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For the last six weeks, I've been covering the digital election, in its all horror and, well, more horror

I'm not allowed to tweet about politics tomorrow and after that I probably won't want to, so with apologies for the self-referentiality, here are the things I found:
1. The viral WhatsApp messages urging British Hindus to vote against Labour - something that's still going on now

Some v.extreme messages were sent by a member of a local Conservative party. After our report, the Tories launched an investigation

2. A sign of things to come. This Tory ad in Milton Keynes took something Jeremy Corbyn said in 2011 out of context to make it seem as if he “condemned” voters

One local resident told me it was "misleading". @WhoTargetsMe called it voter suppression
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe 3a. Another sign of things to come. Our analysis of leaders’ Facebook pages showed Jo Swinson lagging behind on almost every metric
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe 3b. I did a lot of work in this campaign with my favourite data journalist, @C_AguilarGarcia

Best example of her brilliance: this analysis of the emoji reactions to the leaders’ posts. Five weeks later, Corbyn outperforming for sadness feels even truer
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia 4. On 12 November, Labour was hit by a cyber attack

Five minutes after it was announced, I broke the news that it was a DDOS attack live on air (video in the link)

express.co.uk/news/politics/…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia 5. We all (me included) spend too much time on content and not enough on digital infrastructure

When Labour relaunched its phone canvassing app, Dialogue, I revealed what was new – including gamified “badges” to motivate campaigners
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd 6. Another scoop: the Brexit Party was being investigated by the ICO for failing to hand over personal data

Was? Is? I have no idea if it's still going on – why on earth should be allowed to know such things?
news.sky.com/story/brexit-p…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd 7. My analysis of the CCHQ / FactCheckUK stunt, inspired by data from one of my many fantastic Sky News colleagues, @LivMoloney

Tl:dr: it probably worked
news.sky.com/story/conserva…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney 8. Remember the Tories’ spoof Labour Manifesto site?

With my reporting soulmate @ajmartinsky, I revealed that Google had breached its own rules by running an ad for it without a disclaimer
news.sky.com/story/google-b…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky 9. Two weeks later, Google breached its own rules again

It still hasn’t said how many times this happened, nor what has been done to prevent it happening again

Great to have so much accountability!
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky 10. A story about the data driving the campaigns, with @OpenRightsGroup
🤖Labour ranks every voter in each constituency on key issues, including "austerity"
🤖Conservatives use an algorithm to guess age and gender
🤖Both parties are often waay out
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup 11. I write a column every week about tech and politics.

This was the one I wrote after Labour's broadband announcement - a rare moment when we actually talked about policy

news.sky.com/story/sky-view…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup 12. One of the weirdest stories of the campaign. A Lib Dem official faked an email to quash a negative story from @opendemocracy

The Lib Dems launched an investigation…. And we still haven’t heard what they found

Three cheers for accountability! news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy 13. The discussion around voter fraud is undercovered and extremely grim. With @ISDglobal, I tracked the spread of one narrative: the claims of electoral fraud in the Peterborough by-election

What we found was not pleasant
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal 13. Political parties are using gifs to push their message, led by the SNP, whose Giphy channel has 20m+ views

I was struck by a phrase @rosscolquhoun used when telling me about this: “Cut and paste activism”

To me that describes a lot of this campaign
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun 14. The fake Corbyn tweets that went viral after the London Bridge attack were collectively workshopped on 4Chan in a horribly efficient decentralised disinformation effort

With @AJMartinSky and our invaluable friends at @ISDglobal
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun 15. A local profile of Canterbury, one of the most fascinating races in the country

My incredible producer @valeriehamill and I went inside the candidates’ social media strategies – including the very slick Tory operation run by @WestminsterDigi
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun @valeriehamill @WestminsterDigi 16. One of the big trends of this election has been the opaque groups running attack ads on Facebook

I looked at one anti-Labour housing policy campaigner – and found the estate agents she was quoting didn’t say the things she said they did
news.sky.com/story/general-…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun @valeriehamill @WestminsterDigi 17. We had so much planned for the final week. Then the Facebook Ad Library went down

I broke this story, so of course Facebook sent someone to speak to me about it

Of course not! Don’t be silly. Why answer questions when you could give bland statements?
news.sky.com/story/research…
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun @valeriehamill @WestminsterDigi No. 18 hasn't happened yet - it's our #ElectionSocial show, where we get to relive this, as if you'd ever want to

Actually I can't wait: do tune in at 9.45 tomorrow on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter or Facebook

8 straight hours of this. What could be better?
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun @valeriehamill @WestminsterDigi Finally, before I get turned into a dogs at polling station-shaped pumpkin: some thanks. This has been a huge effort by everyone at Sky News, especially the Under the Radar team: @LivMoloney, @AJMartinSky, @adamparkersky, @C_AguilarGarcia and our bold leader @skybod
@WhoTargetsMe @C_AguilarGarcia @Cennydd @LivMoloney @AJMartinSky @OpenRightsGroup @openDemocracy @ISDglobal @rosscolquhoun @valeriehamill @WestminsterDigi @adamparkersky @skybod Thanks as always to producer extraordinaire @SkyNewsValerie for making everything happen and to @DavidMapstone and @alfie_alford for letting me do what I love. Fingers crossed for another election in February... I'm sure you all feel the same way!
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Rowland Manthorpe
@rowlsmanthorpe
Andrew Neil's interview with Jeremy Corbyn airs at 7.00

Here's the message going around Labour activists' whatsapp groups

Apparently it's "truly horrific". "Like, awful"

They're planning to "flood all the hashtags" to "push images and stories with positive message"
Just to clarify for all the people asking. These messages - which look to me like Twitter DMs? - were posted as a screenshot in a WhatsApp group for Labour activists, with the message "all hands on deck"

The messages have now been deleted
Just a guess, but I'd imagine the poster screenshotted their DMs rather than copying and pasting, which is a real pain when you've sent lots of little messages

I've contacted the poster for comment - no reply as yet
Read 3 tweets
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Rowland Manthorpe
@rowlsmanthorpe
Been digging into the economics of Labour's broadband plan. What's amazing - at least to me - is how much money you save simply by avoiding the costs of competition

According to the govt's own figures, providers fighting for the same customers adds £6.2bn to the total cost
At first I thought Labour had made a mistake, because their number was quite a bit lower than the one given by the National Infrastructure Commission

But this estimate assumes competition, with all the resulting duplication of effort and resources
The government went into this last year in its Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review

Labour have adopted the national monopoly model, which is in the third column
Read 4 tweets
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Rowland Manthorpe
@rowlsmanthorpe
A few thoughts on Labour's plan to nationalise parts of BT

1. Wow.

2. Every poll and focus group I've seen would suggest this policy is going to be extremely popular. Not just the free broadband but the tech company tax - people are really angry about that issue
3. Buying BT is the easy bit. The hard part will be working out how this affects all the other firms, which could be hugely threatened by a state provider. I'll be looking forward to seeing more detail on those "access arrangements" McDonnell mentioned
4. A lot of people will say it's unrealistic, and they won't be completely wrong, but in one important way it is realistic - it gets the price and timeline about right

£5bn by 2025 was never going to work. £20bn by 2030 could stand a chance
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