Apparently False News Attracts Widespread Coverage in UK Newspapers
[Edit Dec 17th 2016] The Economist has covered our analysis here. The Guardian, Independent and Telegraph have now retracted their articles because of our findings. [End]
In a report published by the Hope Not Hate campaign last Monday, researchers Dr Imran Awan and Dr Irene Zempi describe widespread celebration of the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox on the Twitter website during the months of June and July of 2016.
The findings of the report do not appear to stand up to fact-checking. Unfortunately national newspapers have widely reported on the story, taking it at face value:
- At least 25,000 individuals tweeted in celebration of Jo Cox’s murder across a total of more than 50,000 tweets. (The Telegraph, 27 November 2016)
- Jo Cox’s murder inspired 50,000 tweets celebrating killer Thomas Mair (The Independent, 26 November 2016)
- Jo Cox’s murder was followed by 50,000 tweets celebrating her death (The Guardian, 26 November 2016)
These claims appear false. We could find evidence of less than seventy tweets in support of Jo Cox’s murder. This implies that the claims are inflated by a factor of around one thousand.
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Director | Computational Biology | Biotechnology | Omics | ML/DL | Immunotherapy
8 年Fantastic article Martin Goodson !
Fractional Chief People Officer - Working with start/scale ups to build and deliver inspiring People Strategy.
8 年Yes excellent piece - thanks Martin Goodson
Founder & Director of Six33 - I help Analytics & Data Science leaders hire and get hired in the UK & USA
8 年Excellent Article Martin Goodson thank you for sharing!