CYBERNATS. If you’re a vocal Yesser online, there’s a fair chance you had that label dumped on you – some embrace it, some don’t. And how many column inches have been devoted to how they’ve poisoned the debate? You could be forgiven for thinking that when we consider social media’s role in the 2014 referendum, that’s all that’s worth talking about.

But it very much isn’t. Online vitriol existing is nothing new, be it teenagers screaming vulgarities on a video game or pensioners screaming vulgarities on Twitter. Let’s flip the script for once and look at how the Yes movement used social media to make up for where the news media fell short. For once, you’re going to be reading what you did right.

It’s a fairly established stance that social media was key in the 2014 referendum. As journalism professor Brian McNair put it: “2.6 million tweets about the referendum were sent in the 24-hour period between 7am on September 18 and 7am on the 19th (polling day). Research by scholars at the University of Strathclyde recorded 10 million Facebook interactions in the five weeks before the vote.

“Clearly, people were engaged in this debate to a degree rarely seen in British politics hitherto, and used social media to articulate their views, share articles they agreed with (or disagreed with), and communicate with others on the issues.”

It’s worth digging deeper, though. Before The National’s letter pages, there were the coffeehouses of 18th-century France. In the coffeehouses, rich people came together to discuss and debate ideas of shared public importance. Thus, the “public sphere” was born. That term was coined somewhat later by Jürgen Habermas, who described it as a space where private individuals come together to discuss as a public society’s rules. In latter days, that space can take the form of letters pages, forums, etc.

Then we have the press, who Habermas described as one of the public sphere’s pre-eminent institutions. Newspapers widened access to the public sphere thanks to their availability. Basically, they can inform the public and so help shape debate. Of course, there’s a substantial disclaimer to this.

Journalism relied on capitalism to function, and with newspaper accounts being constructed by journalists, the fingerprints of dominant institutions quickly became more relevant in the shaping of the public sphere. There were mediators in the information exchange. Newspaper readers would only be reading what journalists had filtered through to them.

This posed a challenge in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum. Not a single daily newspaper was in support of a Yes vote. This was entirely unreflective of the actual state of public opinion.

And so, that filter of news coming into the public sphere made sure it was the pro-Union stories passing through easiest on to newsstands. Project Fear had a pipeline.

Before we go into specifics, there’s an important, eternal question to address. Why do journalists report every single utterance of Gordon Brown, no matter how irrelevant, nonsensical and boring?

There is a model of journalism put forward by Daniel C Hallin called the hierarchy of spheres. There are three concentric “spheres of deviance”.

As Stuart Allan put it, the sphere of consensus values is made up of issues beyond dispute, with journalists feeling no obligation to present opposing views. In essence, this would be something like racism being wrong. The sphere of legitimate controversy contains, for example, debates between the main political parties, in which balance is treated as crucial. If a story is about Brexit, you would get both sides. Finally, there is the sphere of deviance, containing views not worthy of discussion. Conspiracy theories usually fall into this category. According to this model, each story possibility for a journalist fits within one of these spheres. But it goes further. The background of a source is essential too. A newspaper would never report on claims of electoral fraud by a random Twitter user, but if a major politician did it? Of course they would.

The side effect here is that it benefits those with privilege, such as Gordon Brown, and less so those with genuine expertise. Do you remember seeing the Wee Ginger Dug on your television screens in 2013/14? I suspect not.

Because, despite being at the forefront of the independence campaign to this day, his knowledge wasn’t what mattered.

Thanks to the hierarchy of spheres, what matters is rank. But you’ll have saw the Dug on your Twitter timeline. In other words, Brownhog Day is here to stay, folks.

All of this sets an important scene. We’ve been told “cybernats” poisoned the online well in 2013 and 2014, to the detriment of debate on this key constitutional question. In other words, they tainted the public sphere. The only problem is that it’s not true...

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