on and on with no happy ending in sight. It gets really frustrating. Our forthcoming annual report will say more about how - notwithstanding several notable exceptions - government ministers, other MPs and their parties are still the most unresponsive to our requests. 11 correction requests to MPs went unanswered in the first quarter of this year alone.

To use a quote from a former Special Adviser, published in a research paper earlier this year: “The problem is that politicians and others within the political sphere in public life know that the cliché is true: the lie is half around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Evidently, we need to get our boots on faster.

This is why we’re now going to intervene earlier in the information cycle, before we’ve even published a fact check whenever possible. Furthermore, if a claimant doesn’t respond proactively to our requests, we will take action ourselves to combat bad information quickly, doing what they should have done to correct their claim. This means you might see us adding correction notes on politicians’ social media posts, for example.

We’ll also act judiciously to improve the wider information environment, like we were really pleased to do with NHS England. And we’ll pursue further opportunities to pre-emptively deliver improvements, for example by training the prominent people and institutions that we end up correcting the most.

We need to make sure that facts matter more, particularly to those whose voices and decisions have the most impact. Evolving how and when we speak up is key to achieving this.

As we start putting our boots on faster, we’ll also need your help to amplify those moments when we speak out and seek a correction on social media, making sure that facts are too loud to ignore. With your voice, maybe we can move closer towards getting heard as much as Beyoncé.