Rishi Sunak’s X posts flagged as ‘potentially misleading’

Emily Price

The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has had community notes added to his X account three times in the last 24 hours in order to add context to ‘potentially misleading’ posts.

According to X, formerly Twitter, community notes “aim to create a better informed world” by allowing users to add context to a post that could be considered misleading.

If enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a post.

On Wednesday (November 15), community notes were added to the Prime Minister’s X account several times.

The first was attached to a post published at 7:06am in which Mr Sunak claimed to have halved inflation.

The Prime Minister wrote: “In January I made halving inflation this year my top priority. I did that because it is, without a doubt, the best way to ease the cost of living and give families financial security. Today, we have delivered on that pledge.”

A community note was added suggesting that the post was misleading.

It stated: “CPI (a standard way of measuring inflation) has fallen to 4.6% The Government’s goal was to halve CPI from 10.7% last year.

“However the fall in CPI is the responsibility of the Bank of England not the government & recent drops are due to a fall in energy prices not gov policy.”

Later that day at 4:54pm, Mr Sunak posted a thread promising a plan that will include emergency legislation to ensure his flagship asylum policy is not blocked again after the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful.

The Prime Minister said he will end the “merry-go-round” of legal challenges with a law to deem Rwanda a safe country after his plans to “stop the boats” were blocked.

A community note was later added to the post which stated: “It is misleading to mention the European Court of Human Rights here as if the European Convention on Human Rights was the basis of the Supreme Court’s judgment.

“The basis for the judgment was the principle of non-refoulement which is a core principle of all international law.”

The post has been “pinned” to the top of the Prime Minister’s X account.

Also in the same thread, Mr Sunak posted a list of three points that claimed small boat crossings to the UK were down by a third, 20,000 illegal migrants had been returned this year and 50 hotels housing illegal migrants had been closed in the UK.

Context was added to the post with a community note that appeared to dispute the figures.

The community note reads: “According to the government’s own figures, in the year ending June 2023, there were 52,530 irregular migrants detected entering the UK, up 17% from the year ending June 2022, 20,000 returns is still less than in 2013/14/15/16.”

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has demanded an apology from Mr Sunak for wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash on the “ridiculous, pathetic spectacle”.

Supreme Court president Lord Reed ruled there would be a risk of Rwanda returning genuine asylum seekers to face “ill treatment” in the country they had fled.

He made it clear in his summary of the judgment that the ECHR was not the only international treaty relevant to the court’s decision, which also took into account domestic law.

Rwanda

Mr Sunak told Rwandan president Paul Kagame that he remained firmly committed to their asylum partnership.

Lord Reed agreed with the Court of Appeal decision earlier this year that there were “substantial” grounds to believe there was a “real risk” of refugees being returned by Rwanda to their home countries.

Campaigners welcomed the verdict, with the Freedom From Torture charity hailing it as a “victory for reason and compassion”.

Steve Smith, chief executive of the Care4Calais refugee charity, said: “The Supreme Court’s judgment is a victory for humanity.

“Today’s judgment should bring this shameful mark on the UK’s history to a close.”

The legal rulings were based on evidence that Kigali had a “poor human rights record”, citing British police warning Rwandans in the UK of credible plans by the nation’s government to kill them.