Abstract
The final days of the Trump presidency and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the issue of political lying. Politicians have historically employed rhetoric and rhetorical spin to embellish the truth and hide damaging information. However, outright lying has traditionally been deemed politically too risky, resulting in resignation and the undermining of public trust. In contrast, recent electoral successes —the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom, and Trump's victory in 2016 and his increased electoral support in 2020—point to an apparent growing tendency for politicians caught lying not to be punished at the ballot box. Using the U.K. Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as its case study, this conceptual paper argues that strategic political lying has been designed as a priming device to set the news agenda. As an effective campaigning tactic “strategic lying” represents a development of political spin—first evident in the mass media era—that has been intensified by the increasing professionalization of political communications and the rise of social media. In doing so, the concept of “strategic lying” theorized here contributes to deepening our understanding of the ongoing evolution of “spin” in the digital era.
Introduction
Accusations that politicians lie are far from new, but the intensity of such accusations has increased. As Koc-Michalska et al. (2020) note, “Democratic public spheres now present people with falsehoods to an extent that is likely unprecedented since the rise of modern media systems” (461). This paper argues that an overt form of “strategic lying” emerged in the United Kingdom during the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the 2019 U.K. general election, and Trump's presidential campaigns, which has taken “spin” to a new level. As summed up by Alastair Campbell, former Press Secretary and Director of Communications to British Prime Minister, Tony Blair:
I am afraid we have entered a post-truth, post-shame world. The Washington Post says Donald Trump tells 12 lies a day. His predecessors would have been hounded out of office for one in a term. Boris Johnson won a referendum by lying. His reward? He was made Foreign Secretary and he is now going to be the Prime Minister. There is no shame!
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In the United Kingdom, the 2016 European Union (EU) Referendum and 2019 election campaigns were the first in which accusations of lies and lying played such a prominent role in British political life, the latter being described as “… fuelled by a political economy of lies” (Fenton 2019: 11). In the United States, President Donald Trump has displayed strategic lying in both the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections. Whilst Donald Trump's lying has become a significant factor in contemporary political communications, and his repetition of the so-called “election steal” has been the defining strategic lie of contemporary politics, we are using the United Kingdom as our case study.
Focussing on the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 U.K. general election, this paper draws on agenda-setting theory and cross-disciplinary literature to theorize the concept of “strategic lying.” In doing so, we suggest it is a new feature of contemporary political campaigning that presents serious challenges to the liberal democratic model. While the impact of political disinformation generally on voting behavior is unresolved (Karpf 2019), we contend recent events in the UK and US demand examination of the phenomenon of “strategic lying” and its impact on democratic engagement.
Liberal democracy is based on the principles of rationality, access to reliable and accurate information, and electoral accountability, as safeguards against corruption and tyranny (Jamieson 2015; Sanders 2009). Without the provision of reliable information, voters are not able to make an informed decision at the ballot box. In “post-factual democracy” (Allen and Stevens 2018: 11), this task becomes harder for electors to perform because political lying undermines trust in politics and politicians and misleads the public. Although there is debate about whether there has ever been an attentive or informed public, the ideal is a central norm of democracy that separates democracy from other political systems (Karpf 2019).
We argue that “strategic lying” is located in the continually transforming practices of “spin.” “Strategic lying” is defined by both its misleading content and its strategic use within the context of a political campaign in which parties battle to control the campaign agenda (Scammell 2014; Semetko et al. 2011). The goal of the “strategic lie” is to set the agenda and prime the issue, achieved firstly by the attention-grabbing lie itself, and secondly by the rebuttal which ensures that the lie is widely disseminated and its salience amplified by social media users and the mainstream media. The essence of the strategic lie is that its veracity, or lack thereof, is irrelevant; indeed, the more outlandish the claim, the more likely it is to attract widespread attention. The Trumpian “election steal” is the most overt example of this phenomenon.
In contrast to other scholars who have attempted to interpret political communications in a “post-truth” environment, we argue that “strategic lying” is not a “radical departure from the idea of political spin” (Garland 2018: 333), but an evolution of political public relations tactics over decades. This evolution has been facilitated by a range of factors, including the expansion and increasing professionalization of political communication professionals (Davis 2007; Lees-Marshment 2001), and the strategic use of traditional and digital media to exploit the intersecting information flows across platforms in a fragmented and polarized political environment (Chadwick 2013).
Agenda Setting, Priming, and Framing
The goal of “strategic lying” is to have an impact on the salience of issues. As Kiousis et al. (2006) explain, this is a central objective for all political public relations messaging, particularly during an election campaign. Agenda-setting theory is a useful tool for discussing this strategy. Agenda-setting research begins with the work of McCombs and Shaw (1972). It refers to the impact that news media have on the salience of issues for the public. The basic premise of this first level of agenda setting is that the more attention the mass media gives an issue or “object,” the more important it becomes in the eyes of the audience. The attention one media outlet pays to an issue also influences others. Intermedia agenda setting theorizes how “the media agenda is shaped by sources and whether a media agenda shape's other media agenda's” (Kim et al. 2016: 4554). As Groshek and Groshek (2013: 16 in Kim et al. 2016: 4554) explain, in the digital age, agenda setting is “no longer conceived of as only a top-down process from mainstream print and broadcast media to audiences.” Instead, intermedia agenda setting is based on interweaving, and interactive information flows between online and traditional mass media, which enables amplification of messages across platforms by different sources, including politicians, citizens, and the media. The related concept of priming, which is often seen as an extension of agenda setting (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007), also deals with the cognitive impacts of news on voters’ opinion formation. By focussing on certain issues an individual's memory is primed by the news coverage, which influences that person's evaluation of political issues and representatives. This process also has an affective dimension, whereby emotions evoked during political campaigns also influence public opinion (Kühne et al. 2011). Second-level or “attribute” agenda setting, which is often likened to framing, means certain aspects of an issue or characteristics of a person are presented in a particular way, to make them more salient, and thereby influence people's perceptions of it. Each of these strategies is employed in the successful execution of “strategic lies.”
Propaganda, Spin, and Strategic Lying
We contend “strategic lying” is an increasingly common form of political campaigning located in the continually transforming practices of “spin.” Spin developed in the public relations industry which sought to turn the use of propaganda into a legitimate form of corporate and political communications.
According to Mearsheimer (2013: 16-7), there is a difference between spinning and lying:
Spinning is when a person telling a story emphasises certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while at the same time, downplaying or ignoring inconvenient facts … The basic story being told is distorted but the facts are not put together so as to tell a false story which would be a lie.
The concept of “spin” first comes into public view in the 1980s, but spin is not new. In the tradition of Aristotle, every politician seeks to put a gloss on his or her plans and achievements, whilst tarnishing those of their opponent. Garland (2018: 334) dates the first public mention of spin to reports of the 1984 televised presidential debate in the United States between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. In the United Kingdom, “spin” approaches were diligently practiced by Mrs. Thatcher and even more so by her successor Tony Blair (Garland 2019). Gaber (2000) usefully cataloged a range of spin techniques employed at the start of this century. In an analysis of government, “spin” Gaber (2000: 508) divided tactics into “overt” or “above-the-line” activities that “would have caused an ‘old fashioned’ press officer no great difficulty” such as “putting your best foot forward” (Fisher 2016); and “covert” or below-the-line approaches. This latter category included a range of deceptive tactics designed to avoid scrutiny and evade the truth.
In theorizing the concept of “strategic lying,” we contend we have identified a new tactic arising out of the phenomenon of spin. The nearest characterization is the concept of “wicked content” developed by Jack (2019: 435). She used the term to describe online content that is “recognizably problematic” (Jack 2019: 435). The term can apply to online material that is circulated “despite the fact that it cannot be verified because it is inaccurate, fabricated, misleading, or unsupported” (Jack 2019: 441). In the context of this paper, “strategic lying” would fall under this broad umbrella; however, we take it one step further by contextualizing “strategic lying” within the framework of the evolution of spin rather than as an ad hoc online phenomenon.
“Strategic lying” is not to be mistaken for “fake news.” This term has become problematic due to its broad application, particularly when used as a form of abuse to attack the mainstream news media (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). “Fake news” usually refers to online content that mimics the form of conventional news, but with an intention to deceive (Waisbord 2018). In contrast, “strategic lying” is a form of rhetorical spin in which the intention to deceive is more important than the appearance of veracity.
A near relative of the strategic lie is the so-called “dead cat strategy” (Clarke et al. 2015: 91). The tactic is invoked when a politician finds him or herself in an indefensible position and introduces an entirely new, usually fictitious or near-fictitious topic, into the political conversation, to divert attention and shift the news agenda back to their preferred topics. The “dead cat” strategy differs from the “strategic lie” in that it is reactive, devised on-the-spot to meet a particular situation, rather than a planned, proactive strategy. The metaphor of the “dead cat” is, who remembers what you were talking about when a dead cat suddenly drops on the table? One example occurred during the U.K.'s 2015 general election when the polls suggested that Labour was ahead; a leading Conservative suddenly accused the Labour leader of planning to scrap Britain's nuclear deterrent. No such plan existed, but the intervention successfully diverted the news agenda away from Labour's polling lead toward one of the Conservatives key campaigning themes of defense and led the Tory-supporting magazine The Spectator to ask: “Is the Tory Trident row an example of a ‘dead cat’ strategy?” 2 In the United States, Lewandowsky et al. (2020) demonstrate how Donald Trump has been using his Twitter posts to distract the mainstream media's attention away from unwelcome news.
Social Media and Strategic Lying
The rise of social media has increased the attractiveness of “strategic lying” as a campaigning tactic. While traditional campaigning methods, including the use of the mainstream media, continue to play a significant part, social media networks enable the “strategic lie” to have an impact far beyond its first iteration. Based on the network logic of social media, the strategic liar can expect his or her misleading messages to be spread widely via social media. A Labour Party report characterized this phenomenon as “distributed spin” in its analysis of what went wrong during the 2019 campaign. They observed:
The Conservatives’ core message “Get Brexit Done” lent itself easily to the “distributed spin” approach, whereby supporters can pick up and disseminate frames and messages and help to shape audiences’ views of the campaign and related news stories (Labour Together 2020: 94).
Based on a large-scale study of Twitter, Vosoughi et al. (2018: 1146) found that in all categories of information, particularly political news, lies spread “significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.”
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In addition to speed and ubiquity, using social media for disseminating lies also enables the sender to more sharply target messages than with the mass media.
Another advantage of social media to the strategic liar is that statements of dubious factual accuracy are now subject to less scrutiny, or at least to a different type of scrutiny, than when the traditional media performed the role as the dominant gatekeeper. Because of the sheer volume of information flowing via social media it is virtually impossible for either experts or specialist journalists to check and challenge every controversial tweet or post. Though, there are “citizen” verifiers who offer a particular form of fact checking. However, this fact checking of any type is of limited utility. Nyhan et al. (2019), for example, found that correcting inaccurate statements online in real time, by either journalists or a fact-checking organization, has little impact on the way people vote. Those sympathetic to the original message reject the correction, discounting it as coming from a partisan source, or they barely notice it in the first place (Garrett and Weeks 2013).
Furthermore, people's memories of corrections faded rapidly although they did retain a memory of the original lie (Swire et al. 2017; Thorson 2016). This tended to occur because the lie reinforced their political position. For voters dissatisfied with the political establishment, “a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests” (Hahl et al. 2018: 3); or as Swire-Thompson et al. (2020: 21) put it: “They might be a liar, but they are my liar.”
By accepting the lie, the voter avoids cognitive dissonance—the emotion people feel when forced to confront information that contradicts their existing understandings and predispositions (Taddicken and Wolff 2020). In turn, cognitive dissonance leads to “confirmation bias,” the bias that arises because people only notice and retain information that reinforces their own worldview (Nickerson 1998). The other key finding in the behavioral science literature is the tried and tested power of repetition, partly arising from simple reinforcement but also because we tend to be cognitive misers (Begg et al. 1992; Taraborelli 2008). In other words, we find it easier to accept information that we have previously processed instead of processing something entirely new. The profound emotional commitment evinced by supporters of President Trump in their belief that the election was “stolen” is a vivid exemplar of these phenomena.
Manifestations of this phenomenon have been linked to the rise in populism (Kalpokas 2019). Dragoman (2014: 102) suggests that claims by populist leaders to “speak for the people” conceal contempt for the people and a related lack of concern for telling them the truth. They can do this, argues Dragoman, because of what he terms “demolatry” (104). This refers to those who follow and believe in the populist leader and are so shorn of any doubt about what he or she says that lies can be disseminated without apparent cost. Alonso-Muñoz and Casero-Ripollés (2018) suggest social media increases the ability of populist leaders to carve out their own political agendas irrespective of the mainstream media. Through direct communication, the populist leader claims to be in an unmediated dialogue with their followers which increases the resonance of the messages, which are then retransmitted through their networks (Ernst et al. 2017).
In the United States, Donald Trump is a dramatic exemplar of a populist leader employing social media with an apparent lack of concern for the truth. In May 2020, the Washington Post ran a headline: “In 1,226 days, President Trump has made 19,128 false or misleading claims”—almost ten a day. While much of his mendacity would be more accurately be described as “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005), there have been occasions when Trump has also mobilized the techniques of strategic lying. For example, the “birther” controversy, and most vividly, his false declaration of victory in the 2020 presidential election based on his unproven assertion that the election had been stolen from him by widespread electoral fraud.
His first most obvious strategic lie came in 2011 when he claimed to have “proof” that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (making him ineligible to occupy the White House)—the so-called “birther” controversy. Trump went as far as to say that he was sending a team of private investigators to Hawaii to learn the truth and promised to donate $5 million to charity if anyone could convince him Mr. Obama was born on U.S. soil. There is no record of any such team arriving in Hawaii, nor of Mr. Trump donating $5 million to charity following the publication of Mr. Obama's birth certificate. Notwithstanding, over the next three years Mr. Trump continued to raise the issue despite the lie being comprehensively rebutted. Trump repeated it not because he expected people to believe it but, as a “strategic lie,” it kept the issue of Obama's origins and his “otherness” on the mainstream news agenda. It is no coincidence that a similar “birther” controversy was mounted against Kamala Harris shortly after she was nominated as Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign. In the last days of the campaign, Trump constantly reiterated the charge that the Democrats could only win by fraudulent means. When Biden overtook Trump in the electoral college, his supporters were primed to believe that this could only have been because of electoral fraud; a belief that only intensified in the days leading up to President Biden's inauguration, culminating in the attack on Congress in January 2021.
Strategic Lying in the United Kingdom: The Brexit Campaign
The strategic lie first surfaced in the United Kingdom, in its current form, during the 2016 referendum on British withdrawal from the European Union and was again used in evidence during the Conservative Party's 2019 general election campaign. Both campaigns were closely associated with the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and his chief advisor, Dominic Cummings. In his lengthy blog about the Brexit campaign, Cummings (2017), who was the strategic brains behind the Leave campaign, claimed much of its success was due to two key slogans: “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead” (blazoned on the side of the Leave campaign bus) and “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU.” Both were good examples of effective campaign communications, but both were serious misrepresentations.
The Brexit examples quoted above are neither fake news, misinformation nor disinformation, but are closer to, though not identical with, Jack's “wicked content” (Jack 2019: 441). Wicked content is a helpful concept in seeking to understand the content of strategic lying but fails to contextualize the “wicked content” that is disseminated as part of a broader agenda-setting strategy. This distinction can be better seen when examining the intricacies of the first of the Leave campaign's key themes, the claim that Britain sent £350 million a week to Brussels as part of its EU contribution, money which could have been better spent on the U.K.'s health service. Remain campaigners insisted this claim was deliberately misleading, if not untrue, and they produced fact-based rebuttals. The “Remainers” argued that the U.K.'s net payments—after taking into account grants, subsidies and rebates—amounted to less than half of the £350 million figure, and there was no guarantee that any savings resulting from the United Kingdom leaving the EU would be spent on the National Health Service (NHS). Leave campaigners tried to refute these accusations by claiming that the U.K.'s annual gross bill did amount to £350 million, even if there were subsequent deductions; and that diverting the EU money to the NHS was an aspiration, not a pledge. However, every time the £350 million claim appeared in the media it reminded the audience of the original claim—not the rebuttals. At the very start of the campaign, Independent Television (ITV) News devoted the first 8 min of their main national news bulletin to an interview with Boris Johnson in which he was robustly challenged about the £350 million claim. In doing so, his rebuttal of the challenges served to prime the issue and maintain its salience by giving prominence to the alleged costs of the U.K.'s membership of the European Union.
Leave supporters also played an active role in the campaign on social media. Hänska and Bauchowitz (2017: 29) found that there were more Leave users on Twitter than Remainers, and they were more active by a factor of 1.75–2.3. However, some of the Leave campaign’s social media success is likely due to bot activity (Keller and Klinger 2019). Leave campaigners dominated on Facebook and Instagram as well. Polonski (2016) found that Leave supporters were also “more passionate, active and outspoken in their online behaviour,” and posted “almost five times” as often as Remainers, contributing to the campaign's success.
It is apposite that the chief strategist of both the Leave campaign in 2016 and the 2019 election, Dominic Cummings, in his analysis of the campaign, did not maintain that the £350 million claim was correct (Cummings 2017). Instead, he said it was designed “to provoke people into argument”; in other words, to keep the news agenda focussed on this issue, irrespective of its veracity. The fact that the claim was inaccurate was clearly beside the point—“strategic lying” is not about conveying information, even highly spun information, it is about making an impact. In his analysis, Cummings wrote: “…we said, ‘we send the EU £350m’ to provoke people into argument. This worked much better than I thought it would.” He modestly describes the claim as “a brilliant communications ploy.” In addition to the £350 million claim, Cummings (2017) also singled out the slogan “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU,” as one that helped shift enough votes to secure victory. In terms of agenda setting, both claims are examples of affective priming, whereby the Leave campaign successfully appealed to emotions of fear and xenophobia.
In a study of Cummings’ methods, Philip Ball, a former editor of the science journal Nature, observed that his approach to campaigning appeared to be “…just spread lies or manipulate videos, say, and then ride out the repercussions” (Ball 2020). Alarmingly, nowhere does Cummings express any concern about the corrosive effect this might have on public trust and the rise of “indeterminacy” about truth claims in political discourse (Vaccari and Chadwick 2020). This indeterminacy results from uncertainty surrounding problematic online information, such as “deepfakes,” which may not deceive people but can erode trust in online news and fuel uncertainty, which can be damaging in high conflict polarized debates (Vaccari and Chadwick 2020: 9).
Each time the Remain campaign sought to rebut statements they found themselves inadvertently rebroadcasting them. Jack (2019: 441) describes this as “unintentional amplification” which in turn leads to another phenomenon identified by Jack, “inadvertent legitimization”—the act of giving credibility to “strategic lies” simply by repeating them. However, from the perspective of strategic political campaigning, there was nothing unintentional or inadvertent about it. The amplification of the Leave campaign's lies by mainstream and social media was anticipated and exploited and reflects an understanding of intermedia agenda setting in the digital era.
Inadvertent legitimization also occurred when journalists sought to challenge these lies. By accepting these statements as potentially factual and therefore worthy of coverage, journalists were guilty of admitting them to what Hallin (1984) describes as the “sphere of legitimate controversy.” In fact, throughout the Brexit campaign (and since), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was criticized for “phoney balance” for giving as much airtime and credibility to the misleading claims made by the Leave campaigners, as they did to rebuttals coming from acknowledged experts or legitimate fact-checking organizations (Gaber 2017). In doing so, the media coverage continued to increase the salience of the false claims in the mind of voters.
Strategic Lying in the United Kingdom: The 2019 General Election
It is a sine qua non of election campaigning in a liberal democracy that parties need strategies to focus the news agenda on their key campaign themes and seek to impose the news frames that suit their electoral strategies (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2017: 71). However, the use of “strategic lying” in the 2019 U.K. general election by the Conservatives took this to a new level, as one contemporary observer described:
Ordinarily, political strategists might work on “spin”: how best to frame figures and news stories to fit a particular narrative. In the 2019 election, that approach has gone out the window. Instead, the Conservatives just lie. Ministers on TV will flatly deny the accepted understanding of how numbers work, bombard journalists with bald falsehoods, and repeat verbatim smears about the Labour leadership.
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Labour was responsible for some misleading claims, but these were no more than the “normal” ad hoc lying or misleading statements that are an almost universal feature of election campaigns. One such example is Labour's claim that if the Conservatives allowed U.S. companies a bigger role in the NHS then the cost of drugs “would increase by £500m a week”—a claim described by one fact-checking organization as “extreme and unrealistic.”
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But overall, the vast majority of campaign lies were disseminated by the Conservative Party. In the penultimate week of the campaign, First Draft fact checkers found that 88 percent of the Conservative Party's Facebook advertisements contained “suspect information” compared to 6.7 percent of Labour's,
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although the Conservatives have challenged this calculation. At the start of the 2019 general election campaign, a news report in the (admittedly Labour-supporting) Daily Mirror carried the headline: “General election: 43 lies, gaffes and scandals that make Boris Johnson unfit to rule.”
During the 2019 campaign, the Conservatives also increased their use of social media, enhancing the dissemination of their campaign. Facebook was the most important platform for reaching would-be Conservative voters. In the 2017 campaign, the Conservatives averaged around three Facebook posts per day, but this rose to nearly 21 in 2019. This compares with an increase in Labour's Facebook postings from around 12 posts per day in 2017 to nearly 18 per day in 2019 (Fletcher 2019).
Via social and traditional media platforms, Conservatives disseminated a series of statements which we would define as “strategic lying.” We identify them as such because they meet the three criteria that we argue distinguish “strategic lying” from other forms of “spin.” First, the repetition of blatant untruths, knowing them to be so but being prepared to take any flak because it was (rightly) adduced that in the post-truth environment this would do little long-term electoral damage. Second, disseminating lies that were aimed at keeping the campaign focus on news agenda items favorable to the Conservatives, or enabling them to divert attention away from something they deemed unhelpful (the “dead cat” stratagem). And third, the misleading statements were deemed sufficiently attention grabbing to ensure amplification by both the mainstream and social media.
Perhaps the clearest example of the agenda-setting function of strategic lying came early in the campaign when the Conservatives issued a doctored video clip showing Labour's EU spokesperson, Keir Starmer, apparently unable to answer a question about his Party's stance on Brexit—even though the original clip shows Starmer confidently answering the question. In a subsequent interview, Tory Chairman James Cleverly tried to laugh off the ruse by telling BBC Breakfast 7 that “everyone could see the video was ‘obviously edited’ because of the music underneath.” Notwithstanding, the doctored clip had over a million views and the subsequent disavowal posts, many more—just one BBC report of the incident received 1.1 million hits on Twitter. Mr. Cleverly was unconcerned about the ruse being revealed because it had achieved its purpose of being widely disseminated and, in the process, reinforcing the narrative that Labour's policy on EU withdrawal was so confused that even the Party's Brexit spokesperson appeared not to know what it was. Not content with the “success” of the first doctored video clip, the Conservatives posted a second edited version later that day.
Another example of “strategic lying” centered on claims about Labour's spending plans. It is a frequent Conservative refrain during elections that Labour is a spendthrift party, but in 2019 these claims were made even before Labour had published its plans. The Conservatives claimed that Labour's spending commitments amounted to a staggering £1.2 trillion. It was a gross exaggeration, as was revealed when Labour later published its spending commitments, but it was made to appear credible by making it £1.2 trillion rather than the more generalized “over £1 trillion.” 8 According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the correct figure was £98 billion. 9 The phoney figure gave the impression that a researcher had diligently gone through Labour's commitments adding up the party's promises—but that had not happened. When challenged, Tory spokespeople admitted they had just cobbled together every Labour policy they could find from 2015 onwards, plus subsequent party conference motions and pronouncements, irrespective of whether or not they formed part of Labour's program (Full-Fact 2019). The claim was reinforced by another made-up figure released by the Conservatives about how much Labour's program would supposedly cost the average taxpayer. 10 Both amounts were mythical and quickly challenged by public finance experts and fact-checking organizations, but the lies remained on the record and succeeded in achieving the Tories’ main aim of establishing and reinforcing the narrative that Labour was a “tax and spend” party.
Boris Johnson himself was responsible for articulating several “strategic lies,” particularly relating to Labour's charge that the health service was not “safe in Tory hands.” On numerous occasions, Johnson asserted the Conservatives were on course to build forty new hospitals, but the fact-checking organizations maintained only six had been approved, and the others were mere aspirations. 11 Also, in the health field, the Prime Minister repeatedly said the government would be recruiting 50,000 additional nurses; but neutral fact checkers pointed out this figure included 19,000 currently employed nurses, who the Tories hoped would be dissuaded from leaving the NHS (Full-Fact 2019).
However, the implementation of the decision to leave the EU was the issue that forced the Conservatives into the most complex of evasive circles. Under their key campaigning slogan to “Get Brexit Done” the party sought to give the impression that the process of leaving the EU would be swift and painless if they were returned to office. One of the key themes of the Leave campaign was “taking back control” of the U.K.'s borders, but as Brexit approached it became clear the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would have to remain open or custom checks would be required. Repeatedly, Boris Johnson insisted there would be no such checks after Brexit, but this directly contradicted the United Kingdom/EU Withdrawal Agreement and even the Prime Minister's own Brexit Secretary, and the U.K. Treasury; nonetheless, throughout the campaign Boris Johnson continued to deny this was the case. 12
These examples are significant because they focussed on topics that were either central election campaigning planks for the Conservatives or central to their rebuttal priorities. The doctored video clip of Labour's Brexit spokesperson, apparently unable to explain his Party's Brexit policy, was designed to contrast with the Tories’ central slogan of “Get Brexit Done”—the implication being only the Conservatives knew how to accomplish this. The exaggerated claims about Labour's spending plans played to a long-used Tory campaigning theme that the Labour Party was financially irresponsible. The claims about the health service—new hospitals being built and nurses recruited—were designed to counter Labour accusations that the Tories could not be trusted to preserve the NHS; and, Johnson's insistence that there would be no border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland was central to maintaining the key theme of “Get Brexit Done.”
The apotheosis of strategic lying by the Conservatives came when the Party set up two fake websites designed to mislead voters. The first was intended to fool people who were curious about Labour's plans. Typing “Labour manifesto” into a search engine led to what appeared to be a summary of Labour's manifesto but was, in fact, a Conservative Party attack site. It was headlined “Labour Manifesto” with a less than flattering picture of Labour's then leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In smaller type below were the words “A website by the Conservatives” and three headlines featuring key Tory messages.
The second phoney website was even harder to detect as an attack site. Called “Factcheck UK,” it was launched during a live television debate between the two party leaders. Only the sharpest eyes would have recognized the words, in tiny font underneath, “from CCHQ” and a Twitter handle “CCHQ Press”—clues that it originated from the “Conservative Party's Central Press Office.” Unsurprisingly, after tweeting against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the site concluded that “Boris Johnson was the clear winner.” One of the features of Twitter is to give “verified” accounts a blue tick to indicate their legitimacy and credibility; this fake site was able to capitalize on the blue tick given to @CCHQPress. Twitter was unhappy with this misrepresentation saying: “Any further attempts to mislead people by editing verified profile information—in a manner seen during the UK Election Debate—will result in decisive corrective action.” Will Moy, the head of Full Fact, a legitimate fact-checking organization, said: “It was an attempt to mislead voters and I think it is inappropriate and misleading for a serious political party to behave that way.” 13 But the Conservatives were so unruffled that one Conservative minister said the public “didn't give a toss” about the fake fact-checking stunt. 14
After the election, it came to light that Google had removed eight advertisements posted by the Conservatives during the 2019 campaign because of their misleading content (Stone 2019). In contrast, none of the adverts posted by the other main parties were similarly sanctioned. By successfully employing the tactic of “strategic lying” in the 2019 election campaign, the Conservatives shifted and kept the news agenda on their favored ground. Monitoring of radio and television coverage during the election campaign by the University of Loughborough revealed Brexit was the most covered topic, followed by the economy in second place (Deacon et al. 2019).
Conclusion
This paper has sought to deepen our understanding of contemporary spin tactics in the age of digital and social media by theorizing the emergence of the “strategic lie.” Using two U.K. case studies, we have argued that the misleading messaging used by the Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, and by the Conservatives in the 2019 U.K. election campaign was more than just a case of over-enthusiastic spinning, it was deliberate “strategic lying.” The claims that the United Kingdom sent £350 million to the EU every week and that Turkey would shortly be joining the EU were lies designed to deceive and shape the news agenda. The “strategic lies” were made in the knowledge that the original false statements and the rebuttal would be widely disseminated by both mainstream and social media—particularly to those likely to be sympathetic to the Conservative or Leave cause. Just as importantly, the lies served to keep the national debate close to the Conservative's agenda. Polling after the Brexit referendum (Prosser et al. 2016) showed the two major reasons people gave for voting to leave the EU were concerns about sovereignty (which underpinned the notion of the £350 million figure) and immigration, which was underpinned by the prominence of the Turkey “threat.” No direct causation can be established in such matters, but the correlation is hard to ignore.
Similarly, in the 2019 general election, despite growing concern about the state of the NHS, the public continued to tell pollsters that Brexit was the most important issue facing the country (YouGov 2019). We are not claiming this was a direct result of the Conservatives’ campaign of “strategic lies,” but we can observe that it clearly did them no harm at the ballot box. We contend the concept of “strategic lying” has emerged from the evolution of political spin tactics in a post-truth online environment. We argue it represents a contemporary trend that is being skillfully exploited by political communication professionals who understand how the affordances of social media turbo-charge the “strategic lie” in setting, framing, and priming of news agendas to suit their campaigning ends.
But perhaps “strategic lying” was best described, not by a scholar but by journalist Dawn Foster who observed during the 2019 election campaign:
…slash and burn and lie with impunity. Tell whatever falsehood you fancy, especially one that has a propensity to go viral. Get your smear heard as widely as possible, and if you’re challenged, just lie. Far more people will see your initial lie than the follow-up correction, and few people will take the time to research any statistical embroidery or rewriting of the party's stance or record.
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In light of the events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election, further research is urgently required to not only investigate the extent to which “strategic lying” is now a central feature in the political communications culture of liberal democracies but to also evaluate its impact on voter behavior.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
