The photo of a sick 4-year-old boy lying on the floor of an overcrowded hospital in Yorkshire because there were no beds available for him sent a jolt through the British election.
A local newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Post, had published a story about the episode on Sunday after the boy’s mother reached out to share her outrage about the experience. The hospital, Leeds General Infirmary, confirmed that the incident had indeed happened, and issued an official apology.
Then on Monday, three days before Britain’s general election, the story was splashed on the front page of The Daily Mirror, a left-leaning tabloid, to criticize the health care policies of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. Later on Monday, Mr. Johnson was shown the photo in an awkward television interview with ITV that went viral online.
It all seemed like a fairly normal cycle of political outrage.
But since Monday evening, journalists and researchers have tracked what appears to be a social media campaign to discredit the boy’s family. A message was shared widely on Facebook and Twitter from somebody claiming to know a nurse at the hospital who said the mother had staged the photo.
“Very interesting,” the message reads. “A good friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital.” It then goes on to say that the mother had deliberately put the boy on the floor.
It is not clear how widely the false claims were seen, especially because Facebook does not provide a way to track messages posted inside private accounts and groups. Many people posted the message as a screen shot, which also cannot be discovered through a word search. Among those sharing the message were public figures including Allison Pearson, a columnist for The Telegraph, and Kevin Pietersen, a retired cricket star.
The episode highlights how questionable material can spread at the speed of a click, raising further concerns about the role of social media in elections. In this cycle of British campaigning, internet manipulation tactics have gone mainstream, adopted even by the political parties and candidates themselves, particularly the Conservative Party and Mr. Johnson.
At the Yorkshire Evening Post, the experience has been deflating. The reporter who wrote the initial story, Daniel Sheridan, followed standard journalistic techniques to confirm the accuracy of the information, including getting the statement from the hospital.
By Monday night, James Mitchinson, the editor who oversees the newsroom, said he had started to get messages from readers questioning the authenticity of the story, based on what they had read online. One woman wrote to him to say that she would no longer read the newspaper even though she had been a subscriber for many years.
“We’re living in strange times,” he added, “where for whatever reason people are drawn to social media messages and come to trust them more than they trust their local newspaper who they have had a trusted relationship with probably all their lives.”
By Tuesday night, the paper had published its own response, with a blazing headline on the front page: “Don’t Be Fooled By Fake News.”
— source nytimes.com | Adam Satariano | Dec. 10, 2019