I asked our editorial teams which fact checks they felt best represented the work Full Fact do.

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Dear Friend,

In the newsletter this week...
* Did the Conservatives increase taxes 25 times following the 2019 election?
* NHS England gets measles claim wrong
* What role did misinformation play in riots after the Southport stabbings?

But first...

Let me wish you, a happy new year from everyone here at Full Fact.

To mark the new year, I have asked our editorial team, who examine claims in politics, health, and online, to remind me about some of their most memorable fact checks of 2024.

The brief was simple, the fact checks don’t necessarily have to be the most viewed or most discussed but something they felt best represented the work we do at Full Fact.

Our editorial team has had a very busy year, with a general election in the UK, a presidential election in the US, and the launch of a government policy tracker.

The process of fact checking claims can be very labour-intensive and the work of Full Fact’s editorial team makes this newsletter possible.
Best wishes,

Craig, Digital Campaigns Manager—Full Fact


** Did the Conservatives increase taxes 25 times following the 2019 election? ([link removed])
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We start with a fact check from our politics team from almost a year ago in January 2024.

The claim was that the Conservative government had increased taxes 25 times since the 2019 election. This was repeated by several Labour politicians, including the then Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer.

I spoke to Alex, the editor of our politics team, and he said that the team felt really proud of this piece. It required extensive research to track down what was on Labour’s list of 25 tax changes and then to investigate why those might have been included, while other tax changes appeared to be missing. The team then consulted experts to put this list in a more meaningful context.
Read more ([link removed])

More from the politics team
* ITV’s seven-party debate: fact checked ([link removed])

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** NHS England gets measles claim wrong ([link removed])
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Our health team nominated a fact check about how NHS England claimed incorrectly in January 2024 that 3.4 million children were “unprotected” against measles.

The 3.4 million figure was widely quoted—across the media, in Parliament and beyond. An investigation by Full Fact ([link removed]) revealed that the figure is actually an upper estimate of the number of children aged 1-15 who might have missed at least one MMR vaccine dose.

It took almost five months for NHS England to correct the claim, which they did on 22 May 22. Leo from our health team wrote: “The pandemic showed why it’s so important that people feel they can trust the information they get from public health bodies. But in order to be trusted, the NHS must act in a trustworthy way. This is one of the three pillars in the Office for Statistics Regulation’s Code of Practice for Statistics.”

More from the health team
* You do not inhale a credit card’s worth of microplastic every week ([link removed])

Read more ([link removed])
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Support Full Fact

As a registered charity, Full Fact relies on donations from the public to support our independent, impartial fact checking and campaigning work.

Please support Full Fact by donating £10.

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** What role did misinformation play in riots after the Southport stabbings? ([link removed])
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Our online team nominated their coverage of the riots following the Southport stabbings in August. Full Fact concluded the riots were partially fuelled ([link removed]) by misinformation.

The team worked in the days and weeks after the riots to identify several other claims as false or misleading, including one that claimed to show Sikhs and Hindus in London protesting against illegal immigration ([link removed]) .

This fact check required extensive use of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), or making use of publicly available images and data to check the accuracy of a claim.

More from the online team
* Amazon Alexa users given false information attributed to Full Fact’s fact checks ([link removed])
* Amazon’s Alexa has been giving more incorrect answers attributed to fact checkers ([link removed])

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Stop the spread of bad information

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All the best,
Team Full Fact


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