Thread by @firstdraftnews

Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson was asked about a viral hoax on LBC radio this morning. First Draft has been monitoring the spread of this hoax online for the last two weeks #GE2019. Here's what we know:

The hoax appears to have started life in a tweet shared on November 2. It used a very convincing fake of a Daily Mirror article to claim Swinson had been filmed shooting at squirrels with a slingshot

The original was shared nearly 1,000 times and it was reshared hundreds of times more with many people appearing to believe the claim was true.

The account which created it and many of those sharing the tweet were largely anonymous pro-Labour accounts. Any sincere engagement with the story prompted further trolling.

This went on for days but was confined to a fairly small section of Twitter. Then on Nov 5 a Medium post appeared, pushing the same fake claims.

The post was removed at some point in the last 12 hours but here is an archived version of the link web.archive.org/web/2019111811…

Neither the publication "Milngavie Times" nor this "Miranda Joyce" exist. The author used a stock image of "woman thinking" as a profile pic.

The Medium post received relatively few interactions until it was shared by a Brexit Party account on Twitter with nearly 9,000 followers on Nov 14. And then it exploded.

It was shared nearly 4,000 times on Facebook, largely by private accounts, but also by a lot of pro-Brexit pages and groups. It picked up more than 20,000 interactions,

(Those stats are from the CrowdTangle Linkchecker Chrome Plugin, which you can get here) chrome.google.com/webstore/detai…

The biggest share on Facebook came from a page called "Brexit News", at about 1am UK time on Monday morning. Just over 24 hours later she was asked about it on LBC. #GE2019

"I think there's questions about the role of publishers in circulating this kind of thing which is untrue because it's actually very difficult to prevent its spread," said @joswinson
#GE2019

@joswinson Many have already dismissed the hoax as a joke, as 'satire'. But we're increasingly seeing satire used as an excuse for disinformation, particularly in elections #GE2019 firstdraftnews.org/latest/it-was-…

@joswinson And we were aware of this hoax for the past two weeks, but we decided to share our findings only now. Why?

Reporting always carries the risk of amplifying lies and publishers need to balance the public interest in the story against the potential consequences of coverage.

@joswinson We think everyone should consider this before sharing a hoax online, before asking a politician about it. Are you just giving it more oxygen?

Read more in our essential guide to responsible reporting by @victoriakwan_ firstdraftnews.org/latest/how-jou…

ENDS
#GE2019