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Dear Friend,
This week we have published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and Conservative Party Chair, Greg Hands. Our letter was about misleading claims they made that the Labour Party is pledging to open Britain’s borders to 100,000 more migrants each year.
In the letter—already featured in the Guardian, Independent and the Times—we warn that “spreading misinformation about political opponents is damaging to our democracy” and that the repetition of this claim is “unacceptable” and “deeply disappointing”.
Full Fact is now publicly calling on the Conservative Party to “show leadership and not initiate or contribute to the spread of misleading claims, including about other political parties”. Can you tweet Rishi Sunak and Greg Hands to let them know you agree?
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FACT CHECKS
The recent conflict in Israel and Gaza has seen shocking videos of the violence and its aftermath being shared on social media. But some of that has been mislabelled and actually shows conflict elsewhere, events in other countries or, in some cases, video game footage.
Emotive footage that shocks us, backs up our worldview or generates other strong feelings can be particularly difficult to look at critically. But in times like these it’s extra important to make sure we’re not sharing misinformation.
Read our guide covering plausibility, finding original footage, how to spot fake subtitles and video game footage, and more.
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During her speech at Labour’s National Annual Women’s Conference on 7 October, shadow women and equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds MP criticised the Conservative government’s record on equal pay, saying: “Who allowed the gender pay gap to rise? The Tories did.”
Ms Dodds hasn’t explained what this claim is based on. Office for National Statistics data shows both the overall gender pay gap and gap among full-time workers have fallen since the Conservatives took office in 2010, and also since 2015 and 2019. There has been a rise in the gap among full-time workers since 2020, though there’s some uncertainty over this data due to the pandemic. Other figures show a slight rise in the gap at larger employers since 2017, but this data doesn’t cover smaller employers as the ONS figures do.
We contacted Ms Dodds to ask her what data her claim was based on and what time period it referred to, but have not received a response.
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There is no evidence that an audio clip which has gone viral on X (formerly Twitter), allegedly of Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer swearing at a member of his staff, is genuine.
The clip, which has over 1.5 million views at the time of writing and has also been shared on Facebook, was posted as the Labour party conference began.
Labour sources and Conservative MPs both say the clip was faked, while the X account which shared it has previously published other unevidenced claims about Mr Starmer. The clip may have been generated by artificial intelligence, but we don’t know that for sure.
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MORE FACT CHECKS
Also this week...
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Stop the spread of bad information
Find these updates useful? We'd be incredibly grateful if you could share our fact checks and help more people access good information.
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All the best,
Team Full Fact
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