“The European Union wants to kill our cuppa”: How Euromyths and fake news affected the Brexit vote

Isa Tiilikainen — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 15:26:00 +0000

On 31 January 2020, Britain became the first country ever to leave the European Union. The Leave campaign leading up to Brexit was, to the surprise of many, a success. But how did they manage to do it?

Britain’s relationship with the EU has always been a problematic one. Their accession to the European Union, then EEC, in 1973 was preceded by two previous attempts, both denied by the French. Then, only two years after joining, a referendum was held in 1975 asking the British people: “Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community?”. With two thirds of the population voting yes, the country continued to be a member, but the suspicion and mistrust towards the Union always accompanied the 47 years of British membership.

Scepticism appears to stem from this belief of British exceptionalism: they are fundamentally different, and superior to, other nations. In a similar manner, the thought of personal exceptionalism led David Cameron to believe that he could win the referendum on Brexit. The imperial myth of Britain as a superpower leads to the nation approaching the EU from a standpoint that their country deserves a special status and preferential treatment.

To this idea of exceptionalism, the Leave campaign built its narrative. On one hand, the sense of superiority, and on the other hand the myth of being the underdog of the EU facing unfair treatment. Their strategy can be broken down to three parts: (1) simple messaging appealing to people’s emotions, (2) massive social media campaign by micro-targeting, and (3) controlling the debate framing with falsehoods.

False narratives

“We send the EU £350 million a week: let’s fund our NHS instead”, read the side of the infamous Brexit Battle Bus we can all remember. To suggest that such an amount of money would be available for extra spending when the UK leaves the EU was both misleading, as well as a straight up lie. According to different estimates, the actual amount of net payment, after deductions, agriculture subsidies and regional grants, comes down to about £160-190 million a week. And even this amount of money is surely not going to be fully budgeted for the NHS, as post-Brexit customs and legal institutions, among other things, will take up a large part. But the facts didn’t matter. What was important was to build a strong Eurosceptic narrative and appeal to the already existing cynicism of the population.

During the last 25 years or so, British newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express have been whipping up paranoia related to all kinds of things the EU allegedly wants to ban. Whether it’s curvy bananas, vacuums, kettle pots, lawnmowers or double-decker buses, the EU is about to ban it and Britishness is being severely threatened. These false narratives about the EU are called Euromyths and there have been so many of them circling around, that the European Commission has its own web page dedicated to addressing them. The openly EU-critical news coverage has been widely spread in the British media over the last few decades and that, without a doubt, contributed to the Euroscepticism among the nation. The seed of Brexit has therefore been developing for years before the actual referendum took place.

Social media targeting

A key component in winning the Brexit vote was the massive social media campaign spreading false narratives. The Leave campaign spent 40% of it’s campaign finances on one single technology firm: AggregateIQ. In pounds, this sums up to about 2,7 million, which translates to about 3,2 million euros. AggregateIQ is essentially referred to as a ’’department’’ within Cambridge Analytica; the company that many associate with the ’’fake news’’ around Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. The same methods of micro-targeting in social media were substantially used in the Brexit campaign. What this microtargeting essentially boils down to, is targeting individuals based on specific information gathered about them online. Cambridge Analytica is, for example, legally able to buy consumer data sets from airlines and magazine subscriptions and then connect this information with people’s personal data. The aim is to find persuadable voters and target them with suitable triggers. Facebook has proven to be a great source of psychological insights to millions of voters and fundamentally make all of this targeting possible.

While some of the Leave campaign’s ads run on Facebook maintained that new trade deals outside of EU would create 300 000 new jobs in Britain, others included claims ranging from the EU wanting to “kill our cuppa”, banning tea kettles, complaining about “5 million immigrants coming to the UK by 2030” and “Turkey’s 76 million people are granted visa-free travel by the EU”. So the message was not only focused on “costs and control”, but also based on the nationalist and even xenophobic sentiments. Thus, the campaign was successfully able to target a vast amount of people with a diverse set of values. The way in which the falsities were spread, not only through social media but also through mainstream media, was systematic and strategically intelligent.

Controlling the framing

As was established later on, the Leave campaign’s political message was in many ways built on lies, but initially the lies were not intended to be believed; that just came as a bonus. The intention was to frame and warp the debate. Vote Leave’s strategy was to constantly put out misleading information that would then distract the Remain campaign from having to interfere. By this, the Leave campaign managed to set the stage in their own benefit and get the opposite side to play into their hands.

As the Remainers were forced to correct the falsehoods the Leave campaign was actively repeating, they ended up just reinforcing the myths. You see, even though the claim of sending 350 million pounds a week to the EU was false, it impelled the Remain campaign to talk about the fact that Britain does send money to the EU, and that is exactly the subject that the Leave campaign wanted to talk about. Remain’s efforts to concentrate on the single market, economic affairs and all the benefits EU brings to Britain, went to waste. As Dominic Cummings, the campaign director and mastermind behind the Leave campaign, said: “Would we have won by spending our time talking about trade and the single market? No way.”

by Isa Tiilikainen

Photo credits

Banksy does Brexit (detail), Duncan Hull, CC BY 2.0

UK News Brexit Headlines 22nd June 2016, Jeff Djevdet, CC BY 2.0

Vote-leave-misleading-headlines, Abi Begum, CC BY 2.0

The post “The European Union wants to kill our cuppa”: How Euromyths and fake news affected the Brexit vote appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.

Mis(sed) Information: Who killed Father Christmas? We Did!

Julia Glatthaar — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 15:58:00 +0000

Did you know that Christmas was banned in Berlin in 2013? And have you heard about that time when immigrants looted a Christmas tree in a Western shopping center? No? But surely you must know about the Swedish law that bans Christmas lights to avoid angering Muslim refugees. Still not ringing any Christmas bells? No? That is because all of these bizarre headlines constitute a part of the fake news that are cursing the internet and our minds. However, fake news and alternative facts are not the only way in which misinformation spreads.

Today when you are enjoying the beginning autumn, and the first Christmas ads are popping up in the stores, we will discuss how news get to us, and why every one of us is affected by misinformation. This article is not about weird Christmas headlines, but about the headlines we don’t read.

Net neutrality

In order to talk about missed information, we need to clarify, how certain topics reach us. And net neutrality, a lovely alliteration, is the means which should provide us, the internet users, with neutral and unbiased search results. However, search algorithms are shaped by and based upon our personal search history. Therefore, it often happens that some information, and not only cat videos but at times very relevant information, slips through the world wide web.

So, when we look something up, different websites are ranked by both google search algorithms as well as by our personal preferences. And, as all of us know, nobody looks up the search hits on page 36, right? Moreover, more and more people use social media as their primary news source. Since you actively shape for instance your facebook news feed, you actually end up with narrow and single-minded stories. Hence, a lot of information will never reach you.

Prioritisation and Missed Information

The same goes for TV news and newspapers, since they need to prioritise the news in order to cover what they deem to be the most important information. Different shows and newspapers are made for a specific audience, catering towards their backgrounds and political preferences. That way the same event is reported in different ways, or events are not reported at all.

Additionally, a study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) on local newspapers claims that the vast majority of the news was essentially repetitive with less than 20 percent of all news actually containing new information. And even if you do look at a variety of sources, your personal bias influences the types of news you look out for, actively remember and act upon. For instance our so called “negative bias“ makes us hear and remember mainly bad news.

Father Christmas Is Still Alive

Everytime fake news that made their round on public or social media are debunked, there is an outcry of indignation. Who could have known that no Christmas tree has been set ablaze on purpose? Who could have known that Christmas is still legal? We should have bought some decoration after all! And why would anybody knowingly spread these lies in the first place? What can we do? Yet, as you know now, there are much more subtle mechanisms through which bias is introduced into our daily news consumption. And Father Christmas might be still alive after all and is waiting on page 36 of google.

By Julia Glathaar

Photo Credits

Wanted: Santa Claus, Kevin Dooley (CC BY 2.0)

Net Neutrality, Free Press Action Fund (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The post Mis(sed) Information: Who killed Father Christmas? We Did! appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.

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“The European Union wants to kill our cuppa”: How Euromyths and fake news affected the Brexit vote

Mis(sed) Information: Who killed Father Christmas? We Did!