Jo Swinson was forced to deny she fired stones at squirrels and everyone is thrilled

Rest assured, one and all, Jo Swinson does not actually hate squirrels.

In fact, she "likes" them.

This all came out this morning on LBC when she was speaking to Ian Dale, who asked the one question we all want to know the answer to less than a month before a general election:

What's your attitude towards squirrels?

The Lib Dem leader was subject to this bizarre question because last week a fake story about her throwing stones at squirrels went viral.

She replied:

This sort of fake news is surprising to me. This isn't the only one of the very fake news stories.

I do think it's worrying because it echoes what we've seen in other elections. And particularly when you think about fake news and the technological possibility for deepfakes, where videos can be faked, then there are questions about the role of publishers in circulating these things that aren't true.

It's very difficult to prevent its spread.

While Swinson was trying to make a valid and important point on the spread of misinformation on social media, people over on actual social media were pretty amused by the whole debacle.

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