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Social media was not as influential as in 2017 but still proved vital in the election

If you had believed what you read on the Twittersphere on Thursday afternoon, it looked as if Jeremy Corbyn was heading for a stonking Labour victory.

The social media platform beloved by student activists, the media and London’s chattering classes was on fire with reports of blockbuster youth turnout and tightening last-minute polls which pointed to a shock upset from the firebrand Labour leader.

That impression couldn’t have been more incorrect – a fitting tribute to the swelling tide of misinformation and fake news which characterised a bitterly fought election campaign.

Almost two thirds of Britons say they see fake news frequently, and no social network allows news to go viral more quickly, or to reach more reporters and politicians, than Twitter.

Now that Labour’s dreams of a social media-fuelled surge at the polls have ended in defeat by Boris Johnson, what impact did Twitter have on an election plagued by blatant lies and half truths which have circulated so rapidly?

“Twitter has been less influential in this election than 2017, in that the Tories have used it better and learned important lessons,” says Rob Wilson, a former Conservative minister and party veteran. “It still has produced plenty of fake news, or repeated it, but most people do understand that it’s an unrepresentative bubble.”

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Even so, Twitter was ground zero for some of the election’s most grievous falsehoods. It was on Twitter that journalists repeated an untrue claim about a Tory aide being “whacked” by a Labour activist outside a hospital in Leeds, where a sick child had been photographed lying on the floor. Later, numerous Twitter accounts, possibly automated, sent out identical messages attempting to rubbish the story.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives temporarily disguised one of their official Twitter accounts as a fact-checking service, earning a sharp warning from Twitter. Many voters were fooled by a tweet supposedly written by Jeremy Corbyn which depicted him as sympathetic to the London Bridge attacker – and which was reportedly cited on doorsteps.

Some of the smears on Twitter have been downright odd. One was a bizarre and untrue story about Jo Swinson, the ex-leader of the Liberal Democrats, killing squirrels by shooting stones at them. The story was not confined to the digital realm: one activist told The Telegraph his fellow canvassers had been asked about it on the doorstep.

“Because she has been so unpleasant, so self-serving, I put the doubt to one side,” recalls one voter who retweeted the news, with a comment: “I’ve long suspected she wasn’t right in the head. This confirms it.”

Twitter has not been idle. Just before the election was called, it launched a new tool for users to report false voting instructions. It offered security training to candidates, improved AI scanning technology and even banned election ads.

“These decisions were made on principle,” says Katy Minshall, Twitter’s UK head of public policy. “We believe political reach should be earned, not bought.” She says the company has “thousands of people” supporting safety, but will not specify a number for the UK.

Renée DiResta, a Mozilla Foundation fellow studying online misinformation, believes Twitter has “made a lot of progress since 2016”, praising its “concerted effort” to build investigation teams and AI detection tools, as well as its sharing of forensic data.

The Oxford Internet Institute said users were sharing more links to mainstream outlets than junk news, with 57pc of all links coming from “professional” news services.

At the same time, Twitter’s enforcement of its policies has been questionable. The Tories’ fact-checking stunt was clearly against its rules, but the company let them off with a warning.

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Minshall declined to explain why, saying the company wants to preserve “healthy discourse between parties, candidates and their electorate”. On polling day, it removed a viral tweet which described how to vote on the grounds that it was “false”, only to recant and restore it.

“We see [the ad ban] as a bit of a wait and see,” says Ellen Judson, a researcher at the think tank Demos. “[Sometimes] they’ll say something is happening and then it won’t happen.”

A bigger problem is that Twitter is structurally biased towards spreading information regardless of truth, making it easy to spread rumours but difficult to retract. “Getting [correct] information out to the same people who saw the initial misinformation is a real challenge,” says Judson.

DiResta adds that Twitter could “in theory” be redesigned to slow things down by putting more “friction” into the sharing process, but has not done so.

Ultimately, Twitter does not exist in a vacuum. The fake Corbyn tweets were created on 4chan, anonymous discussion board. The fake hospital debunking appeared on Facebook. Most importantly, much of the worst disinformation was spread by politicians, their outriders and the press.

Strategists brought on board by the Conservatives for 2019 have described their work as the “battle for thumbs”, with one, Ben Guerin, saying: “We’re talking anger, excitement, pride, fear. Your content should be relating to one of these emotions for anyone to give a damn.”

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Perhaps that’s why both main parties felt safe concocting nearly fictitious estimates of the costs and benefits of a Corbyn government.

“This is an election problem, not a tech problem,” says Stephen Coleman, a professor of political communication at the University of Leeds. “Parties know they can act with relative impunity. They know that they can deal with any reputational damage because they’re going to get more out of it.”

He says the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office must be given more power to “hit people hard” if they spread “false rumours”, instead of leaving that task to social networks.

Such a crackdown might require a new equivalent of the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883, which outlawed bribing voters and imposed spending limits.

But why would any government want to outlaw tactics that helped it gain power, or that might help it keep power?

Without a party agreement, of which this election provided no sign, social networks such as Twitter will continue to be forced into an ill-fitting role as Britain’s reluctant regulators.