Nearly 90% of Tory adverts misleading, compared to none for Labour

An independent and non-partisan campaign group has found that nearly 90% of all adverts by the Conservative are misleading, while not a single advert produced by Labour has caused concern. Photo: Facebook - Credit: Archant

A global organisation that tackles disinformation online has found that nearly 90% of all adverts by the Conservatives are misleading, while not a single advert produced by Labour has caused concern.

A global organisation that tackles disinformation online analysed every ad promoted by the three main political parties on Facebook in the first four days of December.

It found 5,592 adverts ran by the Tories (88%) featured claims which had already been flagged up by independent fact-checking organisations as being either not correct or not fully correct.

At the same time, the group found Labour didn’t run a single advert that had a misleading claim.

The Liberal Democrats had run hundreds of potentially misleading ads – namely to do with unlabelled graphs or failing to indicate source data for quoted statistics.

By holding back on advertising during the beginning of the election campaign, and then flooding social media with thousands of highly personalised and misleading adverts, the Tories seem to be adopting a similar tactic in this election campaign to the one ran by Vote Leave in the 2016 EU referendum campaign.

Some of the lies the Tories are running with include incorrectly complaining that Labour would spend £1.2 trillion at a cost of £2,400 to every household, which was contained within 4,028 ads.

Those sums are significantly higher than analysis of Labour’s plans by more than 160 economists who agree the manifesto is fully costed and will boost the economy.

Again, Labour did not run a single advert with a misleading claim.

READ MORE: Dominic Raab and Iain Duncan Smith both within two points of losing their seats READ MORE: Could Boris Johnson lose his seat? If Lib Dems and Greens pull together, definitelyFirst Draft also found 500 ads which ran with the widely criticised claim that the Tories will create 50,000 more nurses if they win the general election, though they include 19,000 already employed in that figure.

Will Moy, chief executive of Full Fact, said “we all deserve better” than these lies.

“This election candidates and campaigns on all sides are asking voters for their trust. Serious parties and politicians should not be recycling debunked claims or targeting individuals with bad information – we all deserve better than that,” he said.

The full report can be found here.