Dark arts and sucking eggs

Dark arts revealed by the Graun,who still have the problem of explaining to themselves why lots of people are still intending to vote, albeit by proxy, for Brexit. The journal reveals:

increasingly furious claims and counterclaims of dirty tricks, dodgy memes, misleading adverts and dozens of other kinds of misbehaviour. Online campaigning has been a feature of the last few UK elections, but 2019 is something else, with a bad-tempered and increasingly badly behaved social media ground war

The examples are fiendish:

the simple trick of, say, the Conservative party bidding for adverts when voters type “Labour” or “Labour manifesto” into Google....registering labourmanifesto.co.uk for an attack site promoted against Labour search terms, provoking a large Twitter backlash.

“extremely online” party supporters creating a “fake news” meme with some ridiculous claim about a politician, then circulating it with a sense of faux outrage among a group of people in on the joke...

The catchier of the memes, such as a claim that Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson enjoys murdering squirrels with a catapult, eventually catch on [but there's the problem] with regular internet users who believe the story, are outraged by it and share it.

Liberal Democrats will use almost any data to give the result they want, sometimes using EU election results or even partial local council results, rather than the previous general election, to try to paint the picture they want. Even if these don’t work, the party has been known to meddle with the relative heights of the bar charts to get the result they want.  

claim that the BBC isn’t reporting a particular story or, even better, has worked to deliberately distort it to favour the Conservatives...Momentum’s Twitter account claimed the BBC had deleted a damaging video of Priti Patel and left the post up (attracting thousands of retweets) long after it was noted that it had been very briefly deleted and reposted to fix a typo (a line had been wrongly presented as a direct quote).

the Conservative party seems to have realised a figure that starts arguments is one that can capture the online conversation. [The continuing complaints about the lie on the bus failed to realise this]...One claim, issued long before Labour actually issued its manifesto, was that the party’s manifesto would cost “£1.2tn”, provoking lots of Labour figures, journalists and fact checkers to take the bait, debate and tweet the big number and draw attention to the issue of Labour spending.

 argue that pollsters are either deliberately, because they’re “owned by Tories”, or accidentally – due to some outside factors – miSsing [sic] what’s really going on with British politics...Anyone tracking these accounts will get very used to seeing a Peter Hitchens quote talking about how polls are used to shape public opinion, rather than track it, despite him having said they’re vastly misinterpreting the extent of his meaning on that several years ago.

But how should grannies suck eggs?

being watchful for anything too good – or too annoying – to be true is key and learning how to see a range of news and views to shape our opinion.

It is perfectly true,however, and trying to be fair, that grannies are not the target audience. They are far more likely than their grandchildren to suck actual eggs than to tweet about the effects on the planet of sucking them