Andrew Learmonth: Disinformation is flourishing in Scotland

They shared the hashtag, and then the algorithm did its thing and amplified and spread the tale even further until it was one of the top trends in the UK.
Searches on Google went berserk.

The problem is that the story behind the #BalmoralHotelIncident is complete and utter mince. 

The premise is that Nicola Sturgeon caught her secret lesbian lover – a high ranking diplomat – in bed with another woman in the posh Edinburgh hotel.

So enraged was the First Minister that she threw an iron at her wayward lover.

The details change in some tellings. In one variation, the iron crashes through a window.

But, one thing that all tellers of the tale agree on is that everything’s been hushed up and that measures are in place to stop newspapers, hotel staff and police from telling the truth.

It is nonsense. Completely unsubstantiated. Homophobic and misogynist keich.

And yet it has taken a hold.

As far as I can see, the first time it was mentioned on Twitter was on March 27, 2021, the day Alex Salmond launched Alba.

As people questioned the former First Minister’s fitness for office, someone who described themself as a “Patriot CyberNat”, asked, “What about her appropriateness for office given her shenanigans at the Balmoral Hotel – where staff had to call the Polis?”

Days later, a prominent independence activist who joined Alba and rejected the accusation that he was supporting "a party of transphobes," shared a post on Facebook, spreading the rumour, using the hashtag #BalmoralHotelIncident. 

It soon made its way to Twitter, where it was picked up and tweeted by gleeful unionist accounts.

Where the rumour came from is unclear, but why the rumour started is pretty obvious.

Gossip about a political leader being a secret homosexual is a classic piece of disinformation.

For years, Hillary Clinton battled rumours about being a covert lesbian.

“Contrary to what you may hear, I actually like men,” she was forced to say in a 2019 interview.

In his book, My Life, Our Times, Gordon Brown suggested supporters of Tony Blair had spread innuendo about his own sexuality in a bid to try and scupper his leadership bid in the 1994 race to replace John Smith.

The rumours also dogged him for years. 

On Desert Island Discs, Sue Lawley even asked if he was “gay or whether there’s some flaw in your personality that you haven’t made a relationship”

Just this weekend, Mathieu Gallet spoke to The Times about how the rumour linking him with Emmanuel Macron led to paparazzi camping outside his flat.
He believes the story was conceived by Mr Macron’s colleagues in François Hollande’s cabinet, in a bid to stop him becoming President.

However, he believes the reason it took hold was because of prejudice.

That seems a common symptom of successful disinformation.

Last week, just hours after the murder of 19 children and two of their teachers at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Republican Congressman Pete Sessions told the BBC that the killer “wore eye-shade and sometimes wore dresses.”

The killer did not wear eye-shade or dresses.

But in the minutes after news of the massacre first broke, 4chan’s notorious /pol/ board posted an image of a trans woman who slightly resembled Ramos, along with a link to her Reddit profile, and, without evidence, claimed she was the gunman.

The allegation moved quickly from the fringes of the alt-right. Soon it was being amplified by activists and campaigners.

Conservative activist Candace Owens claimed there were photos of the gunman “cross-dressing”, and claimed this was evidence that “there were plenty of signs that he was mentally disturbed”.

From there it was picked up by a number of politicians, one of whom then repeated it on the BBC’s flagship news show, where it wasn’t corrected until the next day.

Congressman Sessions, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, was almost certainly anxious about the calls for gun control that would inevitably follow the slaughter of a classroom full of 10 and 11-year-olds by a man armed with two assault rifles that he’d bought just days after his 18th birthday.

So when he was told that the killer was trans, or a crossdresser, he likely wouldn’t have checked too hard.

Not only does it help move the conversation away from questions about why the law allows a teenager to buy military-grade weaponry and 375 rounds of ammunition, but it does so at the expense of trans people.

There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation around at the moment, and the question of how to tackle it is causing all sorts of problems for governments around the world.

The thing is that there are plenty of scandals in Scotland, and there’s been more than a few cover ups over the years, so you can understand, perhaps, why people are so willing to believe any old rubbish they hear on the internet. 

How do you fix it? How do you deal with bad actors, and trolls and bots which amplify scurrilous rumours?

That’s the question Holyrood’s Covid 19 Recovery Committee are grappling with at the moment.

Good luck to them, because, ultimately, the consequences of not successfully challenging misinformation and disinformation, of allowing it to flourish means much more mince to come.