THE Conservatives have been warned by the Electoral Commission that they must show “transparency and integrity” after rebranding their press office’s official Twitter account to give the appearance of a neutral fact-checking organisation.
During the leadership debate on ITV on Tuesday night the Tory press account, named CCHQ, changed the primary part of its on-screen name to FactcheckUK, and its logo to a purple tick, while tweeting supportive material about current Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Twitter issued a statement saying the party had “misled” people and promised “decisive corrective action” if any similar incident occurred. The company does not appear to have taken any action over this incident.
Twitter’s rules forbid users with “verified” accounts from attempting to fool others by changing their names or descriptions.
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The Electoral Commission said: “Voters are entitled to transparency and integrity from campaigners in the lead-up to an election so they have the information they need to decide for themselves how to vote.
“The Electoral Commission seeks to deliver transparency to the public through the political finance rules. While we do not have a role in regulating election campaign content, we repeat our call to all campaigners to undertake their vital role responsibly and to support campaigning transparency.”
The Labour Party and the LibDems slammed the Tory move arguing it showed the party were duplicitous and could not be trusted.
The Labour Party tweeted: “The Conservatives’ laughable attempt to dupe those watching the #ITVDebate by renaming
their twitter account shows you can’t trust a word they say.”
Layla Moran, the LibDem education spokeswoman, called it a move “straight out of Donald Trump or Putin’s playbook”.
But Tory Dominic Raab said the party had focused on challenging “nonsense” from Corbyn during the debate.
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Speaking to BBC Radio 4, the Foreign Secretary said: “I think the account was very clearly linked to CCHQ ... but we’re rebutting the nonsense that systematically gets put out about the Conservative position so that voters know the truth.”
Pressed on whether the party would use the tactic again, he added: “We’ll look at the advice from Twitter. But we will make no apology for having instant rebuttal of the nonsense and lies.”
Will Moy of Full Fact, an independent fact-checking organisation, said the press office’s actions had been “misleading and inappropriate”. He asked: “Why would a self-respecting party pretend to do that?”
He said he was “absolutely comfortable” with the party “calling out when the Labour Party put what they know to be complete fabrications in the public domain”.
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