False stories about incident being staged

Then, the same evening, the second misleading narrative took hold. A flurry of tweets began, boosting two stories that were eerily written using the same wording.

The first and most popular claimed to be sourced from a senior nurse who worked at the hospital, though it got the name of it wrong. It said that the photo had been staged by Jack’s mother, and that he immediately got back on a trolley after it was taken.

The second, which appeared to start slightly late, was credited to a paediatric nurse. It used a host of medical jargon to definitively suggest that no child would be treated in such a way, and that therefore the image was either fake or misleading.

In both cases, a flurry of accounts took the text of the tweet and re-shared it as if it was their own. It also made its way onto Twitter, where it was similarly shared without context and as if it was new.

Taken together, the story was shared tens of thousands of times onto an array of different social media sites. While some speculated about the role of bots, many of the accounts that were sharing it did seem to be real.

It didn’t matter that the hospital confirmed the incident happened and apologised to the family, or that the nurses who supposedly served as the source for either story were anonymous and almost certainly not real. The story was shared as if it was fact and was amplified by Conservative MPs and senior journalists.

In some cases, those people have taken down those tweets. But others are still live, and still being interacted with by readers.