As many of you probably know, there is a currently an anti-immigration movement in the UK, which unsurprisingly is supported by Musk who uses his platform to amplify their messages – messages that are mostly build upon lies and misinformation.

Here is a great article in Prospect Magazine addressing these lies and misinformation.

Immigration myths are everywhere

The media is flooded with outright lies and misleading statistics. Countering the falsehoods is arduous work

The article starts out with a great example

“One in 12 in Londoners is illegal migrant”; this was a front-page splash in the Telegraph, picked up and repeated across not just the right-wing press but in “mainstream” publications and by supposedly respectable but gullible or lazy commentators, not to mention Nigel Farage and Lord Frost, and no doubt other eminent politicians.

In fact, this claim contained not just one mistake but several. It was based not on new research but on a rehash of existing and now outdated estimates for the UK’s undocumented population. It took the upper limit of a wide estimate as fact—a more accurate description of this estimate would have been “between 1 in 13 and 1 in 20”.

Worse still, it omitted to note that the higher estimates include a large number of people who have indefinite leave to remain, and so are not, and in most cases never have been, irregular migrants, as well as children born in the UK, who may indeed be irregular but are most certainly not migrants.

Following my complaints to Ipso, the press regulator, the Telegraph and others corrected the story, albeit inadequately, and in small print on the inside pages. Ipso has the power to require them to publish a front-page correction, and have done so in the past; but their ruling will not come for some months.

There is no doubt that this is part of a broader strategy; the author of the Telegraph story, Sam Ashworth-Hayes, is not a “journalist” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but an anti-immigration zealot, whose screeds usually appear on the Opinion page and who is part of a broader network of young right-wing activists.

The playbook is simple, drawn partly from the US, but adapted to the more centralised UK media landscape, where there is less of a clear firewall between “old” media and more overtly propagandistic outlets such as GB News, with many commentators featuring in both. Flood the zone with a mixture of lies, half-truths, misleading claims and statistics taken out of context, often sourced from “thinktanks” with little or no actual expertise. By the time these are belatedly corrected, or put in context, move on.

People like Jonathan Portes, who wrote this article, is fighting the good fight, but it is hard to counter lies and especially misinformation. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it – it just means that we need to be aware of the limits, and make sure to take a multi-pronged approach while fighting this.