Tim Whitemore

Riddle me this: Andy Burnham says Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. His office says it did not change the result. Yet the Intelligence and Security Committee said the government had provided no post-referendum assessment of Russian interference. So how can the government be sure it made no difference if it never properly assessed the impact? 🤷‍♂️ Leave won by 1,269,501 votes, a 3.8 percentage-point margin. A net shift of about 635,000 voters from Leave to Remain—fewer than 2% of votes cast—would have reversed the result. What we know: • Twitter identified 49 Internet Research Agency accounts that posted 942 Brexit-related tweets. • Researchers identified 13,493 bot-like accounts that posted nearly 65,000 messages in a sample of 10 million referendum-related tweets. Twitter linked about 1% of those accounts to Russia. • A separate study counted more than 45,000 Brexit posts in the final 48 hours from accounts it classified as Russian. That does not mean every account was a confirmed Kremlin bot. • 89up estimated 10 million potential Twitter impressions from Russian-linked bots, and 134 million potential social-media impressions for anti-EU RT and Sputnik articles. None of this proves Russia changed the result. But the ISC recommended that the intelligence community assess potential Russian interference in the referendum and publish an unclassified summary. Why hasn’t the UK government acted on that recommendation?