UNITED KINGDOM
The Cabinet Office has confirmed for the first time that its “fake news unit” will continue working on an ongoing basis.
The United Kingdom’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU), a group of social media experts tasked with combatting the spread of fake news online, is to continue on a permanent basis.
The RRU was launched last April under a six-month pilot scheme funded by the Cabinet Office. That funding ran out in October, but the unit continued to operate, even though no plans were set out for its future.
A spokesman for the unit said it would continue operating following what had been “a successful pilot period”. However, the Cabinet Office was not forthcoming on where the money was coming from; simply saying an announcement would be made “in the coming months”.
In a blog post setting out some of the prevailing digital trends identified by the RRU in 2018, a data journalist in the unit, Oliver Marsh said the team would also work with the Government Communication Service to train Public Servants on how to respond to the “modern news environment”.
Announcing plans for the unit in January 2018, Executive Director for Government Communications, Alex Aiken said it would address the challenges for Government communicators that had arisen as the way news was shared had changed.
“We will build a rapid response social media capability to deal quickly with disinformation and reclaim a fact-based public debate with a new team to lead this work in the Cabinet Office,” Mr Aiken said at the time.
As an example, Mr Marsh said the most widely-shared story relating to the public sector on social media last year was entitled: Urgent national frozen veg recall after nine dead.
The unit characterised this as misinformation because it implied nine people had died recently in the UK when in fact there had been nine deaths across Europe since 2015 caused by listeria, which had been raised as a health risk in frozen vegetable products that were recalled by supermarkets last year.
London, 24 February, 2019
