Both sides had ads and propaganda, but it seemed like the anti-Brexit side was much more aggressive. The front page of reddit was swarmed with posts about how Brexit would be the end of the world and that anyone who votes leave is literally a Nazi controlled by Putin and yadda yadda yadda.
The UK is a mixed economy, we have both Capitalism and Socialism and we like it - our safety-net welfare state and the NHS save lives everyday.
EU membership is a shield for former soviet satellite states to join the West and escape Russian influence.
The main leave "argument" was £350,000,000 was being given to the EU and could save the beloved NHS - this turned out to be a downright lie.
Many of the other popular arguments were equally false and fearmongery about out of control EUrocrats legislating on the curvature of bannanas and attacks on the British sausage and that farmers would be better off outside the common market - all very jingoistic.
It has emerged that there was a lot of carefully crafted individually targeted Facebook adverts that played on voters fears derived from personal data held outside the UK (and outside UK data laws), sadly these went undocumented so we may never know the extent of the falsehoods or their level of influence.
The UK electoral commission has expressed concern over this type of campaigning as no-one knows what is being promised or how much was spent on it.
There has been an effort to try to document these dark ads for the recent election where they seem to have been much less effective.
Many Brits feel conned as the referendum was pitched as being only advisory but is now being taken as iron-clad and a 4% majority of those who offered an opinion is very little mandate to enact such major constitutional change.
As the realities for science funding, farming subsidies have kicked polls are reporting many Brexiters have changed their tune. Goldman Sax's relocation to Europe is a bellweather for the realities for the financial industry which is close enough to Tory hearts that one hopes they'll snap out of their dreams of Empire and Commonwealth.
Hopefully the staggering level of incompetence so far demonstrated by David Davis' negotiating team will be the rope that hangs them and we'll get a second real referendum.
The alternative Red White and Blue Hard Brexit promised by Teresa May is not good for anyone in the UK unless they are shorting the pound.
You see the same kind of polarization in the rest of the anglosphere though, maybe larger than in the UK even. Perhaps the referendum released some pressure here. Although to a limited effect. I believe what put a lot of people off was probably also the propaganda around the topic against a Brexit. Propaganda polarizes.
Considering all the establishment propaganda, from posh media, celebrities, politicians, Brussels, etc, about how Brexit is analogous to economic ruin, mass destruction, the Brexit propaganda was like 1/10th the size.
And it didn't have the means to be much more: the state, the "City", the corporations, Brussels, the BBC, the celebs, and the mainstream media all pushed for Bremain...
I have no stake in this fight, but.. from popular media, and my social bubble, the message seemed the exact opposite. It felt like the brexit people said that they would be able to survive with the same economic level and the ability to make their own laws and regulations, while everyone else ridiculed them with how britain would not even be able to get food, and would collapse into mayhem.
I feel you over-play the economic discussion, at least insofar as it was at the forefront.
While economic "freedom" was pushed by the official campaign, however, you can't deny the widespread publicity of the Nazi-esque "Breaking Point" poster. Anecdotally, I saw people pushing to vote Brexit to stop "the scum of Eastern Europe" from coming here and taxi drivers who voted Brexit to "kick the P*s out" (ethnic slur for Pakistani citizens).
The people airing these views weren't hardcore nationalists but regular working class people. Economic circumstances certainly made these voices louder (as hardship always causes populations to turn on "the other"), I will agree there.
Look no further than Brexit and /r/unitedkingdom for a perfect example of this. You would not think that half the UK population voted to leave the EU based on the rhetoric in that sub. The pro-remain echo is deafening.
I agree that both official pro and con Brexit campaigns were ... not good. I just think that there is clear difference between them in terms of how bad they were.
In political opinions, particularly for US politics, you see a lot of ritualistic opening with words to the effect of "both sides are terrible", "they're both equally bad", which is facile even-handedness, and unhelpful when they're differing kinds and degrees of bad. Knocking it back as facile is also becoming a trope, though probably still a necessary one.
The effect has been the opposite - Brexit single-handedly wiped the anti-European elements of most populist parties on the continent, in a similar way as the Greek crisis wiped most anti-Euro objections.
When power imbalances are revealed in such stark contrast, people tend to go with the bigger guy.
The pro-leaving group supposedly used a lot of anti-immigration sentiment to win over voters. I infer from this that being part of the EU forced immigration upon the UK that the people of the UK did not want. I could be wrong.
Anti-Brexit is the status quo. It's by definition not controversial since they can't do anything other than advocate for how things currently are.
Pro-Brexit is by definition controversial since they were advocating for a complete upheaval in the relationship with the EU constructed over decades. And it was always going to be tinged with xenophobia and nationalism since that was the entire premise for the Brexit vote to begin with. And it doesn't get any more divisive than xenophobia.
I disagree. Leave's lies were on a completely different (larger) scale. Most fundamentally, Leave claimed that Brexit would not be an economic disaster, which they cannot possibly have known — especially since they very clearly have no plan at all for what's next.
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