The BREXIT vote:
the art of lie
is shaking the very
FOUNDATIONS
                         OF DEMOCRACY

The Leave campaign's central claim on the immigration issue centred on the alleged likelihood of Turkey – a country often in the news for political unrest, having a strongman leader (rapidly on his way to becoming an autocrat), and as a frontline in the conflicts of Syria and ISIS – becoming an EU member.

The Vote Leave campaign on Turkey used a simple online poster which made only the subtlest of allusions to an influx of new immigrants – nothing that could be attacked as politically incorrect or aggressive.

TURKEY (population 76 million) IS JOINING THE EU, it said.

Strictly speaking, the poster could be described as true: Turkey is one of a group of nations being considered for EU membership. But it is nowhere near becoming a member at any point in the next decade or so. The process for joining the EU requires that prerequisites in thirty-five different areas be met. Turkey, at time of the referendum, had met just one, and was not remotely close on many of the others. Even if all thirty-five criteria were met, Turkey's membership would be far from a given, as every EU member would have to agree to allow it to join.

Vote Leave's misleading poster opened the way for claims which were still more audacious, though... The most misleading (but stark) such claim was a banner headline in the Daily Express, perhaps the most ardent of the pro-Leave papers.

         12M TURKS SAY THEY'LL COME TO UK

said its banner headline, followed by a caption stating:

Those planning to move are either
unemployed or students according
to shock poll.

By flagging the unemployment of many of those allegedly planning to come to UK, the Daily Express article also implied a threat to jobs, or a need to pay benefits to newcomers, stoking anti-immigration sentiment.
The poll, though, was widly misleading, asking respondents if they or anyone they knew would 'consider' a move. Other papers ran stories on visa-free travel for Turks to the UK – on tourist visas – giving the impression, amid the broader atmosphere, that such deals were to allow long-term migration. The collective effect of these stories and attack lines was to plant the idea of Turkish immigration as an issue, inflate its scale out of all proportion, make it sound as inevitable effect of EU migration, and then to pose the referendum as the last chance to stop the threat – which in the short- or medium-term was simply non-existent.

This series of baffling and barely true or simply untrue claims continued to come from pro-Leave campaigns or newspapers.

One line of attack centred on proposals to create an EU army, with the implication that this would lead to the end of the UK's military indipendence (despite the UK already being part of multiple international alliances).
The army was indeed a real proposal, but one that has circulated and gone nowhere for more than a decade, and one the UK could easily have blocked – and had said it would liked do so.

A particularly baffling example came in a Daily Mail front-page splash, times as Theresa May – then a Remain supporter – and George Osborne squabbled over whether the UK needed better border controls even if it stayed in the UK. Alongside a photo of a lorry full of people attempting to smuggle themselves into the country, the paper splashed the quote

                 WE'RE FROM EUROPE –
                                     LET US IN!

No one from an EU nation would ever need to enter the UK in this way, given their right to live and work here, so it's difficult to see why the Mail believed this to be what the people on the van said, or why the story was tied to the EU membership row. It quickly emerged, via a BBC reporter who had seen the footage in question, that the man quoted had in reality said We're from Iraq.

Perhaps the most chilling of the misleading attack lines on immigration came from Nigel Farage and the unofficial Leave. EU campaign: a picture of a huge queue of people – coincidentally or otherwise, mostly made up of non-white people – headlined BREAKING POINT – the EU has failed us all, with the strapline We must break free of the EU and Take Back Control.
The poster was widely condemned as offensive and even compared to some used in Nazi propaganda, which had similarly pictured large flows of refugees against an almost identical background.
The image was given no context in the Leave.EU poster, but was in reality a picture of refugees on the Croatian/Slovenia border.

The UK's obligations on refugees are unrelated to its EU refugee quota schemes. At the fringes of the campaign – largely spread trough Twitter and Facebook – came the sorts of conspiratorial thinking now familiar to the Trump contest.

Claims included the false assertions that various celebrities had endorses Leave – including Victoria Beckham, based on a twenty-year-old out-of-context quote; that EU membership would mean the end of the monarchy; and even that people should take pens to polling stations in case authorities rubbed out and replaced votes for Leave made in pencil.

Source:[5]