This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Story about nurse posted on MP’s social media accounts is ‘fictional’
Last month a story about a nurse called Maya and her struggle to find affordable housing was posted on Labour MP Sureena Brackenridge’s social media accounts, alongside an image of a woman in scrubs and a young girl in school uniform standing in front of a terraced house.
The posts on June 25 explained that Maya was “working in a busy city hospital” and that “for years” her “life was measured in short-term tenancy agreements”. The post said “this is the reality for millions of working people” and then, quoting recent housing construction figures, added: “Recently, however, the landscape has begun to shift in a way that offers real, tangible hope to people like Maya.”
But “Maya” isn’t real, and the image published alongside the posts appears to have been made using AI.
This wasn’t made clear in the original posts on X or Facebook, where one user even commented to wish Maya luck. It’s therefore possible some voters may have seen this and mistakenly thought it depicted a real person and events.
After we spotted this post with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools and contacted Ms Brackenridge, the X post was deleted and the other one on Facebook was edited to say: “Maya is fictional, but this is the reality for millions of working people.”
Ms Brackenridge told Full Fact: “I’ve been made aware of a post undertaken by a member of my staff. I have been made aware the intention was to share policy news, explored through a narrative of how this would feel for a person.”
She added: “I believe firmly in transparency and accessibility. There was not any intention to mislead, but rather an attempt to use technology to present policy in an accessible way.”
Ms Brackenridge also told us she had enacted “procedures to ensure this never happens again”.
The posts appear to be another example of new technology being used in increasingly complex ways in politics and elsewhere. In April we revealed that “illustrative” AI-generated campaign videos posted by a candidate in the Scottish parliamentary elections didn’t show real events.
In this case, Full Fact believes it should have been made clear and obvious in the original posts that this story was fictional and illustrative. We’re grateful to Ms Brackenridge for taking action to rectify this.
The image in the post includes a SynthID watermark, an invisible digital watermark which indicates that it was created using Google’s AI tools.
This can’t definitively tell us if an image was entirely fabricated with AI, or if a real image has instead been edited, potentially in quite a minor way such as brightening it. But in this case there are also a number of visual clues that the image isn’t real, including the blurry text on the wheelie bins and the uniform logos, and the fact that proportions of the front door don’t look quite right.
Sir Keir Starmer’s claim about Labour majorities
In his first major television interview since announcing his resignation as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer claimed: “We’ve only ever won three majorities, and we won a majority in 2024, therefore 1945, 1997 and 2024 go down as three of the most successful elections in the history of the Labour party.”
But the claim that Labour has “only ever won three majorities” isn’t correct. Labour has won a total of nine majorities, under four different leaders.
It’s not clear from his comments whether Sir Keir was including his own majority in 2024 in his list of Labour’s three majorities—he appeared to mention it separately in the first part of his claim, but then included it in his list of Labour’s three most successful elections.
Before Labour’s most recent election victory in 2024, Labour had only won a majority from opposition on three occasions—in 1945 and 1997, as well as in 1964, which Sir Keir did not mention.
The party has also won majorities while already in government on five occasions—under Clement Attlee in 1950, twice under Harold Wilson in 1966 and 1974 and twice under Sir Tony Blair in 2001 and 2005.
