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. In its report, the SMF says: 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. …