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REPORT
UK public as concerned by the spread of misinformation as immigration and Brexit and the EU
Earlier this year, in collaboration with Ipsos MORI, Full Fact set out to better understand public opinion on bad information and the damage it does.
Our research found that the UK public is as concerned by the spread of misinformation as it is by issues such as immigration and Brexit.
Our data shows levels of public concern were comparable to fair wages and low pay, crime, law and order, Brexit, the Common Market and the EU and immigration.
We also found when specifically asked if they are worried about the spread of misinformation, 3 in 4 UK adults agreed, and that more people see the spread of misinformation as a top issue in the UK than taxation.
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FACT CHECK
MailOnline muddles professorship ethnicity figures
A MailOnline article claimed that research had found that black people hold 3.5% of professor posts in British universities. But this confuses the facts and isn’t true.
In 2018/19, The Royal Society found that 3.5% of black academic staff working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) were professors - not that 3.5% of professors were black. By comparison 11.9% of white academic staff working in STEM were professors.
The Royal Society’s figures show that of the 11,895 STEM academics working at the F1 Professor level with a known ethnicity, just 65 (0.5%) were black.
While parts of MailOnline’s report may have given the impression that black people are slightly overrepresented among UK professors, the truth is they are significantly underrepresented.
We’re grateful to MailOnline for promptly correcting its article after we explained the issue.
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FACT CHECK
Most police have not been found guilty of sexual misconduct
On BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, Aisha Gill, Professor of Criminology at the University of Roehampton, said that most police officers had been found guilty of sexual misconduct while wearing uniform.
A reader asked us to look into this claim.
We contacted Professor Gill, who confirmed that she had meant to use a different statistic: that 52% of police officers who were found to have committed sexual misconduct kept their jobs.
This figure seems to originate from a Byline Times report in September, which claimed that 43 out of 83 Metropolitan Police officers kept their jobs after being found to have committed sexual misconduct between 2017 and 2020.
While we’ve not assessed the Byline Times’s statistics, it’s clear they do not refer to the proportion of police officers found to have committed sexual misconduct.
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MORE FACT CHECKS
Also this week...
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All the best,
Team Full Fact
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