Evidence Of Extensive Foreign Interference In Brexit Vote

As the extent of Russian interference in the US election has become clearer, the possibility that the Russians also interfered in the Brexit vote began to look more and more like a probability. At this point, one could even make the case that the success that the Russians felt they had achieved with Brexit emboldened them to expand their efforts in the 2016 US election.

There is already some evidence that there was at least some foreign interference in the Brexit vote. The surprising thing is that particular evidence seems to implicate Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica provided its services to both Leave.EU and VoteLeave for free, allowing both groups to violate campaign spending laws as well as violating laws against foreigners providing monetary support in UK elections. In addition, because Cambridge worked with both campaigns, it provided the opportunity for Leave.EU and VoteLeave to also illegally coordinate their activities.

Beyond Cambridge Analytica's interference, recent revelations have questioned the source of funds used to finance the Leave.EU campaign run by UKIP's Nigel Farage. In Trumpian fashion, Arron Banks, the insurance magnate and funder of both UKIP and Leave.EU, has been found to be worth far less than his self-proclaimed $300 million. At the same time, Banks has bragged about his closeness to the Russians and his contacts with them. In addition, his wife is a Putin-admiring Russian. All of this has finally forced the Electoral Commission to launch an investigation of where the $12 million that funded Leave.EU actually came from. In addition, Farage and UKIP have long been rumored to have received Russian backing as has the Conservatives' current coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party.

Now we have reports about just how extensive the Russian social media attacks on the Brexit vote were. The Times of London identified 156,252 Russian language accounts that posted messages in English encouraging Britons to exit the EU and attacking Muslims and immigrants. The pace of those divisive messages increased as the vote neared, going from 1,000 per day weeks before the election to nearly 40,000 on the actual day of voting.

Needless to say, the details on Russian social media efforts was all gleaned from independent analyses. Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the firms that would have the most definitive evidence, have provided no information on how extensive the Russian exploitation of their platforms were with regard to Brexit. In addition, just like the Trump administration, Conservatives have very little interest in aggressively pursuing that answer as it would probably just undermine the validity of the vote which the Conservatives are now pledged to follow.

The Conservatives are already in near total disarray about how to handle Brexit. The last thing they want to do is to go back and re-litigate the vote. But, as the evidence of Russian interference continues to mount, they will at some point have to confront it.