A medical secretary has claimed that her Facebook account was hacked after it was used to post false information claiming that a photograph of an ill boy on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was staged for political purposes.

The woman denied posting the allegation that four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr’s mother placed him on the floor specifically to take the picture which became symbolic of the NHS’s troubles after it appeared on the front page of Monday’s Daily Mirror.

“I was hacked. I am not a nurse and I certainly don’t know anyone in Leeds,” said the woman, whose name the Guardian is withholding because she says she has received death threats. “I’ve had to delete everything as I have had death threats to myself and my children.”

The original viral post on the medical secretary’s Facebook account said, “I am a nurse myself” and cited a “good friend of mine” at Leeds General. It claimed the boy in the photo “was in fact put there by his mother who then took photos on her mobile phone and then uploaded it to media outlets”. The post dismissed the pictures of the ill boy as “another Momentum propaganda story”, despite the fact the hospital had already apologised for his treatment.

Timeline Hospital photo row timeline 3 December 2019 Four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr is taken to his GP with suspected pneumonia. The GP calls an ambulance and Jack arrives in A&E, where he is initially given a bed and oxygen.

4 December 2019 Early: Jack’s bed is requisitioned for another patient and he is moved into a treatment room with a chair and no bed. When he asks to sleep, his mother Sarah makes a pile of coats for him to lie on.

8 December 2019 8.21pm: The Mirror publishes Sarah Williment’s photos of Jack, under the headline “Little boy with suspected pneumonia forced to sleep on hospital floor due to lack of beds”. The chief of medicine at Leeds General apologises to the family.

9 December 2019 12.42pm: ITV reporter Joe Pike tries to show Boris Johnson the picture of Willment-Barr. Johnson initially declines to look, then pockets the reporter’s phone.

9 December 2019 Before 8pm: A medical secretary based in Worthing says her Facebook account was hacked when she accepted a friend request from someone she didn’t know. Whether it is hacked or not, whoever controls the account posts a claim that a “a good friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds” who saw the Williment-Barr pictures being staged. The claim rapidly goes viral.

9 December 2019 8.08pm: The “senior nursing sister” claim is reposted to Twitter for the first time.

9 December 2019 8.43pm: Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson retweets the “senior nursing sister” claim for the first time.

10 December 2019 Morning: The medical secretary deletes her Facebook account.

10 December 2019 9:47am: The medical secretary tells the Guardian the “senior nursing sister” story was posted by a hacker. She says she has received death threats and is feeling suicidal as a result of it going viral. She does not report the hack to the police.

10 December 2019 2.46pm: Boris Johnson drives a union jack-covered JCB through a wall with the word GRIDLOCK written on it. Show Hide

The medical secretary said she had tried to report the hack of her Facebook account to the advice service Action Fraud, although this claim could not be verified.

Claims that the photo was staged spread rapidly across social media and messaging services on Monday night, potentially reaching millions of people after being amplified by celebrities, journalists, and at least five Conservative candidates.

The row over Jack’s treatment has become a central part of the election campaign, with Boris Johnson being criticised for repeatedly refusing to look at the photograph he was shown by a journalist during an interview on Monday.

Boris Johnson refuses to look at picture of boy sleeping on hospital floor – video

Despite the claim that the photo was staged having been acknowledged as false, it has continued to spread on both Facebook and Twitter, largely through individual low-follower accounts cutting and pasting the original text to share with their friends.

One version, posted by a man who claims to work for the British army’s intelligence corps, has received 2,000 shares on Facebook; another, from a person saying they were a former soldier, has received a further 500.

The same claim was shared on Twitter, where it was spread by much more significant accounts. The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson retweeted screenshots of the Facebook page to her followers twice, telling them “I presume this is genuine”, and adding later that the photo was “100% faked”. Her posts have received thousands of retweets between them.

According to the researcher Marc Owen Jones, Pearson is “perhaps the most influential proponent of the faked floor theory”, although a tweet from the former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen sent to Piers Morgan may have been seen by more people as a one-off.

While many of the users who initially posted the claims to Twitter shared it with identical wording, there is little indication that the false narrative is being artificially boosted by automated accounts.

Twitter metadata shows the vast majority of the tweets were posted through the social network’s website or smartphone apps, and the accounts sharing them overwhelmingly appear to be those of real people with an interest in politics.

Despite claims of a staged photo, Leeds General Infirmary has confirmed that Jack did suffer due to an exceptionally busy week.

“Our hospitals are extremely busy at the moment and we are very sorry that Jack’s family had a long wait in our emergency department,” said Dr Yvette Oade, the chief medical officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS trust.

“We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed. This falls below our usual high standards, and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.”

It emerged on Tuesday that five Tory candidates had used social media to spread the idea that the story may have been a hoax or that his mother had faked it.

Michael Fabricant, Scott Benton and Wendy Maisey all shared a screenshot of the claims circulating on rightwing social media accounts. Maisey, standing in Warrington North, tweeted: “Disgusting what some people will do to sway an election,” and shared the social media comment from the original Facebook account.



Former MP Karl McCartney, who is standing in his former seat of Lincoln, shared rightwing supporter and former Ukip deputy chair Jay Beecher’s tweets in which he said he was in direct touch with a nurse from the hospital who could dispel the story. McCartney has already been forced to apologise in this campaign for retweeting posts from former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and far-right commentator Katie Hopkins, which contained anti-Muslim and antisemitic material.

Scott Benton, standing in Blackpool South, retweeted a comment that suggested Labour must have seen the polls and then faked the incident. He then deleted the tweet.

Neva Novaky, standing in Garston and Halewood, commenting on a radio report about people claiming it was a hoax, tweeted: “We should investigate this.”