“You dressed up party lines as a fact-check service. That is dystopian.”
BBC journalist Emily Maitlis grilled Chairman of the Conservative Party James Cleverly on Newsnight on Tuesday after the Conservative Party’s press office Twitter username was changed to ‘factcheckUK’ during a televised debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.
The account, which has nearly 76,000 users, was used to promote pro-Tory statements pre-fixed with the word “FACT”, which quickly gathered a lot of attention online.
On Newsnight on Tuesday, Maitlis took Cleverly to task for the move, saying: “Your own Conservative press office was pretending to be a fact-check service. You’ve renamed yourself with a credibility tick ‘factcheckUK’. You were misleading the public. You were trying to coat your propaganda as hardened fact… that is dystopian.”
Cleverley defended the decision, saying: “We were calling out the inaccuracies that were coming out during the debtate… we were calling out the Labour Party’s wilful misinformation about the NHS. And every time they do that, we will call it out.”
Two clips of the interaction can be seen below, where it can be seen that Maitlis was not going to let Cleverly off the hook…
.@maitlis: “This is the Conservative press office pretending to be a fact-check service… you were misleading the public.”@JamesCleverly: “We were calling out the inaccuracies that were coming out during the debate"https://t.co/tyeoNZZw7X#Newsnight | #GE2019 | #ITVDebate pic.twitter.com/qOIxTWQa8Z
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 19, 2019
.@maitlis: “You dressed up party lines as a fact-check service. That is dystopian.”
Conservative @JamesCleverly: “We were calling out the Labour Party’s wilful misinformation about the NHS.”https://t.co/tyeoNZZw7X#Newsnight | #ITVdebate pic.twitter.com/9hqsOWy2ZE
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 19, 2019
Meanwhile, Dominic Raab further defended the move on Wednesday morning, saying: “No-one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust”.
"No-one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust"
Conservative Dominic Raab defends rebrand of party Twitter account as 'factcheckUK' during TV debate, calling it an "instant rebuttal mechanism" for "nonsense put around by Labour"https://t.co/HVs6HmvGvr #bbcbreakfast pic.twitter.com/4ZrIwVn8iX
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) November 20, 2019
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