Videos making false claims about government curbs on personal freedoms, bogus taxes and fines and even fictional spats between the Royal Family and politicians are still spreading widely on social media, three months after a Full Fact investigation exposed the problem.
Since late September we’ve fact checked at least 45 new claims in this format, ranging from supposed government plans for nighttime curfews to false claims about “NHS access cards” and even a 500 “Christmas decoration tax”.
While such claims may sound obviously false to some, Full Fact has found that these videos have been viewed millions of times and are being shared widely across different social media platforms.
Accounts sharing these claims are regularly deleted, so we’ve not been able to produce a reliable estimate of their total reach. But our analysis of just four Facebook pages and four TikTok accounts we’ve found sharing these claims reveals that the dozens of misleading videos they have posted have racked up more than 8.4 million views between them, many since our investigation in September.
We’ve identified at least 163,000 shares of the 45 new claims we’ve fact checked, though this is based only on a sample of the accounts sharing the claims and the true total is likely to be much higher.
After we got in touch with TikTok about the four accounts sharing such videos on its platform which we analysed, it told us all had been removed for violating its Community Guidelines on harmfully misleading...
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