They're not necessarily wrong. For example, one of the big anti-Brexit talking points beloved of both Corbyn and social media users before the election was that a trade deal with the US would mean maggots in orange juice. This also, as I recall, became part of the narrative about Brexit supporters being mislead, with the line being that they were sold all those false dreams and would get maggots instead. It was a complete and utter lie: https://fullfact.org/health/maggot-orange-juice-USA/
And I really do mean a complete lie. This wasn't a dispute over creative redefinitions of terms like Boris' NHS funding claims, or some nitpick about a minor detail. Corbyn and a worryingly large chunk of the press took an example of US food safety regulations being unambiguously stricter than EU ones - of them placing all the same restrictions on food manufacturers that the EU does, plus more - and falsely claimed their regulations were weaker instead, using graphic, emotive, memorable language, and everyone believed and repeated this total inversion of the truth.
The thing that gets me is that on some level, people must've known that US food isn't really unsafe. There's not some big movement of people who refuse to eat US food - by and large, everyone trusts food there as much as they would food here. The other thing is that despite this pretty much the entire press dropped the ball on this lie. (It is not even close to the only prominent anti-Brexit or anti-Tory lie they left unchallenged or outright made themselves.) Even Full Fact did initially - they actually helped spread the false claim themselves, and only came back to it a month or so later after it had spread across the internet multiple times and been used by Corbyn repeatedly in his campaigning.
And I really do mean a complete lie. This wasn't a dispute over creative redefinitions of terms like Boris' NHS funding claims, or some nitpick about a minor detail. Corbyn and a worryingly large chunk of the press took an example of US food safety regulations being unambiguously stricter than EU ones - of them placing all the same restrictions on food manufacturers that the EU does, plus more - and falsely claimed their regulations were weaker instead, using graphic, emotive, memorable language, and everyone believed and repeated this total inversion of the truth.
The thing that gets me is that on some level, people must've known that US food isn't really unsafe. There's not some big movement of people who refuse to eat US food - by and large, everyone trusts food there as much as they would food here. The other thing is that despite this pretty much the entire press dropped the ball on this lie. (It is not even close to the only prominent anti-Brexit or anti-Tory lie they left unchallenged or outright made themselves.) Even Full Fact did initially - they actually helped spread the false claim themselves, and only came back to it a month or so later after it had spread across the internet multiple times and been used by Corbyn repeatedly in his campaigning.