Why people living in Wales must be alert to fake news

The highlight of this year’s Llangwm Literary Festival was Welsh journalist Carole Cadwalladr speaking on media manipulation and the use of social media to fuel hatred. Jenny White explains why this is such an urgent topic for people living in Wales today

- Jenny White

WITH Wales a key target for Nigel Farage's Reform UK party in the run-up to the 2026 Senedd elections and social media a key battleground, it has never been more important for people to understand how misinformation is spread.

My personal highlight of Llangwm Literary Festival was a talk by investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who is still subject to legal action following her 2019 TED talk on Facebook’s role in Brexit, which resulted in a libel action by businessman and Reform UK politician Arron Banks.

A champion of press freedom, Cadwalladr discussed the dangers posed to democracy by interrelated factors including declining revenue for real journalism, data-harvesting by tech companies, and the proliferation of misinformation on social media.

Add to the mix targeted funding of political causes by billionaires, and a declining ability by the public to discern the difference between “news” received through social media and real journalism (with all the fact-checking and accountability that entails), and the stage is set for events such as racist riots and large-scale electoral fraud.

Cadwalladr acknowledged the positive potential of social media that was evident in its earlier days, when, for example, evidence of police violence was gathered and shared during the Arab Spring. And in 2020, it was commendable that then Twitter, which is now known as X, made efforts to deter people from posting links to articles without reading them first.