Dominic Raab: ‘No-one gives a toss’ about Tory party’s factcheckUK Twitter stunt
Dominic Raab has said that “no-one gives a toss” that the Conservative Party has been accused of misleading the public by renaming their Twitter account ‘factcheckUK’ during last night’s leaders debate.
The Conservatives have faced criticism from fact checkers and Twitter after changing the name of the @CCHQPress account during the ITV debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.
Twitter said the move had misled the public, while Full Fact called the stunt “inappropriate and misleading”.
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But foreign secretary Raab said this morning that the name change served as an “instant rebuttal mechanism” to defend the Tories against Labour claims.
He said that the change was intended to “make it clear that we’re holding Labour to account”.
“No-one for a split second would have been fooled,” Raab added.
“I knock on doors every day… no one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust.
“What they care about is the substance of the issues.”
Following the debate, the Tory press office account reverted to its original name.
Twitter reacted by vowing to take “decisive corrective action” if anything like that happens again, though it was not clear whether it punished the account holder for last night’s move.
A Full Fact spokesperson added: “It is inappropriate and misleading for the Conservative press office to rename their twitter account ‘factcheckUK’ during this debate.”
“Please do not mistake it for an independent fact checking service such as FullFact, FactCheck or FactCheckNI.”
A Twitter spokesperson said: “We have global rules in place that prohibit behaviour that can mislead people, including those with verified accounts. Any further attempts to mislead people by editing verified profile information – in a manner seen during the UK Election Debate – will result in decisive corrective action.”
Tory party chairman James Cleverly attempted to defend the Conservatives from accusations of misleading the public.
He told BBC Newsnight: “The Twitter handle of the CCHQ press office remained @CCHQPress so it’s clear the nature of the site.
“The reason we did that is because we were calling out the inaccuracies, the lies that were coming out during the debate. The NHS is not for sale.”
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Presenter Emily Maitlis accused him of pulling a “dystopian” stunt. “You were trying to coat your propaganda as hardened fact,” she said. “You know that people do not trust you, so you have to put something out and call it a fact check.”
Cleverly said the idea had come from the party’s digital team.
“The digital team have got a remit, I set that remit, they work within the remit and I’m absolutely comfortable with them calling out when the Labour Party puts what they know to be complete fabrications in the public domain – and we will call that out every time they do it,” he said.
Raab added this morning: “We should be rebutting the nonsense that’s put out about us.”
Rival party politicians condemned the stunt today, however. Labour’s David Lammy called it “grimly dystopian”.
“James Cleverly lies about using the Conservative Party Press account to lie to the country by pretending it is fact-checking service calling out lies, when in fact it is spreading more lies. This is what George Orwell wrote about in 1984.”
The Liberal Democrats press account tweeted:
Image credit: Twitter