If, over the weekend, you logged onto YouTube to catch the highlights of your football team’s match, you might have been baffled by a large banner on the prime real estate at the top of the homepage. The Conservatives were trying to tell you to vote for them to end arguments over Brexit and to stop the torpor of a hung parliament.
The banner ad was tied to a 78-second video that the Tories had uploaded earlier in the day, which would begin auto-playing. Within a day, 3.5 million people had seen at least 30 seconds of it.
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