From Concepta Cassar: Social media prank masquerading as news gets picked up as news…
A Prankster Convinced the Media that Glastonbury was 74% Tory
by Abi Wilkinson
VPoint News
July 1, 2015
The ‘fact’ that 74% of Glastonbury attendees voted Tory, and 13% voted Ukip, was shared widely on social media and printed in the Sunday Telegraph. However, these statistics are entirely false. They originate from a fake Guardian pie chart created by a Twitter prankster. It just shows how easy it is for lies to spread on social media.
On Friday evening, Twitter user @PrayForPatrick tweeted an infographic that claimed to show some surprising statistics about the voting preferences of Glastonbury attendees.
Allegedly, an on-site poll had found that 74% of Glastonbury-goers voted Conservative in the 2015 general election and 13% voted Ukip – making the festival more right-wing that the constituency of Chelsea and Fulham.
The graphic featured the Guardian’s logo and similar, though not identical, fonts to those commonly used by the newspaper. This was apparently enough to convince many people that the unlikely stats were authentic, even though the chart included a glaring spelling error: “attendeees”. The capitalisation of “UKIP” is also out of line with Guardian house style.
The myth took on a life of its own as other Twitter users began sharing the image independently as well as retweeting Patrick’s original post.
Read the rest of the article here.