Thread by @HowShouldWeVote

Back in 2016, we as a country made a choice based on the information we had; and we made a reasonable choice.

We chose to be better off because leaving the EU would mean lower food prices.
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We chose to unleash our economic strength because the EU was holding us back.
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We chose to protect the polar bears
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We chose to stop bull fighting
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We chose to build better flood defences
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We chose to give £350m a week extra to our NHS
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And we chose to protect our British cuppa!
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This was the information that was selectively shown to just some voters.

No context.

No detail.

No truth.

If this is what you saw and, up until that day, you didn’t know anything about the European Union, I would have been shocked if you hadn’t voted Leave! 8/

It is all complete and utter nonsense; but it was delberatly targeted at, and shown to, people who didn’t know that. Those who had little or no knowledge of the European Union and what it did.
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And if you were in that situation and you saw these – and you beleived it because it came from your friends or from poltiicans whose views you trusted – then of course you voted Leave.
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The people who saw these adverts were effectively spied on and then shown just the right thing in their personal timelines to hit just the right buttons to get the desired reaction.

Deliberately manipualted.
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I don’t for a moment expect anyone to admit to this being done to them – I would rather expect people to double down and find other reasons to justify the emotional choice that these ads provoked – but the manipulation happened all the same.
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And the people who did it knew that’s what would happen.
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The mantra in the Leave campagin was that people make choices based on emotion (any advertiser will tell you that’s the biggest factor); and that their ads didn’t have to be true, they just had to be believed.
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So they developed emotional and misleading adverts, subverted the electoral rules to overspend and then distributed them using personal data harvested for other purposes.

This was manipulation on an industrial scale.
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We can only ever make decisions based on what we know. But we now know most of what Leave said was either a lie or heroically optimistic (easiest trade deal in history, German car manufactures on the phone to Merkel demanding we get a deal, etc, etc).
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So knowing what we know now, would we still make the same choice?

Possibly, I don’t know.
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What I do know is that one of the five pillars of democracy is accountability. Without that, without that chance to test what was promised and predicted aginst reality, elections and referendums are just competitions in lying.
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That is not democracy.

So please support the @peoplesvote_uk as the only democratic way forward.

Thread ends/
This is an abridged version of the latest blog at howshouldyouvote.co.uk