A brief thread on the Nadine Dorries/Maria Caulfield/Lucy Allen story today. Not the defamation aspects - make no mistake, the do really matter - but the ‘fake news’ aspects. This is in many ways a classic, archetypal example of how fake news works. 1/n
Firstly, about the fake news itself. This was a doctored video, taking a bit of real material and manipulating it to produce something fake. Real stuff used to craft a fake narrative, a damagingly fake narrative. 2/n
This is very normal. Fake news isn’t created in a vacuum, but often uses a bit of reality as its core, to add credibility and make it look as though it might be real. 3/n
This fakery was crafted to be *believable* by the target audience, crafted to meet the prejudices and expectations of the target audience. This works both in theory and in practice - and it may well have worked in this particular case. 4/n
I don’t know whether Dorries, Caulfield or Allan believed the video was real - but it was designed to be believable by people who are prejudiced against Keir Starmer, and who take the specific issues covered in the video seriously. 5/n
So, this was fake, but based on something real, and designed to be believable by a particular group. So much is completely normal practice amongst some fake news providers. The next task is to get it spread - and this is where Dorries, Caulfield and Allan come in. 6/n
Getting key people to spread your fake news is vital. You want credibility - a blue tick, an MP, a celeb really helps - and you want wide spread *amongst your target audiences* - so you want people with lots of followers of that kind. 7/n
Dorries, Caulfield and Allan will have a lot of followers who hate Labour, and who are looking for opportunities to smear Keir Starmer - so they’re perfect as spreaders of this kind of fakery. The faker has to make sure people like the three MPs see the fake news to spread 8/n
There are many ways this can be done - through semi-trusted intermediaries, through direct contact, through placing stories in places you know they frequent online - and it’s hard to tell which actually happened here, but it doesn’t matter much. 9/n
However it happened, it got the result intended. They all RTed it, spreading it far and wide. That it was revealed to be fake and they all deleted afterwards doesn’t reduce the damage much. The story is likely to have got to enough places that it will spread much further. 10/n
...and the damage is done. The fakers did their job. The account that spread was deleted, but it can soon enough re-emerge and gain its old following. That’s how fake news often works. Disposable accounts to create and seed, ‘celebs’ to spread. 11/n
This places *huge* responsibility on the celebs. Dorries, Caulfield and Allan played a key role in spreading a piece of damaging fake news. Whether they did so willingly, knowingly, negligently, foolishly or otherwise is quite another matter - I suspect only they know. 12/n
But this is a classic example, not an exception or a one-off. Things like this happen again and again, and they’re very hard to stop. ‘Fact checking’ does very little. Deleting the creators of the fake news does very little - they can always re-emerge. 13/n
Dorries, Caulfield and Allan will get a slap on the wrist for this at best - that’s the fake news bit, the defamatory bit is another matter that I don’t want to go into now - and people like them will do things like this again and again and again.... 14/n
Other implications. Getting MPs to ‘regulate’ fake news is pretty much doomed to failure as they play a regular part in its dissemination. Getting social media companies to deal with it (online harms white paper etc) will also fail as they won’t punish big accounts easily 15/n
The best way would be for MPs to be better behaved - but, frankly, that’s never going to happen. The best we can do is be more alert to it ourselves, and to treat the MPs and other celebs who facilitate it with the contempt they deserve. 16/16
P.S. I did this as a twitter thread rather than a blog post because the events themselves happened on Twitter, and it seemed more appropriate. Plus I like my current most recent blog post about contact tracing... ;)
