Sir Keir Starmer and those latest internet rumours

The prime minister’s personal life is once again the subject of frenzied online speculation

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: Simon Dawson / 10 Downing Street (Wikimedia Commons)

Social media is both a blessing and a curse. One the one hand, it has blown apart the cosy ecosystem that allowed established outlets and commentators – what some call the ‘legacy media’ – to determine, usually without regard for the views of the populace, which stories would dominate the news agenda. On the other, it has undeniably augmented the spread of ‘fake news’ and afforded certain screwball actors and their conspiracy theories an unmerited level of oxygen.

On balance, the explosion of independent voices in the national discussion has, I would venture, been a good thing. But though a hundred flowers have bloomed, amongst them will always be a clutch of giant hogweeds. We should not be blind to that fact.

The challenge when observing the blizzard of social media content that hits most of us every day is to discern that which is true – or at least plausible – from that which is plainly claptrap and undeserving of attention. That task isn’t always easy. Look at history. In some cases, stories that were dismissed by certain establishment voices as fantasies – police negligence at Hillsborough; collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland; the blacklisting of conservative accounts by pre-Musk Twitter bosses; the sleazy contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, to name but a few – turned out to contain more than a kernel of truth.