Anti-social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Author:Siva Vaidhyanathan [Vaidhyanathan, Siva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Politics Machine

The first surprise arrived on June 23, 2016. Conservative prime minister David Cameron had pandered to his party’s hard-line, anti-Europe wing by allowing a United Kingdom–wide popular referendum on whether his country should sever ties with the European Union, of which the United Kingdom was a founding and leading member. Cameron was confident that his party’s rank and file, and thus a majority of the nation as a whole, would act conservatively. After all, it was the Conservative Party.

He assumed that the sober business community would make the case that the financial, trade, and labor disruptions of leaving the European Union would be devastating. He assumed that those to the left of the Conservative Party would rally their supporters to defend the free flow of labor to the United Kingdom and the reciprocal opportunities for those from the United Kingdom to find work on the Continent. Still, there were loud, hard-line provocateurs within the Conservative Party, and a growing party to the right called the UK Independence Party, or UKIP. Cameron decided that the only way to move on from the constant complaints those factions put forth about the erosion of traditional English culture and the weaknesses in labor markets in the face of steady migration from poorer Eastern and Southern Europe was to once and for all demonstrate that the voters of the United Kingdom do not fear their neighbors and see openness as working to their advantage.

Cameron was wrong. More than thirty million people voted in the referendum, with 51.9 percent voting to leave the European Union and 48.1 percent voting to stay. The two sides had become known by their simple verbs: Leave versus Stay. The victory of the Leave campaign not only shocked conventional wisdom, it surprised many of those who had been issuing and following polls for months. The polls had been very noisy and inconsistent for weeks before the election. But conventional wisdom settled on the prediction that Stay would win narrowly. The British betting markets, which often accurately predict elections, had settled on an 88 p ercent chance that a majority of the voters would opt to stay. But the very inconsistency and narrowness of the polls demonstrated that they had fairly closely predicted the result—or at least its strong possibility.[1]

The Conservative Party, and thus the government of the United Kingdom, was thrown into turmoil. Cameron resigned immediately. After much shuffling, strutting, bluffing, and palace intrigue among various leading figures in the party, Theresa May emerged victorious and assumed the job of prime minister. May had opposed the vote to Leave, but after it passed she endorsed a vague plan to execute the will of the voters and leave the European Union. Business and finance leaders of the country began planning for the turmoil and the loss of markets for goods and labor. Major firms, including those in banking, began to look for new homes in cities such as Frankfurt now that London seemed unfriendly.

Pundits and journalists quickly searched for explanations. Even if the polls had not botched the prediction, the very fact that so many U.

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