The War On Truth

Despite receding from public view the problem of fake news may, in fact, have gotten worse now many have not been paying attention. Buzzfeed can exclusively reveal it has uncovered a network of hard left trolls that have continued flooding Twitter with a string of hoaxes and falsehoods in what appears to be a War on Truth.

Their premise is usually a simple and bite-sized “fact” that sits on the verge of plausibility. This makes it easily shareable and, for many, easily believable. What separates them from the usual rabble of truth terrorists is they couch their efforts in realistic screenshots of popular and trustworthy websites.

Laurel Woods Huggard, a propaganda and fake news expert for We Are Lit Media, stated “The absurdist nature of their claims are often attached to people that are larger than life. And in the case of Mike Gapes even larger than that. The average person loves newspapers and believes what they see in them. So these trolls launder their lies through reputable publications like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.”

“These calculated campaigns are engineered to create chaos and seed dissent, all behind the wafer thin veneer of satire. But as we all know it is only really satire if it features a talking animal.”

Two particularly abrasive and aggressive offenders are Twitter users @RebootedStef and @ecoclown. They initially came to prominence with a false post about Chris Leslie urinating into coke cans while his CLP looked on in horror.

Leslie denounced the story as “very fake news” and said he was the victim of a Twitter “pile-on” designed to tarnish his impeccable reputation. “They’re quite sophisticated and people believe them,” Leslie said. “I do think it’s worrying because it’s got echoes of what we’ve seen in other elections,” Leslie finished up with a strange tinkling noise in the background.

This was not the first time the duo were to strike at the heart of Westminster. In November, they used a simple text replacement tool to edit the content of a Guardian article to make it appear as if Jo Swinson was claiming Seamus Milne was a Russian Spy.

The tweet got fewer than 1,000 retweets, but on Facebook, it started to fly. Variations of the fake Guardian story were screenshot and shared endlessly into Facebook feeds and groups and were surely a factor in Jeremy Corbyn’s crushing defeat in December. However, in a bizarre twist of fate, this story presaged the confirmation a month later that Milne was, in fact, working for the Kremlin.

Huggard concludes, “these two individuals have been responsible for an explosion of misinformation and they are not alone. Real newspapers are bound by rigorous fact-checking and carefully curated sourcing and cannot keep up with this tidal wave of mistruths. How can it be fair that these troglodytes, who unlike our fine journalists probably didn’t even go to an Oxbridge university, can publish fabrications with impunity? It is high time we considered making this activity a criminal offence.”

Twitter users @RebootedStef and @Ecoclown created fakes that spread across social media. We have watermarked them to prevent them being shared further.

Some posts even involved macabre fake death announcements of prominent journalists yet shockingly Twitter took no action.

Other posts included direct messages alledgedly sent by former politicians. Mike Gapes has denied ever sending this message.

A Change UK MP was target for a vicious pile-on after one of the pair’s first hoaxes

The attacks on Chris Leslie continued for months

Another doctored article claimed the left-wing site Spiked wrote an endorsement of Mein Kampf. Spiked did not respond to a request for a statement.

Although many of the fakes were political in nature, some were just surreal

Some edited tweets were just designed to humiliate perceived opponents

The pair even sought to undermine trust in the media by label real stories as fake news.

They we even responsible for the famous Ed Balls meme. As always it pays to be critical of everything you see on social media.