How the Left made up fake news to smear the Tories in the election
A Mail investigation lays bare the chilling tactics Corbynistas used to f lood the internet with vile abuse and damaging lies about Mrs May and her fellow MPs
The General election was always going to involve a little argy-bargy for Byron Davies, a Tory backbencher fighting to retain Britain’s most marginal Parliamentary seat. his shock 2015 victory in Gower, by a mere 27 votes, had been hugely embarrassing for Labour, who’d held the constituency (next to Swansea) for 109 years. They duly promised to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at winning it back.
When the election was announced, supporters from Labour’s nearby heartlands started pounding local streets for Tonia Antoniazzi, a no-nonsense schoolteacher who in her younger days scrummed down for the Welsh women’s rugby team.
Doors were knocked, leaflets handed out, and photo opportunities staged. Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Foreign Secretary, emily Thornberry, arrived from her native Islington, followed by fellow party bigwig Sir Keir Starmer. TV crews followed in their wake.
Yet the reality of today’s politics is that opinion is increasingly formed in cyberspace. And here things soon took an ugly turn. Within hours of Theresa May calling the snap poll, Byron Davies’s Facebook page began to be bombarded with obscene and hostile messages.
‘It was extraordinary: like someone had turned a switch,’ is how he puts it. ‘Out of nowhere, people started calling me “Tory scum,” leaving C-words, and F-words. The sheer volume made it feel like something organised: nasty stuff arriving every few minutes, from across the country, mostly from people with “I’m with Corbyn” signs on their profile photos.’
Soon, Davies found himself having to spend an hour a day removing obscenities from his Facebook feed.
On Twitter, the abuse was even worse. In May, police arrested and cautioned two men for issuing death threats against him. Then came something more sinister still: an avalanche of what Davies calls ‘fake news’ items began to be circulated on social media, making false and highly defamatory allegations about him.
AYOuTuBe video claimed he’d sought bribes to raise issues in Parliament for constituents. Multiple Facebook posts claimed, falsely, that he was under police investigation for electoral fraud.
his wife was accused, in a viral tweet, of failing to pay bills issued by an impoverished gardener. Several other social media posts accusing Davies (a former police officer) of fiddling his MP’s expenses.
Though entirely false, each claim was shared hundreds, if not thousands of times, influencing countless voters.
‘You need a thick skin to be involved in politics. I certainly have. But this was an attempt to circulate outright lies, destroy my good name, and steal an election,’ he says.
The campaign appeared to work, however: on June 8, Davies was defeated by just over 3,000 votes. So far, so ugly. And as a Mail investigation has discovered, the excesses in Gower — especially the spreading of lies online — was reflected across the country.
A staggering proportion of Conservative candidates spent the 2017 campaign on the receiving end of so-called ‘fake news’. In a trend with worrying implications for the future of democracy, mendacious lies and falsehoods about everyone from the Prime Minister downwards were deliberately placed into the ether, before spreading virally via social media.
The scale of the problem is impossible to quantify. But an Oxford university study, carried out during the campaign, suggests that as many as one in six political contributions shared on social media — a forum disproportionately used by young voters sympathetic to Labour — contain what it called ‘junk news’.
Some contain fabricated news stories. Others are socalled ‘memes’, or captioned photos. Other examples uncovered by the Mail saw lies spread via fake official posters, and bogus Twitter feeds.
The more outrageous the false claims, and the more provocative the tone, the more traction they generally gained.
Astonishingly, those responsible for giving these falsehoods oxygen were in many cases well-connected Labour supporters, donors and activists with links to senior figures in the party hierarchy.
Take, for example, an image of Theresa May purportedly taken in 1988, shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook before polling day.
It carried a homophobic comment she allegedly made while campaigning in Merton, South London, that year, which reads: ‘Curbing the promotion of lesbianism in Merton’s schools starts with girls having male role models in their lives.’
It went viral on June 4, days before polls opened, after it was shared on Twitter by Kevin Cummins, a Left-wing music photographer and vociferous supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who trumpets membership of the National union of Journalists on his Twitter profile.
‘The Tories keep banging on re: Corbyn & Abbott & co in the 80s,’ he wrote. ‘To redress the balance, here’s Theresa May’s “cure for lesbianism” in 88.’ his post was ‘re-tweeted’, or shared, almost 7,000 times by users of the social network, and ‘ liked’ or endorsed by another 5,000 users.
Copycat versions were shared tens of thousands of times more. Presumably this led a swathe of voters to the conclusion that the Prime Minister is a frightful homophobe, unworthy of high office.
The truth, however, is that the Theresa May ‘quotation’ from 1988 was a complete fabrication: there is no evidence she ever made any such
statement about ‘curbing’ lesbianism. When the Mail asked Cummins to explain this, he claimed the quote had been ‘sent by a reliable source’ and he posted it without checking its veracity because he believed it ‘ tallied with May’s voting record back then’.
A journalist called Jane Fae, who has investigated it in more detail, thinks otherwise: she posted a blog last week claiming to have tracked down the original source, who ‘admitted making it up’.
A second fabricated image to go viral, days before the election, purported to be a public information poster headlined ‘have you bought your NHS insurance?’
It carried the logos of the NHS and Public Health England, and falsely claimed that from January 2018, the NHS would no longer be free, and that ‘you and your family may be eligible for minimum health coverage for £4,500 a year’.
This fake poster entered the public domain thanks to Labour Future, an organisation founded by John Mills, a multi-millionaire and one of the Labour Party’s biggest donors. His late wife was the former Crown Prosecution Service boss Dame Barbara Mills. It was carried on Labour Future’s Facebook page, with a link to a fundraising site, and shared tens of thousands of times, presumably by voters convinced the Tories had a secret plan to dismantle the NHS.
Then a Conservative blogger exposed the poster as being fake. Amid heated criticism, and threats of legal action, Labour Future deleted it.
But by then, the damage was done: a hefty portion of the electorate had been swayed by it.
SUCH is the nature of the internet that versions remain in circulation to this day. Labour Future has now issued a grovelling apology for making public the ‘factually inaccurate’ image, which it says was ‘created by an external source’.
Another hugely effective fake NHS news item circulated before polling day was a Facebook post claiming hospital staff in North Devon had been told A&E and maternity units would shut if the Tories won on June 8.
Written by Rob Cannicott, a Corbyn supporter who runs a catering firm called Rob’s Soul Foods, it said NHS staff were ‘ asked not to speak about this closure until after the election’, and described ‘ Tory plans’ as ‘the beginning of the end’. The closure, it claimed, would be announced on June 16. It was shared 2,143 times, and cut and pasted into tens of thousands of other widely shared Facebook posts.
There was but one problem: Cannicott’s claim was completely untrue. The local NHS trust denounced it, saying it was ‘ not accurate’ and ‘not based in truth’. And June 16 has been and gone without any announcement.
In Lincolnshire, images of a fake Twitter post purporting to show the local Conservative party claiming ‘most people spend their benefit money on drugs, alcohol and gambling’ went viral on June 1, courtesy of a Scottish author called Geoff Huijer.
He circulated it to hundreds of followers dubbing it ‘ one of the most disgusting tweets I’ve ever seen’. The fake tweet was then given airtime on the blog of Mike Sivier, a Labour council candidate, and the We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook page, posted by a photographer called Jon Robson, who runs a public sector contractor called Digital Schools.
Thousands more readers read, believed, and shared it, without realising the remarks were fabricated. Robson and Sivier later posted corrections after it emerged that it was fake. Elsewhere on social media, the election campaign saw the re- emergence of a long-debunked urban myth: that Theresa May’s husband Philip is a director of the private security company G4S, which runs prisons, and has therefore corruptly benefited from its links to the UK government.
Entirely false, the claim reemerged in late May thanks to a Labour- supporting architect called Saira Hussain, whose company Hussain Architectural Design has offices across the UK.
She is a supposedly respected professional, who has won important architectural awards, claims to be the ‘ leader of women’s empowerment’ at the Global Young Asian Entrepreneurs Network, and was recently invited to the House of Lords by Labour Peer Baroness uddin.
On May 28, Hussain used her Facebook feed to claim ‘G4S is paid by the Tory government to run prisons. G4S pays no UK taxes. Teresa [sic] May’s husband, Philip May, is a director of G4S.’
Around the same time, an artist called David Rockerchild posted an image of the Mays on a Labour forum claiming Philip is a ‘major shareholder’ in the company. It was shared some 23,985 times. Asked why she concocted the fake p post, Hussain this week cl claimed she wrongly believed it its contents were true, and sa said it was ‘preposterous’ to su suggest she posted it to ‘ ‘influencein anyone’s votes’. Bu But she eventually deleted it af after the Mail contacted her.
A As Hussain’s involvement de demonstrates, many of the m most influential fake news cre creators or distributors have clo close links to the Labour party an and its candidates — which br brings us back to Gower. i
Some of the ugliest materialS aboutab the Tory candidate ByronBy Davies was on a FacebookFa group called ‘Byron DaviesDa Watch’.
It carried multiple posts falselyfal stating the Tory candidatecan was, in the words of regularreg contributor called Eleri Angharad,Ang ‘being subjected to investigationinv for electoral frau fraud’. After the election one DavidDav Morgan states he’s lookinglook forward to celebrating the defeated candidate’s death, as s soon as possible.
‘Let‘L us rejoice that he has gone,’gon it reads. ‘That is enough for m me to celebrate with several pintspint . . . when he dies, I will drink manyman more pints and relish everyever one. Bye Byron, please give us a reason to party soon.’
GivenGiv the vile nature of such materialmate and the volume of fake news circulated there, one might expectexpe ‘Byron Davies Watch’ to have nothing to do with the ‘official’ Labour campaign. Scandalously, one of its 300-odd members turns out to be Tonia Antoniazzi — now sworn in as Gower’s new Labour MP.
In her defence, Ms Antoniazzi tells me she fought a ‘positive campaign’ and ‘ would never condone negative campaigning or the defacing of candidate signs’.
She adds: ‘ I unequivocally condemn personal abuse or the spreading of false information in political campaigning,’ and says Welsh Labour will ‘take action against any member in breach of any rules and laws or [ who] brought the party into disrepute’.
Byron Davies told me he met with lawyers this week with a view to bringing defamation proceedings against Labour supporters who shared the slurs against him.
‘It’s not about the money,’ he tells me. ‘It’s about showing people you cannot interfere with the electoral process by deliberately spreading lies and fake news about politicians and expect to get away with it.
‘This is a serious problem, and it’s undermining democracy.’
He’s right. Yet the growing cancer of fake news now threatens the integrity of every election. until those responsible are exposed, and properly held to account, its growing pernicious influence will only get worse.