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It's polling day in the UK and everyone is lying about their 93-year-old mums

It's polling day in the UK and everyone is lying about their 93-year-old mums

By James Vincent

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Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Today is the day the UK decides whether or not to leave the European Union. It's a big moment for us. Life-changing if we leave, life-remaining-broadly-the-saming if we stay. It's also the culmination of a political campaign that has been one of the nastiest in recent British history, defined by a staggering number of half-truths, distortions, inaccuracies, and fibs told by politicians, media, and the general population. So, it's appropriate then that on UK Twitter, rather than getting bogged down in bitter recriminations and last-minute in-fighting, everyone is having fun lying about their blind, 93-year-old mum.

It started this morning with a tweet:

This is pretty normal for polling day Twitter, and pretty normal for Twitter. You wake up in the morning, you've got a thirst for #numbers that's cranking on your soul like a drug addiction. You think a little. Have a cuppa. Then — simple! You'll make up an anecdote involving some wide-eyed truth-telling figure (Your infant son! Your dear old mum!) who will, apropos of nothing, say something that just happens to affirm your entire political ideology and / or belief system. Boom. Tweet it. Numbers.

But with Keith and his 93-year-old mum, people just weren't having it.

Keith was steadfast that what had happened in that small village hall was the lonely, only truth.

But the internet had stopped caring. Had stopped listening. The internet knows a good, memeable joke format when it sees one and it went mad for it, like a 93-year-old mum attacking a ballot with a stubby pencil.

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