What was claimed
A tube advert purporting to be from the Conservatives says “We plan to cut all homeless people in half by 2025”.
Our verdict
The advert is fake. It was made by an artist.
This advert on the tube was not made by the Conservatives
22 July 2019
An image shared on Twitter and Facebook shared over 15,000 times altogether purports to show a real Conservative party advert on a London Underground train saying: “We plan to cut all homeless people in half by 2025”. The accompanying text from the person who tweeted it says: “A team of people were paid to produce this”.
The advert is not real and wasn’t produced by the Conservatives. An artist called Foka Wolf seems to have claimed responsibility for a number of similar mock ads seen on the underground, including the one in the viral tweet. An interview with the artist in Time Out from May says that he’s based in Birmingham and that he describes his work as “‘misinformation’ and ‘IRL trolling’”.
Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted a few other clues that the advert wasn’t all it seemed. For one, Transport for London, which is responsible for the London Underground, doesn’t allow adverts that promote “a party political cause or electioneering”.
Other clues are the fact that the advert clearly isn’t the correct size for the tube car panel it’s stuck to, as well as the unfortunate wording used. We’ve written more about how to debunk images you see on social media here.