Data about the signatures on a petition calling for a general election shows that it has been signed with MPs’ names thousands of times.
This is incorrect. The data does not show how many times the petition has been signed with MPs’ names, but how many times it has been signed by people recorded as living in those MPs’ constituencies.
Posts on social media have wrongly claimed that data behind a petition calling for a general election shows that it has been signed thousands of times with MPs’ names, and implied that this shows the petition itself is flawed.
A petition on the UK Parliament website titled “Call a General Election” has been signed more than 2.7 million times at the time of writing. Some social media users, including on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, have shared an image of data from the petition and claimed that it shows that thousands of those signatures are from MPs or those using MPs’ names.
One post said: “Hey look their petition is so good even [Prime Minister Sir] Keir Starmer has signed 584 times so far.”
But this is not what the petition’s website or the image of data from it shows.
As stated in the ‘about petition data’ section of Parliament’s petitions website, the data concerned “is not a list of people who have signed the petition” and instead shows the number of people who have signed the petition by “country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament”.
A House of Commons spokesperson confirmed to Full Fact that the data shows the name of each constituency, its Office for National Statistics code, that constituency’s MP and the number of signatures from that constituency (based on the postcode given when people sign). It does not show the number of times an individual MP had signed the petition, or the number of signatures using an MP’s name.
While it’s possible MPs may have signed the petition, or that others may have signed it using MPs’ names, we can’t know for sure. There is no list of named signatories made public, and the only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.
When signing a petition on the UK Parliament website, users are told only British citizens or UK residents have the right to sign. They are then asked for their name, email address and location by country—and if the location is given as the UK, their postcode.
The postcode given is used to create a petition heat map, which maps the number of signatures by constituency, and at the time of writing Brentwood and Ongar in Essex appears to have the most signatures, at just over 7,500.
Petitions on the Parliament website which gain 100,000 signatures are considered for debate in Parliament, with a response from the government guaranteed at 10,000 signatures.
The Prime Minister has since ruled out calling an early general election in response to this petition.
False claims such as these can undermine trust in democratic processes. Before sharing a claim on social media it’s important to consider whether what you are seeing is accurate, and the information provided is reliable.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the data actually shows the number of signatures recorded from each MP’s constituency, not the number of times the petition was signed with that MP’s name.
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