A regional daily is considering action over the unauthorised use of a photograph in a viral ‘fake news’ story shared millions of times in the run-up to the US presidential election.

The New York Times revealed that the picture, which originally appeared in the Birmingham Mail, was lifted by bogus website Christian Times Newspaper to illustrate a story about supposed election fraud.

The story, published in September last year, claimed “tens of thousands” of fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton had been found in a warehouse in Ohio.

In reality, the photo had been used by the Mail in May to go with a piece giving readers information about how to vote in forthcoming local elections in Birmingham.

The photo which first appeared in the Mail and was used by Christian Times

It was taken in May 2015 and showed ballot boxes being taken to Sheldon Community Centre, Birmingham, ready to be delivered to polling stations for that year’s general election.

The Mail’s publisher Trinity Mirror is now considering action against those responsible.

Editor Marc Reeves said: “I’m sure our syndication department will be in touch with the publisher of this site to discuss the unauthorised use of our picture.”

The New York Times tracked down the fake article’s writer, Cameron Harris, a Donald Trump supporter who set up Christian Times in order to make money from advertising revenue.

Mr Harris claimed the unidentified man in the picture was ‘Randall Prince’, an electrician from Columbus, Ohio, and a supporter of Trump who had found the supposed fraudulent ballot boxes.

The NY Times report states: “A photograph, he thought, would help erase doubts about his yarn. With a quick Google image search for ‘ballot boxes’, he landed on a shot of a balding fellow standing behind black plastic boxes that helpfully had ‘Ballot Box’ labels.

“It was a photo from The Birmingham Mail, showing a British election 3,700 miles from Columbus — but no matter. In the caption, the balding Briton got a new name: ‘Mr. Prince, shown here, poses with his find, as election officials investigate.'”

According to CrowdTangle, which tracks web audiences, the story was shared six million times on Facebook.

In October an appraisal of the web domain www.ChristianTimesNewpaper.com, which Mr Harris bought from an expired domains website for $5, revealed it was worth between $115,000 and $125,000, but a Google crackdown on ‘fake news’ in the days after November’s election saw adverts removed from the site, making it “essentially worthless”.

The episode came to light as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched a probe into the implications of the spread of “fake news” on social media.

The Whitehall scrutiny came to light this week in a written parliamentary answer to Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard.

The party’s former chief executive pressed the Government over its “assessment of the potential influence of fake news disseminated via the internet on voting in the UK … and whether they are taking steps to limit that influence”.

Responding, Tory frontbencher Lord Young of Cookham said: “The Government have not made an assessment of the potential influence of fake news on voting in the UK.  The Department for Culture, Media and Sport are currently considering the implications of the dissemination of fake news on social media sites more broadly.”

The Commons culture committee was said to be poised to summon the chiefs of Facebook, Twitter and Google as part of a parliamentary inquiry into the phenomenon.

Damian Collins, chairman of the cross-party committee of MPs, told the Sunday Telegraph some fake news stories were being distributed “maliciously” and sites had a responsibility to ensure their platforms were not being used to spread such content.