Could it be true?
Every day between now and the election, Tortoise’s Alexi Mostrous will examine a claim from the campaign trail. Some will be outlandish, some believable. Some might even be true.
On Tuesday, a video of a Labour MP went viral. Rachael Maskell was seen telling a crowd that the UK must “keep going” with mass migration. What did it matter, she asked, “if we have to wait another week for a hospital visit?”. Within a few hours, Maskell’s name had been mentioned more than 9,000 times on Twitter by people like Tommy Robinson, the far-right campaigner, and Darren Grimes, the GB News presenter. But the video looked dodgy. Maskell’s words didn’t match her mouth movements and the BBC logo on screen seemed to keep moving around. Was this the first clear example of AI fakery in the UK election? Actually, no. It turns out the video was real. Maskell really did say those things at a Refugees Welcome Rally in her home city of York. But it happened eight years ago, in 2015. This inconvenient truth didn’t stop accounts like Robinson’s presenting it as a recent comment. AI fakery might grab the headlines, but often it’s the more prosaic types of misinformation that gain the most traction online.
