Full Fact doesn't just check claims from politicians - we check lots of false claims about them too
Full Fact might be known for its work scrutinising claims from politicians. What’s perhaps less well-known is that an important part of our online fact checking is also addressing false claims about politicians that might otherwise misinform voters. So what does this work look like, why is it facing an uncertain future, and what needs to be done next to protect the public from this type of bad information?
So far this year, we’ve published fact checks on 17 false and misleading claims about politicians, which used a range of methods to mislead. For example, we’ve seen:
- Incorrect posts on social media, for example about MPs’ winding-up payment periods. Some of these have been viewed tens of thousands of times—like this claim that MPs are getting a 28% pay rise (it’s actually 2.8%).
- Fake posts imitating politicians, like the ones that may have misled people into thinking that Rupert Lowe (then a Reform UK MP) challenged the Deputy Prime Minister to “remove teaching any sign language in the UK” (he didn’t).
- Edited photos such as this photo of Labour MP Nadia Whittome with a “rapists welcome” placard (it was altered—the original image said “refugees welcome”).
- Faked screenshots of news articles, like one supposedly reporting that Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar MSP had described Billy Connolly as “outdated, vulgar and offensive” (there’s no evidence he ever made such comments).
- Likely AI-generated photos, audio and videos, such as an edited Daily Mail cover including an image of the Prime Minister and Jimmy Savile together, a video where the PM appeared to say that some claims against Savile “felt slightly frivolous”, and another where he appeared to take off his suit jacket alongside other European leaders in solidarity with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (While it’s sometimes hard to be certain how an image or video was created, we found none of those examples were genuine and all were likely to have been created using AI.)
We were able to identify, review and rate these claims—where they were made on Facebook, Instagram or Threads—as part of Meta’s Third-Party Fact Checking programme. Meta currently directs users in the UK and elsewhere outside the United States to fact checking articles about rated content, helping to limit the harm they could otherwise cause.
We were also able to use fact checks published as part of the Third-Party Fact Checking programme to correct claims elsewhere. Earlier this month, for example, the Telegraph corrected an article which previously incorrectly claimed that a group of MPs and peers had asked Sir Keir Starmer to fund the construction of an airport in Pakistan.
Worryingly, the long-term future of Meta’s Third-Party Fact Checking programme in the UK remains uncertain, after Meta announced an end to the programme in January in the US. Misinformation and disinformation about politicians—and the harms associated with it—can only be expected to increase exponentially unless Meta re-commits to Third-Party Fact Checking globally.
In our forthcoming annual report we’ll set out how the government needs to act, both by demanding clarity from platforms about how they’ll collaborate with fact checkers, and by establishing legislative protections for the British public from harmful misinformation and disinformation. For the sake of democracy and wider society, we really hope that politicians will work with us.
We also hope to work further with you too. Please sign up to our newsletter to get our latest fact checks in your inbox, and contact us if you see something else that you think we should look into. Our toolkit provides simple and practical tools that you can use to identify the types of bad information listed above, including deepfake videos and AI-generated audio. We’re really grateful when we get alerted to bad information that we can combat, and we’ll keep on doing this on Meta and elsewhere for as long as we can.