The first event we would like to analyze is the murder of Joanne Cox.
The 16th of June 2016, six days before the referendum, labourist parliament
member Jo Cox was slaughtered by a far-right extremist.
Not only was Cox a member of the labourist party, which alongside the Scottish
National Party and the Liberal Democrats, was against leaving the EU, but a few
days before the assassination she had declared that Brexit was not the
answer to immigration concerns.
This event could have influenced the people to change their minds on the
votation. Instead, since Leave won, it had no tangible influence on the
outcome.
If Jo Cox's murder had no influence on Brexit referendum for us because it
was just a single episode, fake news on social media are multiple episodes
that had continuously repeated before the Brexit vote: every day a lot of posts
were made by fake accounts on the most known social networks, mostly on Twitter
where some research made by a university shows that more than 400 fake
accounts were made and more than 130 million dollars were spent by Russia
to spread fake news on internet. For us this fact had got a big influence
for the Leave vote.
Fake news are not only on social networks but also on news
papers. They are not really fake news but an exaggeration of a news. This
is an example: as we can read, EU wants to take out the UK flag on the meat
that is not made in UK. If you read the entire article, you can notice that
this news, which is banal, was so emphasized to make it seem like the European
Union wanted to remove a right to the UK to penalize it. Among the many news
papers, there are also the Daily Mail and The Sun. Like the fake news
published from Russia, also news papers influenced the vote of UK citizens.