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Jeremy Corbyn announced that the Labour Party might back a second vote. Prime Minister Theresa May conceded that she might allow for a Brexit delay. Cue the sketchy Facebook ads.

A search for key terms – including “Brexit”, “Referendum”, and “Brexiteer” – on Facebook’s ad archive reveals a hive of activity triggered by Corbyn’s second referendum klaxon. Most of the ads published since then have been put out by official parties (the Liberal Democrats), well-known campaigns (Labour Leave, Labour Future) or pressure groups (environmental organisation Friends of the Earth.) But some of the campaigns are way less easy to pin down.


Take Britain’s Future, a Facebook page followed by over 20,000 people, and hellbent on promoting a no-deal Brexit. On February 26, according to the ad archive, the page was targeting the constituents of several Conservative MPs, including Lucy Allan, Steve Double, John Hayes, John Baron, among many others. The ads urged constituents to ask their MPs to “Remove the Backstop”, “Rule out a custom union” and “Deliver Brexit without delay”. The campaign looks eerily similar to the one orchestrated by Mainstream Network, before the media brouhaha made the website go silent in November 2018.

Between October 1, 2018 and February 23, 2019, Britain’s Future spent £294,784 on 2,537 Facebook ads Facebook

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Now, Britain’s Future is not exactly like Mainstream – if anything because we know of one person associated with it: the organisation’s website names the writer and journalist Tim Dawson as its “editor”. But Britain’s Future’s address, management, and, crucially, finances are not transparent: the website suggests that the organisation – whose name is nowhere to be found on Companies House – raises donations “from friends and fellow Brexiteers”.

Those friends and fellows must be very generous: between October 1, 2018 and February 23, 2019, the organisation spent £294,784 on 2,537 Facebook ads, according to the social network's ad archive. In that period, Britain’s Future was the second biggest political advertiser in the UK on Facebook, coming just after People’s Vote UK (£295,015) and outspending the Conservatives – at £78,841 the highest-spending party on Facebook – by almost four times. Britain’s Future did not reply to requests for information about its funders.


Britain’s Future is just the extravagant epitome of this conundrum. Several other entities spreading Brexit-related ads as of February 26 do not publicise the identity of their backers. Some of them, like the pro-Leave Centre for Welsh Studies, are think-tanks, a category notoriously cagey about its finances (the Centre, headed by Matthew MacKinnon, formerly Vote Leave’s regional director for Wales, did not respond to questions about its funding); others, like a page called We Are The 52%, sport a seemingly bare-bones structure that jars with the £38,813 splurged on Facebook ads in the last five months; pro-Remain campaigns People’s Vote UK and Best for Britain, while overall much more transparent, still attracted criticism for not publishing the details of all their funders and donors.

It’s an improvement of sorts, but Facebook adverts have a well-earned reputation as bugbear-in-chief in British politics. It started when the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how, during the Brexit campaign, the Leave side had deployed targeted “dark ads” on the platform to underhandedly influence the electorate. Mere months later, the Commons’ Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, in its interim report on disinformation, recommended that political ads on Facebook should be labelled to clearly show who paid for them – information that had been missing from some of the pro-Brexit ads posted on the social network in 2016.

The Centre for Welsh Studies think-tank, which is running pro-leave advertising on Facebook, is headed by Matthew MacKinnon, formerly Vote Leave’s regional director for Wales Facebook

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In October 2018, a shady Facebook page called Mainstream Network was exposed for publishing £257,000’s worth of pro-Brexit ads – including some targeting the chair of the disinformation enquiry, Damian Collins – without providing any information about its financial backers. That hastened Facebook’s roll-out of its new rules on ads, requiring pages pushing political content to reveal who was paying for it. In addition, all political ads started being collected in a searchable online archive.


It could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Earlier this month, Open Democracy raised the alarm about a cluster of Facebook pages that were publishing ads supportive of no-deal Brexit, while providing very little information on who was behind the organisations nominally paying for the posts.

One could again lay the blame on Facebook’s doorstep: publishing political ads on the platform only requires a British or EU identity document and a UK bank account. But the problem runs deeper. It has to do, for instance, with the British Electoral Commission’s utter toothlessness when it comes to supervising digital campaigning, let alone forcing an organisation to reveal its backers.

Putting pressure on Facebook might – only might – help us get rid of dark-ads, one day; solving dark-money will not be that simple.

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