The Tories’ FactCheckUK Twitter rebrand is part of a worrying political trend

It should not be the responsibility of voters to be on the look-out for political parties masquerading as fact checking organisations

Last night, as the two men vying to be the UK’s next prime minister debated the issue of truth and trustworthiness, the Conservative Party’s press office Twitter account was passing itself off as a fact checking organisation.

Branding itself ‘FactCheckUK’, with only the most minimal reference to CCHQ – an acronym not widely known outside the Westminster bubble – it claimed it would check the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s claims during the ITV debate.

It is inappropriate and misleading for the party to do this. Particularly concerning is that the account tweeted claims that we, as the UK’s independent fact checking charity, have already established are misleading or inaccurate.

For instance, it reiterated as a ‘FACT’ the amount Labour would spend if elected – but this is a largely meaningless figure based on flawed assumptions and policies that Labour has not announced. When people see a ‘fact check’, they expect accurate information with sources that are clearly identified – not thinly veiled party lines.

FACT: Corbyn's Labour would spend £1.2 trillion over the next five years if they get elected – the equivalent of funding the entire NHS budget for nine years #CostofCorbyn

— CCHQ Press (@CCHQPress) November 19, 2019

The Conservative response has been that it was clear that the party was behind the account, and that people who spent more than a split second looking at it wouldn’t have been fooled.

But it should not be the responsibility of voters to be on the look-out for political parties masquerading as fact checking organisations. And regardless of whether or not they were taken in, this stunt does voters a disservice and makes an already polluted information space worse.

Voters are already facing a lack of transparency as we are increasingly targeted with online dark ads: opaque, targeted and potentially personalised based on data you may not even know parties have.

Although the government has admitted that electoral laws need to be reformed for a digital age, it has failed to act. This means that we still face shadowy online campaigns and cannot truly understand why we are seeing certain ads, or who paid for them.

During the US 2016 elections, the campaign for Donald Trump is reported to have run 5.9million different versions of ads. How do you scrutinise so much noise? And what is the impact on people’s views of politics, politicians, and each other?

It’s too early to say for sure. What we do know is that this UK election is wide open to abuse, as urgently needed reforms were not implemented in time to protect it.

We should all be pushing for greater transparency online, especially ahead of the crucial vote we are facing. It is the responsibility of our candidates and the parties they represent to make this debate more open, honest and transparent.

But this campaign has already seen parties push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The Conservatives have promoted a ‘doctored’ video of a Labour politician being interviewed on Good Morning Britain; the Liberal Democrats have used questionable tactics on leaflets; and Labour has repeatedly made claims about the cost of a post-Brexit trade deal to the NHS based on extreme assumptions about drug prices.

We believe that public debate can be better. It is crucial that voters can trust the people we are being asked to choose between at the election on 12 December.

When the candidates for the election were revealed last week, we wrote an open letter calling on them to stick to three simple principles: get your facts right, back up what you say with evidence and correct any mistakes you make. We were encouraged that a number of them replied to thank us for the intervention and agreed to this pledge.

You can help hold them to account, and keep this election transparent, by sharing any potentially misleading adverts or claims you see with us.

We all have a voice in this election.

Will Moy is chief executive of Full Fact, an independent non-profit aimed at fact-checking political and media claims.

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