When it comes to reporting new legislation planned by the European Union, many British tabloids have a tendency to "overdo it".

It has been suggested recently that there are 26,911 words of European Union regulation on the sale of cabbage. The claim is not true, but it has a long and interesting history dating back to the US in the 1940s.

Andrew Bridgen—a Conservative Party MP and Brexit supporter—claims that the “overwhelming majority” of EU member states have no steel industry.

"Forget the fiction... it's absolute nonsense. It needs to be called out."

As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent between 1989 and 1994, he invented a self-serving journalistic genre that set a poisonous tone for British EU reporting.

I rebutted @DCBMEP's original thread. He deleted most of it and retweeted it here. So here's my original rebuttal thread on why he's wrong, slightly elaborated.

Boris Johnson challenged in parliamentary committee on his claims that the EU bans children from blowing up balloons and bans recycling of tea bags.

The 'tariff nerd' received thousands of retweets after debunking the MP's claims.

"The term euromyth is used to refer to exaggerated or invented stories about the European Union ..."

Campaigns on both sides of Britain's referendum on EU membership have been pushing their messages hard, but more than a few of those messages are actually myths.

For at least three years – and in some cases much longer – Brexiters have peddled fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about what Brexit would mean and how it could be done. Ever since the 2016 referendum more and more of these have been exposed or debunked, as many of the posts and links on this blog testify.

In October 2015, I gave a speech to international journalists in Germany called, ‘Newspaper lies can cost lives.’ Less than a year later, Britain voted for Brexit, with one of the main reasons cited as ‘too many migrants’. How did such a fear and dislike of migrants develop? Newspaper lies played an enormous role.

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was wrong about this but he’s never corrected his mistake, and the myth persists. What is the claim and why is it wrong?

Normally I do threads on official documents like legislation, or think tank papers, but today I have been asked to debunk viral online claims about the scary "Lisbon treaty 2022".

This thread examines claims made in this BrexitCentral article by Kevin Dowd regarding an alleged quintupling of tariffs on oranges from South Africa imported into the EU.

This article, circulated widely on social media at the time of the referendum, claimed in error that EU tariffs starve African farmers. Since then it has been updated with an errata explaining its stated facts and conclusion are wrong. No tariffs are paid except on weapons. / NOTE: This article has now been removed from CAPX. We've linked to a copy from the WayBackMachine web archive.]

So here's a story about how Jacob Rees-Mogg's nonsense can travel halfway around the world before the fact-checkers have got their boots on.

Here, Stephen Fry on the quiz show QI discusses various fearful theories about European Union regulations and the misunderstandings which led to them.