LATE last month, The National told how the old Better Together website, better.tg, has been turned into a pro-independence page after it was hijacked by a Yesser.
Today, we can reveal that it’s not the only one. And the campaigner behind the latest hijack believes that these online takeovers highlight one big problem with the entire Better Together campaign.
“They registered all of these domain names, better.tg, nothanks2014.net, and even that other one, votenoborders.co.uk, the fact that they registered all those domain names and then just let them lapse,” the campaigner said.
“It was as if, well, ‘we’ve won, let’s walk away and forget about it’.
“They thought once they’d won that referendum [in 2014] it was all over and done with.”
READ MORE: Official Better Together website now a pro-independence page after Yes hijack
He says that while the Yes side was “a really organic campaign with people on the ground, the grassroots base, thinking what do you do”, the Unionist campaign was “to some degree artificial”.
The Better Together arguments were, he says, much more top-down. When the vote was over, the interest and paid interns vanished. The Yes side didn’t.
“A lot of us feel that the UK establishment and the people campaigning for the Union just stopped making the case for the Union. They thought ‘right, that’s it you’re trapped now’,” he said.
“The fact that they let them go, they let these domains lapse so people like me could take them over, is really symptomatic of their whole approach.”
This Yesser, who has asked not to be named, has taken over the nothanks2014.net website.
While it previously redirected to the main Better Together site, this domain is listed on the campaign’s official Facebook page, which still has around 200,000 likes and a similar number of followers.
However, thanks to the activist’s efforts, the link instead now redirects to a YouTube video from The National highlighting the Unionist campaign’s broken promises.
Having come to Scotland in the late 1980s and found himself “very ambivalent” about independence, the activist told The National that had all changed in 2012.
“Independence suddenly came massively on the radar. That’s what really made me make my mind up and say Yes – but early on I thought it wasn’t really for me to say.
“I had a feeling it was entirely a matter for the people of Scotland to decide. Now, I don’t think that at all. I think that anyone who lives here has a right to have a view.”
Outside of activism, the Yesser says he has seen in his day job the troubles associated with letting a domain lapse, and he is open to ideas of what to do with the Better Together one he now controls.
“At the click of a mouse I can send it somewhere else, so if people would like to come up with any creative suggestions, I’m eager to hear them!”
Let us know in the comments below or writing a letter into letters@thenational.scot
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