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mammuth/iStock(LONDON) — While American eyes were focused on the Trump impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill last week, the U.K. has been embroiled in a political scandal of its own. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing an election on Dec. 12 and this week his Conservative party has been accused of peddling disinformation on both Twitter and Google.

Information disorder — the proliferation of fake news in various forms (whether intentionally false or not) — has emerged as a key issue in upcoming elections both in the U.S. and around the world.

Last week the party was reprimanded by Twitter for misleading the public when a campaign account posed as a fact-checking agency during the election debate, and now the Conservative Party, also known as the Tory Party, is in hot water over a Google ad purporting to be a false opposition manifesto.

On Nov. 19, Johnson faced off against Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition Labour Party, in the first televised debate ahead of the upcoming general election. Sparks flew as the pair clashed on a number of issues but the main talking point afterwards was the behavior of a Conservative party Twitter account rather than political issues.

During the debate, the Conservative Campaign Headquarters twitter account (@CCHQPress), changed its name to “factcheckUK” and changed its cover picture from a photograph of Boris Johnson to an image which contained a purple background with a white check mark. The account was described as “Fact checking Labour from CCHQ.”

After causing some outrage on Twitter during the debate, the CCHQPress reverted to its regular appearance afterward.

The move drew scrutiny from independent fact-checking charity Full Fact, which derided the move as “inappropriate and misleading.”

 

 

And it drew criticism in the British media as well. In this clip, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, who posed the questions to Prince Andrew in a recent controversial interview, accuses the Conservative party chairman, James Cleverly, of dystopian behavior. “You dressed up party lines as a fact-check service. That is dystopian,” she said.

In the same clip, Cleverly defends his digital team’s decision to rebrand the Twitter account simply saying that they did it in order to call out The Labour Party’s inaccuracies. “I’m absolutely comfortable with them calling out, when the Labour party put what they know to be complete fabrications in the public domain,” he said. “And we will call them out every time they do it.”

 

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