This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Are there university tuition fees in Scotland?
In a Scottish election leaflet from the SNP, First Minister and party leader John Swinney claimed “there are no university tuition fees in Scotland”. That is not quite right, however. While many undergraduates in Scotland have their degrees paid for, university tuition fees do need to be paid by some other students, including many taking postgraduate degrees.
The Scottish Government covers the cost of up to five years of mainly undergraduate study for full-time students ordinarily resident in Scotland who are studying in Scotland, meaning these eligible students do not pay tuition fees. Undergraduate tuition fees for Scottish students are typically £1,820 a year. Students need to apply annually to the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS), an executive agency of the Scottish Government that supports higher education students with information and funding, to have these fees paid directly to their university. The SAAS also covers the cost of the professional graduate diploma in education (PGDE) for eligible students, and provides tuition fee and living cost loans to students.
But there are tuition fees in Scotland for other types of students or degrees. Those undertaking a second undergraduate degree or repeating more than one year, for example, would pay fees. Postgraduate students are also required to pay tuition fees, though some may access grants, scholarships or funding through other bodies. And those moving to Scotland from other UK nations, or other countries, in order to study their first undergraduate degree are not eligible for free tuition fees.
A study commissioned by the Scottish Government found that in the 2023/24 academic year some 56% of postgraduate students in Scotland were paying tuition fees, along with 12% of higher national and undergraduate students. When we asked the SNP about the claim it told us: “The SNP is proud that we abolished Labour’s tuition fees, meaning that Scotland is the only part of the UK where undergraduate students can study at university without needing to pay tuition fees.”
Video of voters in the street is AI-generated
A video presenting fake people as real voters has been shared on Facebook ahead of parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales, and local elections in England, on May 7. The clip, which appears to have been deleted after Full Fact fact-checked it, seemed to show a presenter speaking to random people on the street about who they would vote for, with all of them saying Reform UK, except one who said Restore. But the footage was actually AI-generated.
We found that both the video and the audio elements of the footage contained SynthID, an invisible watermark that appears in content created or altered with Google’s AI tools. And there were a number of other clues that the video should be treated with suspicion, including strange writing on a bus stop at one point, a 73 bus that listed its destination as simply “London”, and a shop towards the end of the video that was somewhat improbably named “Local Shop”.
Posts like this shared ahead of polling day without any indication they are made with AI can undermine democracy by deceiving voters about what is real. Before sharing content you see online, it is important to consider whether it is trustworthy. Our Full Fact toolkit and guides to spotting AI media can help you do this.
