Anti-Burnham fake news on Makerfield Facebook accounts has surged, report finds – UK politics live

Good morning. Andy Burnham seems to be on course to win the Makerfield byelection on Thursday. But, if he does win, it will be despite a huge increase in the amount of hostile, fake news about him circulating on local Facebook groups. This has been documented in a report out today by the Social Market Foundation thinktank that has important implications not just for Makerfield, but for how politics functions today in a social media environment awash with lies.

double quotation mark Nearly 1 in 6 pieces of news shared in local Facebook groups during the campaign is false, with misinformation heavily targeting Labour and its candidate Andy Burnham, a new study has found.

The Social Market Foundation analysed over 1,800 posts across four local Facebook groups – representing different towns and settlements within the constituency with 66,000 members across them in total – and found that the share of news posts classified as misinformation jumped from 4% before the by-election was called to 16% during the campaign, a four-fold increase.

These findings come just days ahead of what has been billed as the most consequential by-election for a century. Nearly half of Britons (46%) now seek out local news through social media, second only to television and ahead of every other source. Over a third (34%) make use of local social media groups for this purpose – despite the fact these online sources do not come with fact-checking and editorial guidelines associated with the press …

The shift towards engagement driven rather than recency driven feeds can raise the prominence of misinformation. We can see the implication of this in Makerfield’s local Facebook groups. In one of them, 5 of the top 10 posts were misinformation. In another, 8 of the top 25 were misinformation. If people engaged with the post – whether agreeing or challenging them – it meant the misinformation would get boosted by the platform’s algorithm.

This chart from the report illustrates the extent of the problem.

The SMF has published this study as part of a larger study into the impact social media is having on politics. Earlier this month it published a report saying fake news is three times as common in places without proper local journalism.

Today the Reuters Institute has published its annual study of global digital news and it says “for the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news.”