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Kerry-Anne Mendoza, editor of leftwing website the Canary
Kerry-Anne Mendoza, editor of leftwing website the Canary. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian
Kerry-Anne Mendoza, editor of leftwing website the Canary. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

DIY political websites: new force shaping the general election debate

This article is more than 6 years old

A week before polling day, highly partisan blog articles are being shared more than ‘MSM’ news, a Guardian analysis has found

With seven days until Britain goes to the polls, a new force is shaping the general election debate.

Highly partisan, semi-professional political blogs are being shared more widely online than the views of mainstream newspaper commentators.

Websites run by a publicity-shy English tutor in Yorkshire, an undergraduate student in Nottingham and a former management consultant in Bristol are publishing some of the most shared articles about the UK general election, ranking alongside and often above the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent.

Alternative news sites are run from laptops and bedrooms miles from the much-derided “Westminster bubble” and have emerged as one of the most potent forces in election news sharing, according to research conducted for the Guardian by the web analytics company Kaleida.

Two of the three most shared articles since Theresa May called the election on 18 April remain those written by Thomas Clark, who publishes left-leaning articles from his Yorkshire home under the moniker Another Angry Voice.

Nothing from the BBC, the Guardian or the Daily Mail comes close to his greatest hit of the campaign so far, subheadlined in typical conversational style: “If you insist on blibber-blabbering about how Jeremy Corbyn is so ‘unelectable’, could you at least tell us how many of his policies you disagree with and why.”

share data

It has been shared more than 102,000 times on social media so far, according to Kaleida. The most shared pieces by the BBC and the Guardian trailed not just this, but two of Clark’s other posts on “why you need to speak to someone who works in the NHS” and “30 things you should know about the Tory record”.

The Canary, a pro-Corbyn Bristol-based site, claimed it doubled the number of visitors to its site to six million last month.

Evolve Politics, which is run by just two people in Nottingham and Peterborough, saw its story that the rapper Akala “just smashed the entire anti-Corbyn argument in seconds” shared 55,000 times on Facebook.

It was read at least 200,000 times. Whether such sites have the power to change voters’ intentions or function largely as echo chambers is becoming an urgent question for politicians.

The websites explicitly offer a counter-narrative to what they deride as the “MSM” or mainstream media.

The ninth most shared election article came from the Canary on Tuesday when it fulminated at the lack of praise in newspapers for Corbyn’s performance in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

The headline ran: “What’s happening across the front pages of the UK press today is nothing short of a whitewash.”

Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Monday. Photograph: Reuters

The phenomenon is not unique to the left. Westmonster, a pro-Brexit “anti-establishment news” site set up only a few months ago by the insurance billionaire and former Ukip backer Arron Banks, has pushed its way into the top 40 most shared election stories.

Its story last week “Farron to open door to 50,000 Syrians” garnered 11,000 shares, according to Kaleida.

Breitbart London is the UK branch of the “alt-right” website in Washington owned by Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and cited as a huge influence in Trump’s win. It publishes a large volume of news about immigration issues in Europe and radical Islam.

But it had its biggest UK hit last week with: “Morrissey rips British politicians after Manchester attack: ‘petrified’ to admit Islamic extremism behind terror.” It was shared 25,000 times.

The role of viral blogs comes under the microscope after abuse was levelled by some pro-Corbyn Twitter users at the BBC Woman’s Hour presenter Emma Barnett, following her tough interview with Corbyn in which he forget the cost of a key Labour childcare pledge.

Barnett was labelled a “Zionist” and a “pig”, but these blogs did not join in. The Canary implored in one piece: “We should also be fair to host Barnett, because social media has been tearing strips off her.”

The publishers of the partisan sites strongly deny they are echo chambers but they do believe their job is to rally support for their causes.

Another Angry Voice deliberately framed its viral hit, which set out 20 Labour policies, as a campaigning tool.

Clark urged readers: “If every Labour party supporter uses this as a reply every single time they see the ‘unelectable’ trope being wheeled out, maybe it might eradicate this.”

Clark did not respond to requests for comment, but did say recently that his audience knew they were being misled by other media and “really like having a guy out there who can cut through the propaganda and put the counter-arguments into articles and infographics they can share”.

Matthew Turner, 21, a third-year politics undergraduate at Nottingham University, has grasped that the shareability of the alt-media is what gives it political potential. In between studying for his finals, he helps run Evolve Politics.

“When something goes as viral as our Akala story, it is never just preaching to the choir,” he told the Guardian.

One of his site’s pre-election hits was “Shameless Tory student films himself burning £20 note in front of freezing homeless person.” It received half a million views and sparked anger that “united the left and centre”.

Matthew Turner of Evolve Politics. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Evolve set up a charity appeal for a shelter in Cambridge, where the incident happened, and it raised almost £5,000.

“This kind of dynamic activism is new to the media,” Turner said. “Stories that go viral are stories that you can rally around. I think the vast majority of readers like us because we light a fire in their belly.

“Readers of the mainstream media tend to not get that nowadays. We are the ones offering the fight.”

Evolve pays fees of as little as £5 for a 1,000-word piece, but offers 50% of advertising revenue received from Google, which can vary from a few pence if the story only gets a few clicks to £200 if it generates half a million.

Critics say this creates a strong incentive to exaggerate or even falsify stories, but Turner insisted the site’s editors were careful to fact-check contributions.

Raheem Kassam, a former aide to Nigel Farage who is now editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, believes the new sites have finally broken a media oligarchy.

“People see a massive disconnect between what is going on in their streets and town centres and what is on the BBC nightly news,” he said.

Responding to the suggestion that alt-news sites are blurring fact and opinion, he said: “I do not mix opinion and news within stories. When I look at sites like the Canary and Westmonster, I almost feel like we are the grownups in the room now. They are mixing editorial in with news.”

Raheem Kassam of Breitbart London. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters

With Brietbart, the editorial stance is as much apparent in the story selection and headlines.

Take the following stories from one week last month: “Germany: Iraqi asylum-seeker convicted of raping Chinese students”; “Pakistani migrant faces terror charges in Germany”; and “Asylum seeker brutally tortures fellow migrant, gouges eyes over 50 euro debt”.

Kassam edits the site from the US and posts international stories with themes that resonate with Trump’s new nationalism.

“We are looking at global events and trying to protect the idea of nationhood,” he said.

“We are bringing in examples of where others are doing things incorrectly. We are showing policies on migration, multiculturalism and welfare and where is good and bad.”

Kerry-Anne Mendoza, the editor of the Canary, which has grown to a team of 20 freelance writers and editors, denies Kassam’s claim it mixes fact and opinion, saying: “We write in a human voice. We are not attempting to be a paper of record.”

Mendoza, 35, a former management consultant, joined the Occupy movement in 2011. She then went to report from Gaza during the conflict with Israel in 2014 before starting the Canary 10 days before Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015.

“We wear our biases openly – social and environmental justice, racial equality and the right of men and women to live equally,” she said.

“We have a crisis in our media. It is fundamentally too narrow in terms of ownership and the backgrounds of the people producing the news. Readers are presented with an astonishingly similar narrative.”

The viral spread of posts by the new range of alt-news sites during the current election campaign suggests the appetite for something different is finally being sated.

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