Owen Smith. Image, BBC, fair use.
On 14th July, ‘The Canary’, a crowd-funded news website, published an article entitled “BREAKING: Labour are trawling your social media to stop you voting in the leadership election”. The piece claimed that Labour’s Procedures Committee “have reportedly announced that anyone who uses the words ‘traitor’, ‘scab’ or ‘scum’ in relation to another member of the party, will automatically be barred from having a vote in the leadership election”. The writer asserted that the party was seeking to exclude up to “50,000” members through this mechanism, and concluded by calling the move “Stalinist”. I am sure that for many members new and old, who had encountered the Labour Compliance Unit’s energetic attempt last year to bar those who did not share “Labour values” from voting, this article confirmed their suspicions. Thousands of them shared it on social media.
There was just one problem: it wasn’t exactly true.
