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Dear Friend,
In the newsletter this week...
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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.
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Best wishes,
Craig, Digital Campaigns Manager—Full Fact
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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.
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More from the politics team
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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 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.”
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More from the health team
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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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Our online team nominated their coverage of the riots following the Southport stabbings in August. Full Fact concluded the riots were partially fuelled 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.
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.
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More from the online team
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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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