A newspaper article says a court has ruled that it is reasonable for protesters to call Sir Keir Starmer “Tory scum”.
The headline has been edited to include Mr Starmer’s name. The original article referred to Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
A screenshot claiming to show an article headlined “Reasonable for protesters to call Sir Keir Starmer ‘Tory scum’, court rules” has been edited.
The image has been shared on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). The caption says: “A court has found that it is plausible to describe Starmer as, “Tory Scum” - I think this was established long before this court ruling to be fair”.
While some saw it as a joke, others appear to believe it was genuine.
The original headline was published by the Guardian in November 2023 and refers to Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith, not Mr Starmer. The article describes a high court ruling not to overturn an acquittal of two protesters who were previously found not guilty of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent, after calling Sir Iain “Tory scum” outside the 2021 Conservative party conference.
In the edited version, the name Sir Keir Starmer is in a different font (the lower case ‘r’ for example looks different, is slightly larger than the rest of the text, and the bottom of a ‘p’ in the top row is cut off—all clues it has been edited afterwards).
False headlines or pictures from satirical works can be screenshotted and shared without context, potentially leading some people to believe the claims they are seeing in isolation are true.
It can be difficult to tell immediately whether or not a claim online is trustworthy, especially when information can so easily be taken out of context. For tips on how to verify content, visit our fact checking toolkit.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because the headline has been edited to include Mr Starmer’s name, seemingly as a joke.
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