Foreign Affairs
Turns Out The Story About Brexiters ‘Frantically’ Googling ‘What Is the EU?’ Is Almost Certainly A Stunning Falsehood
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It wasn’t but hours after Brexiters voted for Britain to leave the EU, when the wider media already had a smoking gun proving that they were all incompetent ninnies who had made a grave mistake.
Their evidence: A “250% spike” in the Google search term “What happens if we leave the EU?”
The problem: The story is probably complete bunk. Google Trends tweeted the statistic, and media organizations ran with it. Except, Google Trends doesn’t give specific numbers for how many times a particular phrase was searched. Google Adwords, on the other hand, does.
A sample of Google Adwords for the last available month, May — provided thankfully by Northwestern University student Remy Smith and expounded upon by blogger/author Steve Patterson — shows that June’s numbers were at best only a few thousand Britons searching the term “What is the EU,” similarly for “what happens if we leave the EU.” Now let this sink in: 17 million Brits voted to Leave, and a few thousand searchers who could have been school children, tourists, or stoned college drop outs, started a wave of media attention that painted those millions as complete morons.
Due, of course, in no small part to the journalists and pundits who were so desperate to characterize Brexiters, like Patterson put it, “as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.” Did anybody stop to think that it might have been Remainers, worried, sleepy Remainers, who did the Googling?
Regardless, onward: The Washington Post blared “The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it” — frantically. The New York Times similarly scoffed “Britons Ask Google: What Did We Just Do“, using the same “tripled search” methodology. Patterson asks, “Did nobody ask: tripled from what number?”
Never mind with that nonsense about numbers, onward: NPR, Arstechnica, The Hill, PEOPLE, USA Today, and The New York Daily News all ran similar headlines, many featuring a single anecdotal, on-camera interview of the same wide-eyed British woman saying she might vote differently were she given a chance to recast.
At the time of this writing, Stephen Colbert had just wrapped up a raucous bit on The Late Show about how the 250% spike in searches was oh so funny and telling about Leavers (and how dumb they are).
Needless to say, smug would be a light way of describing how all these reports were delivered. Certainly the search for “when is the Super Bowl” spikes every January, perhaps next year, stories will crop up about NFL fans not knowing anything about the sport.
“I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating,” wrote Patterson.
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