[2][3] "The Russia Report" published by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament in July 2020 did not specifically address the Brexit campaign, but it concluded that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace.
[43] In addition to interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian trolls have previously been documented promoting fake claims of election fraud after the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and attempting to amplify the public impact of terrorist attacks,[44] with Prime Minister Theresa May accusing the Russian government of “deploying its state-run media organisations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions”.
[45] According to a US senate report, Russian state media channel RT covered the referendum campaign extensively and offered "systematically one-sided coverage".
[46][47] A parliamentary inquiry into disinformation and 'fake news' cited research estimating the value of anti-EU Russian state media during the EU referendum campaign at between £1.4 and £4.14 million.
[44] Data released by Twitter in 2018 identified 3,841 accounts of Russian origin affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, as well as 770 potentially from Iran, which collectively sent over 10 million Tweets in "an effort to spread disinformation and discord", according to The Telegraph, with a "day-long blitz" on the day of the referendum.
[50][51] In November 2017, The Times reported that researchers from Swansea University and UC Berkeley had identified around 150,000 accounts with links to Russia that tweeted about Brexit in the run-up to the referendum.
[54]: 13 A working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research claims the influence of Twitter bots may have been significant enough to impact the result, roughly calculating that automated accounts may have ultimately been responsible for around 1.76 percentage points of the 'Leave' vote share.
British Journalist Isabel Oakeshott stated in an article for the Times: As part of my research I uncovered controversial information about links between Arron Banks and his associate Andy Wigmore and the Russian embassy in London.
[74][40] The government (led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson), which formally has authority to control the timing of its release to the public, refused to do so before the 2019 United Kingdom general election in December.
[76] In November, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism started a crowdfunding exercise to raise funds for legal action to force the British government to release the report.
[79] The report stated that no government ministry took significant interest or specific responsibility in investigation, and that the British intelligence community believed election integrity was not a major focus.