THE website previously used by the Better Together campaign has been hijacked by a Yesser - and turned into a pro-independence page.

The National first noticed the change when looking through old Better Together tweets from their campaign’s official account for an unrelated story.

When we clicked on a link shared by that Twitter account in the summer of 2014, we were taken to a 404 “missing page” screen.

Branded like Better Together, the page said: “Much like the case for Scotland in the UK, this page is missing.”

The National:

Confused by the strangely pro-independence message, we looked a little deeper. The website has a News section, a Facts section, and an About page.

While the News and Facts sections spoof the pro-Union arguments made in 2014, the About page gives the game away.

There the webpage’s new owner, Dale Harvey, explains a little about what he hoped to achieve by reviving the dead site.

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Speaking to The National, Harvey said he had found the original Better Together site on archive.org, a website which keeps old versions of over 452 billion internet pages, and used the old design as the framework for his new, spoof site.

As a web designer by trade, Harvey said it was “quite quick and easy” for him to do.

Asked how he had originally noticed that the Better Together website was out of use, Harvey said it was thanks to an old tweet from that campaign.

Originally sent on September 2, 2014, the now infamous tweet reads: “What is process [sic] for removing our EU citizenship? Voting Yes.”

Though he can’t remember who or which, he saw somebody share another old Better Together post at the same time as this famous one resurfaced. Unlike the first, this second tweet contained a link to the campaign website.

“I realised that it didn’t go anywhere,” Harvey said. “The error that came up made me realise that the domain had expired.

“I was trying to think of ways that I could use my tech skills to contribute to a Yes campaign and this seemed like a fairly easy one that I could do myself.”

Harvey says that his spoof site’s similarity to the original has “confused” some people, adding: “Even I forget that I’ve done it and have a bit of a double-take.”

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The web designer said the campaign’s Fact section was “very easy to spoof because everything was quite directly contradicted fairly quickly after the vote”.

For the News section, he found old tweets from the campaign which contained links to the domain he now owns and tried to “make sure that those links carried on working”.

For example, one old tweet from Better Together reads: “Leading Scottish QC says if we leave the UK then we leave the EU. Read more here…”

This sends people to a short article, edited by Harvey, which tells us to “look at Guy Verhofstadt telling the Home Affairs Committee there is no big obstacle to Scotland joining the EU”.

Previously largely apolitical, Harvey didn’t vote in the 2014 referendum.

Asked what had changed his mind on the independence question, he told The National it had been after he first had to directly deal with the Home Office.

He said that this experience with the “hostile environment” was when he “started to understand what the Yes campaign was about”.

In the course of looking into this article, we also checked Better Together’s official Facebook page, which is still active and has almost 200,000 followers.

The National:

Although this page looks unchanged since 2014, there is one key difference.

Instead of a link to the Better Together site, there is a link to www.nothanks2014.net.

However, this link is not what it seems.

Instead of taking you to a pro-Union page, it takes you through to a YouTube video posted by The National running through the 2014 No campaign’s broken promises.

We have been unable to track down this anonymous Yesser with access to the Better Together Facebook page, but we appreciate their small contribution to the movement.