Going by that, people in the UK didn’t even know what the UK was on referendum day, and since we can see back for a year, they’ve never known! Nothing to do with the referendum at all – it’s just an enormous steady stream of people having no idea where they live. According to this, more people seem to know what the EU is than what the UK is. Even on the day of the referendum, there were still more people wondering what country they lived in than what international body they were a part of.

Going by that, people in the UK didn’t even know what the UK was on referendum day, and since we can see back for a year, they’ve never known! Nothing to do with the referendum at all – it’s just an enormous steady stream of people having no idea where they live. According to this, more people seem to know what the EU is than what the UK is. Even on the day of the referendum, there were still more people wondering what country they lived in than what international body they were a part of.

Going by that, people in the UK didn’t even know what the UK was on referendum day, and since we can see back for a year, they’ve never known! Nothing to do with the referendum at all – it’s just an enormous steady stream of people having no idea where they live. According to this, more people seem to know what the EU is than what the UK is. Even on the day of the referendum, there were still more people wondering what country they lived in than what international body they were a part of.

That’s a lot of people, right? With a little playing around, I was able to find something that people were even more interested in than the EU referendum results.

The article makes a half-sentence reference to the fact that the search for “what is the EU” was dwarfed by searches for “referendum results”, but dwarfed by how much? It doesn’t say, so I had to look for the facts myself. Oh, no big deal, looks like it’s only dwarfed by more than 10,000% , so much so that the line for “what is the EU” looks like the EKG reading for a day-old corpse.

Since that’s about 230% of the EU referendum results search, and we’ve now got a good idea that there is a ridiculous amount of people living in the UK by searching more than just a few intentionally misleading terms, we can then conclude that, at worst, no more than .003% of UK voters (or 1 out of every 33,000 people) is unsure of what the EU and the UK are. The real answer is, in fact, much much lower than that because this doesn’t take into account such people as those who don’t use google, don’t use computers, or simply search using different terms. but I’m not a mathematician or statistician*, so I’m not going to pretend to be one, unlike the various news outlets “reporting” this and pretending to be journalists.

Somebody remind me how following the news is somehow supposed to keep you well-informed. Without it, at least we wouldn’t have our heads constantly filled with BS like this.

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*I’m really not! All numbers here are roughly precise.

Update: To further illustrate how much those news articles cherry-picked their search terms, here’s a new way I thought to search, using “referendum” instead of “referendum results,”



That’s a 250% increase over what I was originally saying.

I played around with some more terms (Because that’s what you do with Google Trends: play. It’s a toy, not a source to base the news on.) and discovered the best one yet. News.

This time it’s about 175% more interest in ‘news’ over ‘sex.’ Yes, that’s right. The EU referendum made news sexy. This also means that my numbers above are too high, and now we can see that at a maximum, only 1 in 60,000 voters wondered “what is the EU?” So wouldn’t a better headline have been “British people now more interested in politics than sex”?