© Phil Noble/ReutersLabour Party Deputy Leader Tom Watson
Watson has written to Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, claiming that as many as 150,000 Russian linked Twitter accounts were tweeting about Brexit during the 2016 EU referendum. He accused Russian UK-based media outlets, RT and Sputnik of producing "systematically one-sided coverage" of the referendum, and called for a 'Mueller-style' investigation into alleged Russian interference.
There have been countless claims since the Brexit referendum of 2016, but very little concrete evidence that Russia interfered in the vote. What's slightly bizarre about Watson's demands is that he calls for a 'Mueller-style' investigation, which has so far produced no clear evidence of Russian involvement in US elections, despite all the hype.
Corbyn's number two points to a November 2017 research paper conducted by scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley. They claim Russian Twitter accounts posted over 45,000 tweets about Brexit in 48 hours during the 2016 EU referendum. Is this really proof of Russian meddling when the same piece of research says 28.6 million Brexit-related tweets were collected between 24 May 2016 to 17 August 2016?
In December 2017, the Financial Times reported research conducted by The Oxford Internet Institute, which found there had been no significant Russian activity during the lead up to the 2016 Brexit vote.
They discovered a total of 105 accounts had tweeted around 16,000 times in two separate weeks ahead of the referendum. Just 0.6 percent of the links shared via tweets with Brexit hashtags - which could have been in favour of either the Remain or Leave campaigns - were to known Russian sources such as Russia Today or Sputnik.
In 2017 Facebook identified an ad spend of less than $1 - 76 pence to be precise, by Russian organisations during the lead up to the EU referendum. The funds bought three adverts with an estimated reach of 200 people.
In February this year, Youtube's head of policy, Juniper Downs, told the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that they had conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence of interference by Russia into the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Watson has been both supported and ridiculed in equal measure on social media for his call for an inquiry into Russian meddling in the Brexit vote. Some are calling his actions "long overdue," while others accuse him of "clutching at straws," and claim the Mueller inquiry is the exact opposite of a public inquiry, as it's conducted in secrecy.
The real issue is whether the Russian networks presented the facts of the case honestly, and not about whether they have a right to do so. That question is a matter of law, not political opinion. Of course somebody like Tom Watson, who is (blindly) supporting the dishonesty of the EU case and is confronted by an honest presentation in making knowns the contrary arguments is going to feel grieved that some network would dare do so. They would much sooner have these contrary arguments inadequately presented. That is what happened in the early days of our experience with what was then called (dishonestly) the Common Market. Nobody with a mass audience really presented the truth about the Common Market honestly all those years ago. The British people were shoe horned into the EU based upon shaky and adequate information. It took many of us years finding out the real truth about what we were getting into. What is happening now is that British people are waking up in dribs and drabs until over one half of us are opposed to any further involvement in this foolish quasi fascist would be super state.
RT and the other Russian networks have every right (under British) law to present the facts of the case. They have done so all along, and have presented better than our own mass media networks, who tend to resort to ideological rather than logical arguments. It is probably easy for Tom Watson to confuse the two modes of presentation. He also no doubt wishes to find grounds for objecting to Russian media dealing with British and European issues. The fallacy in his reasoning appears to be some kind of species hominem argument applied to institutions: Objecting to the message because the messenger is a foreign institutional source.