Haha you half-read my mind. I did want to address the whole independence supporting Iranian bots but I wasn’t about to do it for someone who was clearly just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck.
First - disregard everything historical about Scottish independence. This is not a continuation of the wars of independence, Braveheart, Outlander or anything like that.
The contemporary independence movement boils down to democracy. We continually have policy inflicted on us that we do not vote for, our government has had policies vetoed by the UK government and we’d like the responsibility for those policy areas.
The build up to the referendum in 2014 was pretty wild and was absolutely studied by a wide range of political strategists specifically around social media strategy. Believe it or not, social media was the place to politically campaign for independence.
The Yes campaign exploded from a pretty minor 25% support for independence to 45% due to a lot of in-person campaigning but also a lot of knowledge sharing between different regional Yes groups across Scotland.
By the end of the campaign, a lot of people were politically savvy and particularly online. It led to activists ‘infiltrating’ the other side, the No campaign admitted to having banks of people sitting around a table and blasting out messaging (appreciate all this is par for the course now) but at the time it was pretty wild.
People at the time didn’t have the hostility and cautiousness to random social media follows back then. So it was common to ‘follow for follow’ literally any account that presented itself as a fellow supporter of whatever side.
I find it funny that the article cited ‘UK Defence Journal’ as the group that uncovered the ‘Independence accounts now silent after Iran blackout’. The UK Defence Journal wrongly claimed Scotland would be the epicentre of all Royal Navy ships following a successful No vote.
That all being said, it’s really easy to find bots and individuals who pretend to be from different groups. There are pro Brexit bots, there are anti Brexit bots, there are individuals who live halfway across the world who pretend to be white British conservatives who hate immigrants.
So quite how a couple of bot accounts ended up as ‘No one in Scotland wants independence it’s all just Iranian bots’ - is a bit silly in my opinion.
If it was really a foreign-led thing, they’ve been doing a really good job getting Scotland to consistently vote for pro-independence parties. They’ve really give the UK a runaround whoever they are.
ALT
