False claims Laura Kuenssberg clashed with Rupert Lowe on air shared online
A false post claiming to describe an argument between the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and Rupert Lowe MP has been circulating online.
The post claims that an “explosive clash” took place on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show in which the presenter demanded that “SOMEONE CUT HIS MIC — IMMEDIATELY!”, with the MP eventually walking off the set, claiming that he wouldn’t be silenced.
None of this really happened. There is no evidence that Mr Lowe has even appeared on the programme, let alone been involved in any such clash. The BBC confirmed to Full Fact that the post is fake.
There are several other clues that suggest the claims are false.
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Firstly, the scene doesn’t resemble the set or logo of the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, which you can see just by looking at real stills of the set from the show.
Secondly, there are glitches within the image, such as text at the back reading “BBC BC Sunday”, as well as blurred faces on some of the audience members in the background. These are common issues with AI-generated imagery.
Thirdly, we found that the image contains SynthID, an invisible watermark added to content created or edited with Google’s AI tools.
Finally, this closely resembles a previous post we checked in January, which falsely claimed that an almost identical clash happened on the same show with Nigel Farage.
While several people commenting on the post identified the content as fake—yet another clue that the content was untrustworthy—others appeared to believe the post was true.
Before sharing content like this which you come across on social media, first consider whether it comes from a reliable, verifiable and trustworthy source. Our Full Fact toolkit can help you do this.
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 false because these are not real quotes from an interview between Laura Kuenssberg and Rupert Lowe MP, and the images of the interview have been generated with AI.