Rush hour
So yesterday the UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that he was informed that there was Russian interference in the UK's disastrous 2016 Brexit referendum - where just a sliver over half of the votes were in favour of the UK leaving the European Union.
In 2019, a report was commissioned to investigate Russian interference in UK politics. When the investigation was concluded, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson basically sat on the report. At that point there was an election looming and I suspect he was worried that whatever the report revealed would be detrimental to his election hopes.
Eventually a heavily redacted version was released that, according to Wikipedia, stated there was substantial evidence to suggest Russia had significantly interfered with UK politics and the UK was slow/unwilling/unable to react to it.
Side note: Boris Johnson is close friends with a guy called Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former high-ranking KGB agent. Close enough that, when he was Prime Minister, he elevated Lebedev to the House of Lords against the establishment's advice. Close enough that, as Foreign Secretary in 2018, he slipped his private security to travel alone to Lebedev's Italian mountainside mansion for a weekend party, returning on the Monday in the same clothes he travelled in, looking extremely crumpled, tired and emotional - a party where Italian secret service confirmed Johnson met Lebedev Snr, a man suggested to still have close ties to Putin and the Russian secret service.
So, where were we? Ah yes, Brexit and Russian interference. At the time there were rumblings that the Brexit party were somehow receiving funds from Russia. It's a well known fact that a lot of the Brexit party propaganda promoting Brexit was on social media. Undecided people were expertly targeted, especially on Facebook, to receive pro-Brexit messaging. The slim majority (52 to 48) that Brexit got suggests that small numbers of people swayed by clever marketing could have swung the decision.
Fast-forward to 2026. Ukraine, in its war with an invading Russian force, recently used drones to take out a Russian datacentre. Almost overnight, supportive tweets on Twitter for the right wing party in Germany disappeared. Heavily pushed right-wing talking points voiced by certain accounts fell silent. People bemoaning immigrants in Britain were so upset at the datacentre bombing that they fell inexplicably silent online.
There has to be some connection, right? Social media going a lot quieter on right-wing talking points after a Russian datacentre goes down? Brexit was a wholly right-wing thing. Can we honestly not say that if the Brexit campaign was happening now, suddenly a lot of its online pro-Brexit supporters would lose their voice? It certainly seems that way to me.
Which then leads to breaking news that right-wing sack of shit Nigel Farage has just done a round of TV interviews claiming that the Prime Minister is lying about Russian interference and that there's no proof. How would he know? Did the Russians tell him? Or are they telling him to say that?
Who do you believe? A man in the top job, with access to all the levers of power, all the national secrets, all the available intelligence? Or a right wing grifter known to have ties to Russia?
This all connects in my head - jpeg of frazzled man standing in front of a pegboard entangled in push pins connected by countless red threads. I don't know whether I've articulated it well enough here.
Suffice to say a lot of right wing social media propaganda seems to have been coming from a now-destroyed Russian datacentre. Brexit was ostensibly a right wing concoction that came out of nowhere fuelled by social media. Connected?