Everyone remembers the WikiLeaks scandal. It occurred when a whistleblower managed to leak a lot of restricted documents to the world. Essentially proving that the USA was spying on its people in a horrible and Orwellian manner. Many Americans were tricked into thinking this man was a traitor. But in reality, he was simply uncovering illegal and morally wrong practices by this government. He wasn’t the first person to do this. And he also wasn’t the last.
Poli-Blog
Poli-Blog is a now-closed blogging website that focused on political from around the world. It dabbled in USA politics but mainly focused on other nations. The idea of the site was to provide the American people with a greater insight into foreign politics, in the same vein that the rest of the world is very informed about the politics of America.
The blog was run by one person, with a team of technicians behind him that only focused on blog maintenance and posting. The main blogger, whose identity we are still unsure of, was responsible for all the actual writing. And it is this writer who managed to uncover some massive government corruption.
Brexit
Everyone knows about Brexit. The massive referendum held by the United Kingdom in which they decided to leave the EU. A mistake that is already costing them dearly. Many people wonder why they decided this. Well thanks to the information uncovered by the writer of Poli-Blog, we now know why.
You may have seen that new movie with Benedict Cumberbatch that goes into detail on how Dominic Cummings helped spearhead Brexit and lead the UK out of the EU. And you may have heard about Cambridge Analytica, the company that sold data to the Brexit party to help them secure more votes.
It was Poli-blog that first caught the trail of Cambridge Analytica, although this isn’t common knowledge at all. They successfully found out this company was manipulating people by accessing data they shouldn’t have access to and then selling it to other companies.
The Imapct
The impact of this information was largely ignored by the British media and everyone who in favor of leaving the EU. This proves how effective this campaign of manipulation and lies actually was. It is easy to see from this information that the entire Brexit campaign was built upon misinformation and slander designed to trick people into leaving the EU.
But why was it that all this information leaking didn’t cause a bigger fuss really? Well, there is one key problem with the information that Poli-Blog managed to uncover and it all comes down to poor blog design and outreach. If the site had managed to imrpove on both of these aspects, things might have been a lot different.
Outreach
Outreach is essentially how many people a blog reaches. This could be millions. It could be hundreds. And in the case of Poli-Blog, their total consistent readership was in the hundreds. And most of them were American. This presented a number of issues.
Firstly, without a larger readership, the information uncovered just went to waste. No one wanted to believe it was true and instead attributed it to being political propaganda fronted by a lefty. If they have used tools to help you do your own blogger outreach, rather than simply relying on the skills of their technical team, they might have been able to get this information out there and make an impact.
The other issue was the massive political unrest that was present in America. Trump’s presidency was one of the most divisive and turbulent ones in history. The entire four years were filled with scandals, issues, riots, protests, and a seemingly endless stream of racism and atrocities.
And this acted as a smoke screen for anything related to Brexit. Considering most of the readers of Poli-Blog were American, it is no wonder the information did nothing. The readers were too busy dealing with their own issues to worry about the fate of one small island nation.
In the end the UK did wake up to the realities of what had taken place during the referendum, but it was far too late. The Tories had secured a landslide majority in the house and the UK is set for four years of hard times.