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Supporting Brexit [Dylan Bueltel]
On June 23, 2016, a turning point for European politics and a major wakeup call occurred: the Brexit referendum resulted in the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. Brexit presented a deep disruption of European political stability and reflected how vulnerable democracies are in the digital age. Almost 10 years later, the public has shown its change of feeling towards the outcome, reflecting a sense of regret. Opinion polls show how the majority of the Britons now state that it was wrong to leave the EU. The people’s change of feeling raised a crucial question: how can one trust public opinion when the digital transformation scenery is even more manipulated and distorted than back in 2016?
It is foremost important to understand that since 2016, we are living in the post-truth era. This era is attributedto the proliferation of fake news on the internet, in an anonymous way, which are posted on a daily basis and are of an insulting, defamatory and discrediting character. As well, the era reflects how objective facts have lost strength when shaping public opinion while emotions and personal beliefs have gained strength.
In order to understand Brexit, it is necessary to understand that the political narratives at the time of the referendum weren’t just communicated, they were emotionally amplified through a transmedia environment, in which the factual accuracy of the messages was disregarded. The distorted message circulated through media, blogs, forums, news outlets, etc. The result was a feedback where emotional claims were much stronger than an evidenced analysis on the main argued topics regarding the referendum posture. It is important to note that having access to more information does not mean this one is better, and the Brexit campaigns are the reflection of it. The proliferation of information digitally did not make citizens more informed, instead the content overload made it extremely difficult for individuals to distinguish authentic sources from manipulative or misleading ones. This oversaturation set the scene to amplify polarization and for citizens to shape their decisions based on already existing feelings shaping the outcome of the referendum.
There has been a significant changing logic of foreign interference during the last decade. During the 2016 referendum, the United Kingdom was clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence in campaigns, making it vulnerable to Russian campaigns which highly relied on micro-targeting and data-driven strategies to segment and influence identified voters. Research showed that more than 13,000 twitter-bot accounts were active during the referendum time and shortly after deactivated. Bots and troll farms extended the polarized content across social media generating eco-chambers with one single purpose: to target micro-audiences with personalized messages and therefore reinforce existing biases. There was a clear objective, to subtly persuade voters towards particular political outcomes. As of 2025, almost a decade later, the methods of foreign interference have considerably shifted. Back in 2016, artificial amplification was a main mechanism, nowadays, the structures of social media allow narratives to propagate organically.
While in 2016 artificial amplification was the main mechanism, now the structures of social platforms allow narratives to propagate organically, driven without any cost by engagement algorithms. This change is strictly tied to the fact that the external financing of electoral campaigns is largely prohibited under most democratic legal frameworks, making direct foreign cyber-campaigning not only a sensitive political topic but also a criminalized one. As a result, external actors have recurred to indirect information strategies that by themselves generate organic virality, allowing influence to spread without trace.
In this framework, pseudo-media outlets, which are digital platforms that imitate journalistic websites while violating professional standards, have become a central, if not the central instrument for interference. These pseudo-media’s final objective has surpassed direct persuasion and has just become undermining the public, in this case the voters, capacity to distinguish facts from falsehood, by forming an oversaturated information environment. Portal Kombat, which now receives the name of Pravda is evidence of how troll farms have evolved into multi-platform disinformation ecosystems that work by interconnecting transmedia nodes that are able to spread coordinated narratives flawlessly across platforms. These changes in how foreign interference works reflect a subtler tactic in which external actors now seek to gain trust themselves by creating a ground for destabilization, polarization and uncertainty rather than just shaping opinions on a specific subject.
Pseudo-media refers to the digital outlets that imitates the styles of mainstream journalism but completely violates the actual journalism standard by presenting themselves as legitimate, spreading disinformation and partisanship when providing anti-establishment narratives. The Russian pseudo-media outlets have become central actors when it comes to modernizing the disinformation landscape. Their focus is to saturate the media with large amounts of information instead of pushing voters towards a specific understanding of events. They pollute, not persuade. By flooding the digital world with misleading information, contradictory claims, fake news, and fabricated reports, they have managed to make it extremely difficult for the user to realize what is truly authentic.
This issue doesn’t only affect the user directly, it damages the system since it becomes the contaminated data that powers the AI systems. Legitimate material is combined with manipulated one inside AI programsresulting in the unintentional reproduction of false information. This weakening of informational clarity can be reflected during the Brexit referendum, where foreign actors exploited people’s trust on the media; today the significant transformation of the digital landscape, which includes a pseudo-media ecosystem, shows that the very conditions that enabled the referendum’s manipulation have just deepened, making the UK even more susceptible to foreign influence.
Troll farms, bots and pseudo-media have managed to deteriorate the quality of information leading to deep implications for democratic governance. Recent poll studies, like the one presented above by YouGov, reflect the Britons’ changing feelings during these past years towards the EU leave. As well, it shows how the public interprets political occurrences through a distorted, chaotic and emotionally intense information environment. In the post-truth era, emotions frequently surpass what is objectively verifiable, and political decisions are usually tied to identity rather than concrete facts or evidence. Democracy relies on individuals making well-informed decisions, the overwhelming amount of misinformation, pseudo-media and AI-amplified false information presents a serious threat to integrity and democracy.
In 2016, the main strategy was to use hyper-segmentation advertising to target users into seeing specific information. As of 2025, disinformation is organically spread, illustrating how manipulation becomes more deceptive and stealthier as time passes. While during Brexit, micro-targeted political ads were what campaigns used as a main strategy to influence identified voters through segmentation, nowadays disinformation is mainly spread naturally through viral content like memes, short videos and transmedia. Virality once had a cost, now it no longer depends on foreign boosting or large budgets; engagement algorithms amplify organically, making false narratives spread rapidly and anonymously. A change like this one made it harder to impose regulations and track down the manipulative source, setting the perfect scene to overload citizens with persuasive content. These vulnerabilities that influenced Brexit’s outcome, keep strengthening with time, due to the organic disinformation ecosystem’s power to influence the public’s perception progressively but extremely powerfully, making it harder to discern fact from fiction.
The democratic system, which is rooted in public opinion, has been affected by the proliferation of disinformation. As it was previously mentioned, when citizens are vulnerable to viewing misleading or manipulative contents, their political decisions and stances are highly shaped by distorted perceptions rather than by evidence or facts. These distortions extend to measurements such as polls leading them to inaccurately reflect the electorate’s preferences since different polarized informational realities lead to the creation of different understandings of events.
Many tools have been created to evaluate how systemic vulnerabilities regarding information lead to disinformation flows and later on have an effect on democratic stability. The Impact-Risk calculator published in 2022 by the EU is one of these. This one tries to identify which segments of the population and which channels of communication trust are more vulnerable and susceptible to erosion. As stated by the European Council, disinformation “undermines people’s trust in democratic institutions and media,” which is exactly the case of the United Kingdom. The quality of the democratic system is undermined when there is unchecked disinformation. Accountability is also weakened and the capacity of citizens to decide based mostly on facts and with the purpose of a collective interest is highly manipulated and undermined by the proliferation of false narratives.
Overall, as the YouGov poll showed, the British public opinion has significantly changed over the past decade showing regret of the decision. Still, this significant change does not mean that there is a more informed electorate. Current disinformation has the characteristic of being organic, widespread, and harder to detect, making it much riskier than just the targeted ads used during the 2016 campaigns. In order to properly face these challenges digital literacy rates must grow, as should transparency promotion in order to protect the public from the saturation of fake news and information on the digital landscape.
Democracy was once challenged by the lack of information, now in the post-truth era it is not only weakened by the manipulated, low-quality, self-contradictory content, but also highly affected by the inflammatory content that generates anger as a sub-product. It is necessary to find measures to inform individuals on how to navigate this changing environment, if not, Brexit-styled cases might recur and public opinion will by the day become more and more vulnerable to distortion in a world where the digital landscape is increasingly and rapidly changing.