Re: The BBC
>Regardless, the 'cheating' in this case would be the breaking of the spending limits if that's what has happened.
I totally agree. But that isn't the focus or tone of all these articles. The narrative is all about an evil organisation which used some mind-control magic to change people's votes. There is obviously no way that people not under an evil magical influence would have voted "leave".
I'm not sure if those behind these stories think they are being subtle in arguing that the election is invalid and the result ignored.
The tone of the articles are so obviously partisan framing all this as both bad and exceptional. This kind of targetting goes on every day. Buy a flight to Italy, you'll get offers for Italian car-rentals. This is not an aberration, this is what facebook and google do for a living. This is exactly what Obama did and was praised for when he won his elections by the same newspapers who denounced both Brexit and Trump's election when they did exactly the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, I find it all abhorrent, but I take personal responsibility for it by not blabbing about my life on facebook. Even if they get a profile on me from those around me, I'm not seeing their adverts. If you don't like the power these organisations have, stop giving them free content and consuming their advertising. I'm not going to cry if facebook and Tumblr go under. Do you think Facebook or its clients (the ones who actually pay them for stuff) or the government want it to go away, or is it just too useful? Building profiles and micro-targeting is what the Cloud does. Don't come crying because you think it was used for evil. If you want it to go away, you have to kill the capability.
This level of creepiness is not just for social media any more. I see MS are banning profanity in O365 documents. Think about what that means. Are your documents "safe" in the cloud? Encrypted?
Nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure. We need new protocols to provide distributed authentication, presence indicators and RSS feeds so that we can share information with our friends and friends alone, without giving data to large organisations. Large organisations tend to evil. This is because as they grow, individuals (customers, voters, providers) become relatively less important. Larger organisations trample on those they disagree with. That may not matter to you while you are in power or in the majority. Welcome to the Minority.
Notice how Scottish independence went back on the agenda after the Brexit vote? That would be devolution of power to provide self-determination. Scotland splitting from the UK, just as the UK split from Europe. It is interesting how people suddenly want that ability despite being pro-EU. It is pretty similar, except of course the EU is not supposed to be a nation.