Vote Leave’s supposedly youth-focused sister group showed most of its Facebook advertising to older voters during the EU referendum campaign, according to data released by Facebook that bolsters the case that it was not a separate entity.

This month, following a series of stories in the Observer, the Electoral Commission fined Vote Leave and BeLeave a combined £61,000 and reported individuals involved to the police after concluding that the official pro-Brexit campaign group broke legal spending limits before the 2016 referendum. It concluded that Vote Leave used BeLeave – founded by a 22-year old fashion student, Darren Grimes – as a proxy to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on Facebook advertising.

Grimes has vowed to contest the ruling, and set up a fundraising page that has raised tens of thousands of pounds from the public to fight his legal case.



Vote Leave has always insisted that BeLeave was a separate campaign with a unique skill in producing social media messages that could reach younger voters, rather than a simple proxy for Vote Leave’s overall campaign.

A Vote Leave campaign poster. Photograph: Vote Leave

Analysis of the data – included in a file detailing hundreds of ads that Facebook said were run by Vote Leave and associated groups during the campaign – shows that the majority of views of BeLeave’s paid adverts were by older Facebook users, mirroring other Vote Leave spending.

The pro-Brexit adverts produced by Grimes’ group were seen a minimum of 45m times, with three-fifths of the audience aged over 35. Millions of views of the BeLeave adverts were among people who were over the pension age.

The BeLeave adverts, which were more upbeat and less provocative than those produced by Vote Leave, included calls for “a fair immigration system that doesn’t discriminate” and insisted “our future is brighter without the EU holding us back”.

The Facebook data also casts doubt on the extent to which Vote Leave used demographic microtargeting to create personalised adverts aimed at at influencing small slivers of society.

The data suggests Vote Leave largely used Facebook adverts as a blunt instrument to promote a relatively small number of core messages on immigration and NHS funding. It promoted these adverts to millions of people across all age groups, a tactic more in line with traditional advertising practices.

A Vote Leave campaign poster. Photograph: Vote Leave

“There wasn’t the time to do any sophisticated targeting given the very narrow window that we had once I became aware we’d be given a donation,” Grimes said. “BeLeave’s messaging was always distinct, trying to reach the same internationalist, liberal constituency that I knew younger voters to be.”

The data also points to apparent incompetence in the way the official Brexit campaign placed some of its adverts. Vote Leave targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in India, including with ads featuring the former cricketer Sir Ian Botham promoting a pro-Brexit football prediction competition, potentially wasting campaign funds.

The data released via the Commons DCMS select committee shows for the first time the scale of Vote Leave and BeLeave’s combined Facebook campaign. Placed adverts were seen a minimum of 165m times during the referendum.

One advert, saying the UK should “spend our money on our priorities like the NHS”, was shown at least 12m times, while an advert claiming Turkey was “joining the EU” was shown at least 5m times.

Some adverts touched on topics designed to appeal to niche demographics, such as opposing bullfighting in Spain or calling for money to be spent on flood defences in Yorkshire rather than being sent to Brussels. But most of the money went into promoting more general warnings about an impending influx of immigrants or threats to health funding.

The adverts were placed through the Canadian IT firm AggregateIQ, which was also used by other pro-Brexit groups including the Democratic Unionist party (DUP).

Despite the DUP being based in Northern Ireland, more than half of the Facebook adverts the party ran during the referendum period were not shown to anyone in the region, according to Facebook’s data. The party’s pro-Brexit online advertising campaign reached a minimum of of 350,000 views in Northern Ireland and almost 2m in the rest of the UK.

The DUP had a history of campaigning for Brexit outside Northern Ireland. In February 2017, it was revealed that the party had spent almost £300,000 on a cover wrap for the Metro newspaper, which is not published anywhere in the region. In total, the party spent £425,000 on the EU referendum, more than seven times its declared expenditure in the 2015 general election.

Veterans for Britain, another Brexit campaign group, also used AggregateIQ to place its Facebook adverts, but its data was not released. Facebook’s UK head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, said the campaign had “not permitted us to disclose this information” to the DCMS committee.