BBC stargazer Brian Cox spread it. Stephen Fry fell victim to it. How the Left used fake news to try to steal the election . . .
GUY ADAMS continues his investigation
When Professor Brian Cox posts messages on social media, countless people stand to attention.
With 2.66 million followers on Twitter and another 670,000 on Facebook, the former pop star turned BBC science pin-up has used the internet to become one of Britain’s most popular and influential celebrities.
Recent months have seen him wax lyrical on a wide range of topics, from astronomy and the TV series Twin Peaks to music — a subject on which he’s something of an expert, having played in nineties band D:Ream, whose song Things Can Only Get Better was famously purloined by Tony Blair’s new Labour as its saccharine theme tune.
And, like many Left-leaning public figures, the charismatic TV presenter never goes long without sharing his thoughts about what he calls ‘the lamentable state of UK politics’.
Cox’s pet subjects include Brexit — he’s a staunch Remainer who reckons ‘it’ll take us 50 years to recover from a so-called hard Brexit’; Donald Trump — a ‘ dumb child’ guilty of ‘dangerous stupidity’; and whichever Tory MPs have recently displeased him, from Leicestershire’s David Tredinnick, who he once called ‘an outlier on the spectrum of reason’, to Somerset’s Jacob Rees-Mogg, who he declared this month to be a ‘nob’.
There was a ripple of glee in Labour circles on June 5, 72 hours before polling day, when Cox used his influential social-media pulpit to draw attention to a tweet from someone called James Conwyn, who described himself as the ‘Conservative MP for earlington Abbey’.
‘Vote Conservative if you want strong and stable leadershit,’ it read.
The offensively mis-spelled version of Theresa May’s campaign message seemed like an amusing Freudian slip, and was shared tens of thousands of times on social media as election day approached — in many cases by followers of Cox, who had uploaded it to Twitter at 3.03am and to Facebook a few hours later.
‘At last, a Tory who tells the truth!’ read one typical response from one of the TV scientist’s fans. ‘Oh my God! how hasn’t this idiot deleted it?’ read another observation on Conwyn’s mistyping of the word ‘leadership’. So far, so amusing. except for two crucial facts. First, there is no Tory MP called James Conwyn. Second, a Parliamentary constituency called earlington Abbey does not exist.
In other words, the post and the Twitter account on which the supposedly embarrassing comment was made — before being widely shared by Cox and so many others — was nothing more than a crude fake.
Mr Conwyn’s portrait photo was, in fact, an image of Sir Malcolm Williamson, a City grandee who once ran insurance firm Aviva and was knighted for services to high finance. The image was stolen from the website of new Day, an investment company where he’s a director.
Which all means that shortly before election day, Cox was guilty of widely spreading across the internet a piece of fake news that was damaging to the Conservative Party.
When asked, his representatives did not return requests for comment so we don’t know why Cox circulated this irresponsible claptrap —whether it was by accident or if it was some sort of ill-judged satirical joke.
We can only hope that as a highly qualified scientist, who is trusted by millions, he would surely never deliberately dissemble misinformation.
Quite why Cox didn’t later delete the fake news post, or upload some sort of a clarification, when it later became clear to some of his social media followers that it was an obvious fabrication, is also unexplained.
Indeed, the phoney post remains on Cox’s Facebook feed — a fact that friends of Sir Malcolm, the City gent whose identity was stolen, find upsetting.
One of them pleaded for it to be removed, saying Sir Malcolm is ‘a private person, not associated with any particular party, who is very annoyed at his photo being used in this way’.
But whatever really went on, this episode reveals a troubling wider truth: that the attitudes of many voters, particularly the young, and even those who should perhaps know better, are increasingly being shaped by so- called ‘fake news’ spreading like a cancer across the internet.
Last week, a Mail investigation revealed that many Tory candidates during the General election campaign were falsely accused, in an array of fabricated Facebook and Twitter posts, of a gamut of offences — from electoral fraud to fiddling expenses to ripping off vulnerable employees.
The posts included a picture of Theresa May captioned with an utterly fake quotation suggesting that in the eighties she’d advocated ‘curing’ lesbians. This was circulated online tens of thousands of times.
Several other defamatory posts propagated the lie that May’s husband is a director of private security firm G4S, which has lucrative government contracts, and that he therefore corruptly profited from her position when she was home Secretary.
MOSTof these posts were given the oxygen of publicity by Corbynistas. The fake lesbian image, for example, went viral on Twitter after being posted by Kevin Cummins, a pop photographer who advertises his credentials as a member of the national Union of Journalists.
The G4S myth was given credence, too, by, among others, Saira hussain, a Labour- supporting architect recently invited to a reception for Asian business people in the house of Lords by Baroness Uddin.
Perhaps most scandalously, a fake poster carrying the logos of the nhS and Public health england, which falsely suggested that the Conservatives intend to charge families ‘up to £4,500’ for health insurance, was placed online by Labour Future, a campaign group founded by one of the party’s biggest donors, consumer goods millionaire John Mills, whose late wife, Dame Barbara, ran the Crown Prosecution Service.
The sheer, jaw-dropping extent of the fake news problem was laid bare in a recent study by Oxford University, which showed that during the election campaign around one in six political posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media forums — which are overwhelmingly used by young Labour-leaning voters — contain ‘junk news’.
Most appear to have been deliberately fabricated, in order to mislead.
Since last week’s revelations by the Mail, many more have come to light, of which just a handful are highlighted here.
Theyinclude an image of actor Stephen Fry, who has 12.7 million followers on Twitter, appearing to endorse Jeremy Corbyn.
‘I voted Liberal before but not this time. Jeremy is the one I am supporting this time round,’ reads an accompanying caption. ‘Make sure everyone in your house votes Labour. even if you voted UKIP before. We must not split the opposition vote. everyone must vote Labour to ensure we smash the Tories.’
The image was shared tens of thousands of times on social media and was cited as evidence of the Labour leader’s growing popularity.
Its exact origins are unclear, though it seems to have first gone viral after being placed on a Facebook page called ‘We Support Jeremy Corbyn’ at 9.43am on June 3 by Sasha Phillips, a pro-Corbyn activist who works as a life coach in Southampton.
We don’t know why Phillips posted it, because she did not respond to a request for comment. What is certain is that the quotation is a lie.
Stephen Fry never uttered those words and did not endorse Corbyn, or indeed the Labour Party.
yet his name still appeared on another widely circulated Facebook post which contained a largely fabricated list of famous people who were allegedly supporting Corbyn.
The names included the Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne (who has never publicly endorsed him) and pop star harry Styles, who is actually believed to have endorsed the Lib Dems in the election, saying in an interview that he supported ‘whoever is against Brexit’.
Versions of the phoney list went viral after being posted on the We Support Jeremy Corbyn page and on another page called Jeremy Corbyn Leads us to 2017 Victory.
elsewhere, Tory MP Jacob ReesMogg was targeted by a particularly vicious fake news attack involving false suggestions that he’d been given £7.6 million by the Government to renovate his stately home.
One read: ‘ Stop the 7.6 million pound refurbishment of Jacob ReesMogg stately with from [sic] tax payers money.’
Another carried an image of him with the caption: ‘ The Chancellor, Philip hammond, has just awarded a grant of £7.6m to do up Wentworth Woodhouse, my wife’s 300-room
ancestral home. Which is ironic because I voted consistently to penalise benefit claimants who have an extra bedroom.’ Stirring stuff. But also untrue: neither ReesMogg, nor anyone in his family, owns Wentworth Woodhouse, a vast stately pile in Yorkshire, although 70 years ago it belonged to his wife’s grandfather.
Today, the mansion is controlled by a charity which, with the support of locals, wants to turn it into a tourist attraction in the deprived area. It was this charity — not ReesMogg — that got the £7.6 million grant, to fund restoration . . . following a campaign by the local MP, John Healey. The fake posts on this subject appear to have been inspired by an article in The Canary, a far-Left news website notorious for carrying poorly sourced items. It was headlined ‘One Tory MP just received a £7.6m bonus from the Chancellor. Despicable!’
Unsurprisingly, The Canary’s founder, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, was invited to appear on BBC1’s Question Time this week, where she repeatedly talked over fellow guests and was told by presenter David Dimbleby to ‘shush, shush’.
So pernicious is the spread of fake news in the unregulated world of social media that even material posted as satire can be taken as gospel. For example, a video was posted on Twitter at 6.30pm on June 6, 36 hours before polling day, by Matt Zarb- Cousin, a former spokesman for Corbyn. Captioned ‘Oh my word, that placard’, it contained footage of a Tory rally in which a member of the public, standing next to Mrs May, is holding a sign reading: ‘She’s lying to you.’
The video was a fabrication: the sign had been digitally altered. However, that didn’t stop huge numbers of Twitter users believing it was true.
More than 19,000 people re- tweeted it, and 28,000 ‘liked’ it, forcing Zarb- Cousin to post a clarification 20 minutes later, admitting: ‘ Given how tightly controlled Conservative events are, I thought it would be obvious that this was a fake. But clearly not. It is indeed a fake.’
By then, however, the damage had been done: versions of the fake film were all over cyberspace, many circulated by people who believed it to be real.
Yet Zarb-Cousin’s clarification was re-tweeted only 50 times — just 0.002 per cent of the number of times the original fabricated one was re-tweeted. Even now, with the election lost, key Labour figures use social media to place information in the public domain even though they know it is fake.
A typical culprit is George Aylett, a Labour candidate in Wiltshire in the 2015 General Election and chairman-elect of the Labour club at Hull University, where he now studies.
At 4.39pm on June 22, he posted what he claimed were official statistics showing ‘Wage growth since 2010’. They suggested that UK wages had fallen by 10.4 per cent in the past seven years, while in Poland they’d risen by 23 per cent, and in Germany by 11 per cent.
He claimed that Britain was the ‘only G7 nation where wages are stagnant whilst economy grows’.
HISmessage has been retweeted 10,400 times and ‘ liked’ 8,514 times. Countless versions, with the same figures, have been posted on Facebook by (among others) the Left-wing TV host Terry Christian, who has 8,133 followers.
There is but one problem: the figures are completely untrue.
Wages have not fallen by 10.4 per cent in the UK since 2010. In fact, according to the Office for National Statistics, average weekly earnings have risen by 13.1 per cent in that period, although once inflation is taken into account that figure comes out at just 1.2 per cent.
Aylett, a vehement Corbyn supporter, does not appear to have merely fabricated the figures in his viral tweet. Instead, something more scurrilous has happened.
The figures are lifted from Organisation For Economic Cooperation and Development statistics covering 2007 to 2015 — which takes in the 2008 financial crash and the sharp downturn in the following three years under Gordon Brown’s Labour government — but are being dishonestly presented as figures that instead cover 2010 to the present day.
Aylett did not respond to a request for comment when asked to explain this apparent display of dishonesty.
Perhaps he feels there is no need. For as the explosion of fake news shows, social media has created a cynical world of ‘ post- truth’ politics, where lies are manufactured to win votes, and facts seem increasingly irrelevant.