Brexit: Sky News Data And Propagating A Narrative

Hey All,

I am sure most folks here are familiar with the referendum vote in the UK to leave the EU. Initial reports denounced pro leave voters as emotional while stay votes were rational. They continued on to proclaim young people were at fault for not turning out to vote.

It turns out that Sky News Data created this narrative from 2015 general election polls and . . . thin air.

Supposedly Apathetic Millennials Are Not the Ones to Blame for Brexit

But studies by Michael Bruter, professor of political science and European politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his colleague, Dr. Sarah Harrison, have suggested that youth turnout was much higher. I spoke to Professor Bruter about the youth turnout figures and other crucial things people have misunderstood about this election.

That is correct, a couple of university professors decided to go out and collect data and verify whether any of these claims where true.

In regards to the Sky News produced figure of 36% which became gospel:

o what was the youth turnout, according to your research?
I've just got the figures back from our other survey, which is from a fresh sample, and what we found is that turnout among voters eighteen to twenty-four was sixty-four percent. Now that is an estimate, because it's always an estimation, but it comes from an actual survey where people were asked whether they voted or not, and whether they registered or not. We also controlled for over-reporting of electoral participation, because people always have a tendency to tell you that they voted even if they did not. So even when you account for all of that, we find is that turnout among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was about sixty-four percent. That would be the highest turnout among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds for the past twenty-five years.

Turnout among young people was sixty-four percent. That's the highest for any election for the past twenty-five years

This is a very different story to what we've been hearing.
Yeah, and this is a very important thing. That Sky data, they just took the answer from whether people voted out of nine out of ten or more on a zero to ten scale. They effectively confessed that it's not an actual turnout figure by any standard, just a prediction based on last year's data.

That is right, they effectively confessed that they made the figure up.

How can you measure people's emotional response?

. . . .

One of the things we always measure, I know it might sound silly, but it's actually important, is whether people cried when they heard the result of the election. What we found is that in this particular referendum, thirty-two percent of people told us they either cried or had tears in their eyes when they discovered the result of the vote. A small proportion were crying out of joy, but a much larger number, because they were Remain voters, were extremely sad.

The authors of the study go on to identify the unprecedented number of crying on both sides and the bitterness and anger expressed by both sides towards the others.

So, in conclusion, a pair of London School of Economics and Political Science professors decided to fact check a "journalistic" organization's reporting and found that the reporting was made up and essentially little more than the opinion of the editorial department.

Everyone please make sure to vet your news sources!

-FBB

Funny, I tuned into Skye news before the election to get some info, which led me to correctly predict the outcome from the USA.

I saw this in on the guardian site. Very interesting as the line that young people have no right to complain about the result as they didn't vote has been used here on ATS more than once.

Makes the point well about how we allow news organisations to define the narrative.

Good thread.

Here's a factual view of the referendum demographics, or rather a more reliable source as to how voting demographics were derived. Sky would have taken their statistics from a similar source, but either way there's consensus that young were less likely to vote than other age groups.

ONS - FOI

Why believe one bunch of London academics over another?

We do know that young people are less likely to get off their arses to vote. This is taken from studies and exit polls from previous elections. Therefore, if the view of the post-referendum research by others support previous trends then they are more likely to be accepted that two academics attempting to say something different.

a reply to: paraphi

As your link points out there are no official figures.

The original estimate wasnt based research but on the previous general election, this one is on the actual referendum.

I don't think it surprising that the turn out among young voters would be higher for a referendum than an election. The same is widely believed for the Scottish independence referendum.

www.theguardian.com...

It's not young v old, plenty of younger people voted leave, they just don't make for good copy in the way that "Old gits stole our future" does.
Here's a good piece from the arch Remainiac bible, the Guardian.
It shines a light into the the deep dark cave of human perception following the vote.

Like so many articles, the real truth about how people feel is shown in the comments section.
See all that vitriol from the "understanding" Guardianistas?

One that resonated particularly was how the rise in racial incidents is a result of remain tarring all leavers with the "racist" brush which had the effect of making the true racists think there was broad support for their idiotic point of view.

originally posted by: paraphi
Here's a factual view of the referendum demographics, or rather a more reliable source as to how voting demographics were derived. Sky would have taken their statistics from a similar source, but either way there's consensus that young were less likely to vote than other age groups.

ONS - FOI

Why believe one bunch of London academics over another?

We do know that young people are less likely to get off their arses to vote. This is taken from studies and exit polls from previous elections. Therefore, if the view of the post-referendum research by others support previous trends then they are more likely to be accepted that two academics attempting to say something different.

I agree with the sentiment, however the data was not from a similar election and was not widely prefaced with "our projections from previous elections . . . etc" incline me to believe this incident was much more similar to the FOX news declaration of George Bush winning Florida in the states.

If you are unfamiliar, here is an explanation from a left leaning organization:
FLASHBACK: How Fox's Biased Reporting Clouded The 2000 Election

As other posters have noted, it was presented across the board as an excuse to treat the opposing side (of whatever side of Brexit) very poorly.

Thank you for the link.

-FBB