A remainer’s despair at the #FBPE brigade

As a remainer, I always found it far too harsh when eurosceptic pundits occasionally compared some of my fellow voters to Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. Now I’m less convinced that this comparison is always as unfair as I once thought. 

Last week, I offered some thoughts on ‘Why the #FBPE hashtag failed – and the general lessons from that failure.’ It was intended as a discussion of the ways in which the Follow Back Pro Europe meme on Twitter backfired. It was a somewhat nerdy, technical discussion, focusing on how FBPE accounts actually just ended up talking to each other – and, in the process, failed to convince the other side to change their minds. But what I thought was a mild piece ended up rattling a hornet’s nest I assumed no longer existed. I was soon buried under a Twitter avalanche. FBPE types were not questioning the fine details of my article but rather the idea that FBPE had failed at all.