As old political certainties crumble, elections become harder to call.
Ahead of May’s locals in England and parliamentary contests in Scotland and Wales, that sense of volatility is rising fast.
With plummeting public trust – not just in the parties on offer but in politics as a whole – it is time to raise the alarm about how vulnerable our elections are to manipulation and misinformation. Unpredictability on its own is not necessarily a problem – but insecurity is.
We enter the new year with a worrying gap having opened in our political discourse. It is one ripe for exploitation by a wide range of actors, from profit-driven peddlers of misinformation to hostile states that benefit from a more divided and less coherent Britain.
The May elections will offer all these actors a tempting stage for their activity, and a test bed for the next general election. Yet the latest proposal from Keir Starmer’s government to strengthen the system through an Elections Bill does not offer enough to fight back.
Full Fact’s mission is to help improve the information space and make it easier for people to know what to trust. We seek to combat false and misleading information, while promoting what is evidence-based. This has already become much harder as big US tech companies, keen to curry favour with the White House, have sought to mischaracterise the fight against misinformation as an assault on free speech, and to distance themselves from collaborating with anyone seeking to check facts.
The threats aren’t new, but they’re growing. People are doubtful that political parties tell the truth when they campaign, and Full Fact polling at the last election found that 59 per cent of adults did not expect the parties to campaign honestly. That lack of trust contributes to an ‘anything goes’ mindset in which manipulated or even wholly fake content can gain a foothold because people are so sceptical about politicians’ motives.
In the final months of 2025, we fact-checked dozens of videos making outlandish claims about new government policies, including time limits for sitting on park benches, caps on the number of trips out of the country, and monitoring of phone calls. Despite being weapons-grade nonsense, these videos were viewed more than 300,000 times.
Just as trust has nosedived, the tech revolution is accelerating. With AI tools, anyone can now create fake content in minutes. Deepfaked MP George Freeman recently found himself in a tough spot, trying to explain to his constituents that he had not, in fact, defected to Reform UK. Given that small ripples in enough councils and constituencies can determine the balance of political power in this country, tighter laws around this kind of material are urgently needed.
While the rise of disinformation may be an inevitability, that we have no established ground rules or playbook for responding to a major information incident is unacceptable. Although Full Fact has worked on a framework for information incidents since 2020, and other countries like Canada have reasonably well-established protocols, the drive to create one for the UK has stalled. This is indefensible.
The re-emergence of great power politics, led by unpredictable figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, has also made the entire information space more hotly contested at a time when we crave more certainty. We now risk sleepwalking into elections without the vital safeguards that mean people can trust what they see and decide how to vote based on sound, provable facts.
If the government is serious about defending British democracy, it needs to realise that its Elections Bill must do more. There is a clear pathway to improving the legislation before the next general election and creating a more robust electoral system, fit for this age of AI. Without these changes, our electoral system will remain insecure and vulnerable to manipulation for years to come.
