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In the age of universal suffrage, it was one of the earliest, most notorious examples of “fake news” intended to swing an election. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of London’s Daily Mail, had no doubt that it had succeeded. One week after the UK’s October 1924 election, he wrote to his rival, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, claiming that the so-called Zinoviev Letter had cost the Labour party around 100 seats and so contributed to its crushing defeat by the Conservative opposition.
The letter was a forged document which the British communist party, so small as to be all but irrelevant in electoral politics, had supposedly received from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Soviet Comintern. The letter said it was “indispensable to stir up the masses of the British proletariat” and to conduct propaganda in the armed forces so that they could “paralyse all the military preparations of the bourgeoisie”.
One hundred years on, more than 70 countries have held or will hold elections this year, involving about half of the world’s adult population. Some are free, robustly fought contests. Others are empty rituals orchestrated by autocrats. At least in democracies, however, the perception that “fake news”, disinformation and conspiracy theories may influence elections is as widely held as it was in the UK in 1924.
The threat undoubtedly exists, but the impact of “fake news” is sometimes exaggerated. After the 2016 US presidential contest, in which much was made of malign Russian interference on social media, researchers estimated that about 25 per cent of Americans had visited a “fake news” website in a six-week period around the vote.
However, they also found that some 10 per cent of readers had made 60 per cent of the visits. They concluded that “fake news does not crowd out hard news consumption”. In other words, Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton had deeper causes than Russian manipulation — even though the losing Democratic candidate was not wrong to point to “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year”.
With skill and determination, democracies can fight back against “fake news”. A good example is Taiwan’s election in January. Lai Ching-te, candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive party, emerged victorious despite an extensive disinformation campaign mounted from China. Researchers believe that Taiwan’s election officials, local media and fact checkers did a good job in neutralising the Chinese offensive.
At times, “fake news” seems unnecessary to achieve the desired result. In the UK’s 2019 election, the Conservatives doctored a video to imply that Sir Keir Starmer could not answer a question about Brexit. They also briefly relabelled their official Twitter account “factcheckUK” to suggest it was an independent fact-checking service. It was all a bit pointless. British voters were so turned off by Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s radical leftist leader, that the Conservatives were assured of victory anyway.
The 1924 election provides a similar lesson not to overstate the role of “fake news”. In Labour myth, the contest is remembered as a dastardly example of the Tories working hand in glove with the secret services and the rightwing press to discredit the left. Exhibit One is the Zinoviev Letter, and Exhibit Two is the Daily Mail’s banner headline published on October 25, four days before the election: “Civil war plot by Socialists’ masters.”
How the Daily Mail acquired a copy of the letter, which was probably written by a former tsarist officer, has never been definitively established. But Gill Bennett, a historian who wrote the most authoritative account of the affair, said in a 2018 book that military officers, intelligence chiefs, civil servants, politicians and newspaper proprietors with Conservative leanings “had motive and opportunity to get hold of the letter and make sure it was publicised”.
She and other historians agree, however, that the letter played at best a minor role in the Conservative victory in 1924. Labour actually won 1mn more votes than in the general election the previous year. The decisive factors were the Tories’ success in overcoming an internal split and a collapse in the Liberal vote. The Liberals contested far fewer constituencies than in 1923, partly because David Lloyd George refused to use his personal political fund to pay for a bigger campaign.
None of this excuses the Conservatives’ dirty tricks in 1924. But our well-founded dislike of “fake news” should not make us exaggerate its importance or fear that democracies are helpless in the face of it.
tony.barber@ft.com
