Last week, parliament published 100 pages of pro-Leave adverts that appeared on Facebook during the Brexit referendum. Some were what you would have expected. “Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey are joining the EU. Seriously,” read one, with a picture of an NHS doctor with her head in her hands. Of course, they probably aren’t. Seriously.
Others were more niche. One showed sad Arctic fauna, because “the EU blocks our ability to speak out and protect polar bears”. Who knew? Yet more focused on the threat that the EU posed to the British cuppa. “Now the EU wants to ban tea kettles!” said one, offering a small giveaway that these were all the work of the Canadian digital advertising firm AggregateIQ. Tea kettles, indeed.
Former Vote Leave figures now insist that some of these adverts were never seen by anybody. Others were seen by a few thousand people, and others still by many, many more. All, though, were only to be seen by the people at whom they were targeted.
In other words, there was never much prospect of Boris Johnson or Michael Gove being hauled before the inquisitors of Newsnight or Today and asked, “What is all this polar bears rubbish?” or “Tea kettles, wtf?” because the inquisitors would have had no way of seeing them. Nor would most people, until only the other day. More than two years after the campaign, and thanks to the whim of a parliamentary committee and a US technology firm. Even though these adverts are the case on which Leave was sold.
Not to everybody, obviously. Please don’t tell me that you’re not even on Facebook and you already knew how you were going to vote years ago. When will you grasp how little you mattered? Possibly you mattered as little as I did, which was hardly at all. Both of us were already in the bag, albeit different bags. The people who mattered were, in the words of Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, those “between 35-55, outside London and Scotland, excluding Ukip supporters and associated characteristics, and some other criteria”. They could have gone either way. Thus, they lived through a campaign most of us couldn’t even see.
The Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee released an interim report on Sunday into what used to be known as “fake news”. It should be read by anybody with an interest in politics. Within it, various fascinating, John le Carré-style questions are asked (and not quite answered) about Russian influence on the Brexit vote, where Leave.EU’s money came from, and exactly what Cambridge Analytica-type lobbying firms have been doing in Britain and around the world. Its core concern, however, is closer to home and far more important. As Damian Collins, the committee chairman puts it, “We are facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy”. If this sounds like hyperbole, maybe you haven’t been paying attention.
Whether or not anyone has used social media to do anything politically malign — be it Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, or Nick Clegg, Tony Blair and George Soros cackling together inside a hollowed-out mountain HQ — is a secondary issue. The primary issue is our drift into a world where we simply cannot know. The great public conversation itself has been usurped by an almost infinite number of hidden private ones. This, in a nutshell, is the big problem.
In a sane world, concern about this would be non-partisan and consensual. Unfortunately, we don’t live in one. It is a quirk of parliament that Collins’s committee is dominated by Remainers, but that hasn’t stopped pro-Brexit voices such as Arron Banks, Cummings and the political blogger Guido Fawkes from frequently alleging bias. Perhaps they are even sincere, but as a Brexiter tactic for ignoring difficult conclusions from credible bodies, the cry of “bias!” is becoming awfully familiar. Witness the assault by Tory MPs such as Priti Patel and Nadine Dorries on the staid, solid Electoral Commission, after it found Vote Leave guilty of breaching spending rules in pushing the sort of adverts Facebook was carrying.
Some Remainers aren’t helping, either. The idea that Britain should have a second referendum is quite separate from the idea that breaches of electoral law mean the last referendum should be rerun. Plenty of Remainer MPs (Sarah Wollaston, Nicholas Soames, Anna Soubry, David Lammy) have called for both, not seeming to make much distinction. I see what they want but they aren’t helping the idea that fighting the online erosion of our democracy should be a non-partisan concern.
It has to be. “My experience with social media is it’s a firestorm,” Arron Banks told the DCMS committee. Then he said that his skill was starting the fire and turning on a big fan to make it spread.
Those social media fires are still burning, and plenty of others too. Increasingly, they start all by themselves, such is the constant heat now. Often it seems as if the primary business of politics has become the ceaseless task of accommodating and humouring their acrid stench. Two years on, everything is still horrid and charred and broken, and the bulk of our political and media class still lack almost all curiosity as to why. However much they think Brexit matters, they all need to wake up. This matters more.
Hugo Rifkind