Story about struggling nurse posted on MP’s social media accounts is ‘fictional’

Last month a story about a nurse called Maya and her struggle to find affordable housing was posted on Labour MP Sureena Brackenridge’s social media accounts, alongside an image of a woman in scrubs and a young girl in school uniform standing in front of a terraced house.

The posts on 25 June explained that Maya was “working in a busy city hospital” and that “for years” her “life was measured in short-term tenancy agreements”. The post said “this is the reality for millions of working people” and then, quoting recent housing construction figures, added: “Recently, however, the landscape has begun to shift in a way that offers real, tangible hope to people like Maya.”

But “Maya” isn’t real, and the image published alongside the posts appears to have been made using AI.

This wasn’t made clear in the original posts on X or Facebook, where one user even commented to wish Maya luck. It’s therefore possible some voters may have seen this and mistakenly thought it depicted a real person and events.

After we spotted this post with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools and contacted Ms Brackenridge, the X post was deleted and the post on Facebook was edited to say: “Maya is fictional, but this is the reality for millions of working people.”

Ms Brackenridge told Full Fact: “I’ve been made aware of a post undertaken by a member of my staff. I have been made aware the intention was to share policy news, explored through a narrative of how this would feel for a person.”

She added: “I believe firmly in transparency and accessibility. There was not any intention to mislead, but rather an attempt to use technology to present policy in an accessible way. Ms Brackenridge also told us she had enacted “procedures to ensure this never happens again”.

The posts appear to be another example of new technology being used in increasingly complex ways by politicians and other figures. In April we revealed that “illustrative” AI-generated campaign videos posted by a candidate in the Scottish parliamentary elections didn’t show real events.

In this case Full Fact believes it should have been made clear and obvious in the original posts that this story was fictional and illustrative. We’re grateful to Ms Brackenridge for taking action to rectify this.

What do we know about the image?

The image in the post includes a SynthID watermark, an invisible digital watermark which indicates that it was created using Google’s AI tools.

This can’t definitively tell us if an image was entirely fabricated with AI, or if a real image has instead been edited, potentially in quite a minor way such as brightening it. But in this case there are also a number of visual clues that the image isn’t real, including the blurry text on the wheelie bins and the uniform logos, and the fact that proportions of the front door don’t look quite right.

We asked Ms Brackenridge to confirm how the image was created and whether it was entirely made with AI and will update this fact check if we hear back.