As the incredulity over CCHQ’s rebranding as factcheckUK reached fever pitch, some noticed an ad cropping up in their timelines. “Disinformation isn’t always easy to spot,” it read. “Make sure you know what to look for.” The advert was from the Cabinet Office.
Below, a short video featuring a green, goblin-like creature and a feckless individual, explained how to avoid getting duped by disinformation on social media. A narrator points out that social media accounts can be “purposefully misleading” and encourages people to use the S.H.A.R.E checklist: is it from a Source you can trust; read beyond the Headline; Analyse the facts; has the image been Retouched, and check for Errors. Catchy, it ain’t. But it provided useful tips for the single person tricked by CCHQ’s flaccid attack on the truth.
If only the government had listened to its own advice. For a little over an hour last night, as Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn duked it out on the first televised leaders' debate, the press office account for the Conservative party, CCHQPress, rebranded itself as factcheckUK and pumped out a series of apparently fact-based rebuttals against Corbyn’s “lies”. Just as the Cabinet Office warns against falling for such skulduggery, Twitter’s own rules make it clear that verified accounts behaving in such a way will likely be reprimanded.
The first bullet point on Twitter’s guidelines for how and why it will remove an account’s precious blue tick is plain and simple: if you lie, you lose your verified status. In fact, it goes further than that. Twitter also states that it may remove the verified badge and status of any account that changes its profile to modify the account’s original purpose.
If Twitter was serious about tackling disinformation on its platform, it would have removed the verified blue tick on CCHQPress the second it became aware that the account had cynically rebranded itself as factcheckUK to spread disinformation during the leaders debate. But Twitter didn’t. Its statement said it would take “decisive corrective action” if the stunt was repeated. Quite why Twitter didn’t take such action last night is unclear.
But not unexpected. As the social network has grappled with president Donald Trump’s rule-by-tweet approach to politics, the platform has resolved to obey one rule above all others: don’t piss off powerful politicians.
The actual substance of the Conservative party’s duplicity amounts to a storm in a teacup. Most of its posts were retweeted just a few dozen times, with almost all replies and quote tweets coming from people outraged by its attempted deception. At best, a few people may have believed what they were seeing to be genuine fact checking. But even that is unlikely. It’s not quite shitposting, but the Conservative election campaign definitely has form here.
Make no mistake: this was an oddball stunt designed to fail. Which raises a simple question: what were the Tories trying to achieve? Counterintuitively, the stunt has allowed a number of Tory MPs to go on TV and radio and push the line that Jeremy Corbyn can’t be trusted. Most of the electorate don’t use or care about what happens on Twitter. What last night’s stunt has allowed the Conservative party to do is get everyone talking about facts and the truth rather than policy.
Ultimately, this wasn’t an attack on the Labour party or Jeremy Corbyn. It was an attack on the truth. Erode people’s confidence to judge what is true and what is not and the Conservatives seemingly believe they can reduce this election to a single issue: get Brexit done. In the avalanche of disinformation, the Tories have made it abundantly clear that this is the one line that can have an impact. Everything else, campaign strategists will hope, can be reduced to noise and lies.
As he did the rounds on the morning news, foreign secretary Dominic Raab argued that the public doesn’t “give a toss” about political squabbling on social media. But, as Raab well knows, this isn’t squabbling. It might sound grandiose, but at its core this daft stunt is a flagrant assault on the truth. Get Brexit done. Facts be damned.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
