With thanks to @greenmirandahere.bsky.social whose message for some reason made me think of moon landings :)

4. YouGov moon landings data - yougov.co.uk/politics/art... - note that a further 12% say they were probably staged.

2. Government has admitted number is wrong - saying it is only about who uses X for news at all. But it is still higher than the Ofcom data - bsky.app/profile/nath... 3/4

3. Ofcom 2024 data has 3% of UK adults who name a news source picking X as their most important one: bsky.app/profile/ferg...

1. Claim that "10.8 million families use X as their main news source" came in follow-ups to question of mine in the Lords - hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2026-0... 2/4

Make of that what you will...!

It's less than the number that told YouGov a while back that the moonlandings were definitely faked.

The Ofcom 3% / 1.8 million people saying X is their most important news source seems the most credible figure in all this - so an awful lot less than the minister originally said.

fyi @gabrielmilland.bsky.social
@jamesrball.com @danielvulkan.bsky.social

Thank you for following up on this. The claim came in the discussion following my question in the Lords, and the govt was quicker at getting back to you than they have been to me about correcting this!

I was about to nod in agreement, but then remembered that I had created this list - bsky.app/profile/did:...

E.g. by historical US standards those Trump ratings are pretty poor, but over here they'd be seen as quite successful.

US and UK approval rating seems to be on a different scale. Numbers that people call huge for net scores in the US often seem pretty small from here. Do you know if there's been any academic comparisons of whether countries have different norms for the range of ratings?

YouGov said themselves why it'd be wrong to count that as 2 wins for Starmer, which is why their own piece counts it as 1, not 2. That's a pretty key point which the screenshot doesn't include (to be fair, it's in a different place on the page on their site!), and I think best to take into account.

So YouGov's view is that saying Starmer won two isn't supported by their data as that requires counting as a 'win' something that YouGov says their polling is not precise enough to be able to call it a 'win'.

OK, to put it this way: the reason the YouGov story gives a different total for Starmer than you message did, is because YouGov (rightly in my view) was taking into account the margin of error on their results, and so not counting results that were too close to call.

The margin of error comment from YouGov explains why their figures are different from yours, and it's welcome that they highlight the limitations to their own data in that way - something it would be good to encourage more pollsters to do.