Conservatives accused of tricking people by changing Twitter profile

From Cosmopolitan

During last night's heated debate between Boris Johnson, Conservative Party leader and our current PM, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposing Labour party, the Conservatives came under fire for using Twitter to mislead people... Uh oh. Let me break it down for you.

As the televised discussion played out, the Tory party's official press office account (@CCHQPress) rebranded itself as 'factcheckUK' - which, given that many people use independent fact checking websites to verify claims made by politicians, is pretty shady.

This is what the Tory press office Twitter account usually looks like:

And this is what it changed to during last night's debate (shout out to The Guardian, who were the first to report this and air the god damn receipts):

As you can see, it's not immediately obvious that the account is run by the Conservatives. Many of the tweets, of course, given that they're rival parties, were anti-Labour too – including one which crowned Boris as the clear winner of the debate.

As you might imagine, social media users were not so keen on the stunt... and neither was actual, legitimate fact-checking body Full Fact, who asked Twitter to take down the Tory press office account, while branding the move "inappropriate" and "misleading".

Others, some using the art form of a simple GIF, said how "angry" it had made them:

Since this whole sitch has blown up a tad, Emily Maitlis (who was recently praised for her grilling of Prince Andrew over his friendship with sex offender, Jeremy Epstein) questioned Tory Party chairman James Cleverly on BBC's Newsnight, referring to it as a "dystopian" move.

James responded by saying, "The Twitter handle of the CCHQ press office remained @CCHQPress [the same] so it's clear the nature of the site. The reason we did that is because we were calling out the inaccuracies, the lies, that were coming out during the debate. The NHS is not for sale."

Sure thing, babe. Sure thing. When pressed to say if he knew about the rebranding of the Twitter account, he said, "The digital team have got a remit, I set that remit. I'm absolutely comfortable with them calling out when the Labour Party puts what they know to be complete fabrications in the public domain – and we will call that out every time they do it."

Emily Maitlis then said, "You were trying to coat your propaganda as hardened fact. You dressed up party lines as a fact check service, that is dystopian. You know that people do not trust you, so you have to put something out and call it a fact check."

And yeah, that's pretty much it.

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