Stonehenge Alliance....exposed!!

HTTP://www.facebook.com/bypasswinterbournestoke/?

Thank you to my friend Dr Andy Shuttleworth for this exposé

Thank you to my friend Dr Andy Shuttleworth for this exposé

We've been increasingly amused and bemused, in roughly equal measure, by the Stonehenge Alliance's ever more plaintiff bleatings on the subject of the A303 Stonehenge to Berwick Down scheme and especially the tunnel. We wondered who the Stonehenge Alliance actually influenced and who they were influenced by. To do this, we employed a nifty bit of Social Network analysis software that has been used to debunk many of the recent "fake news" stories. Quite fitting really.

When you look at the Stonehenge Alliance's social network, it looks a bit like a web and that's what it is - a web of interactions with other websites. The first map shows the first 600 links to and from their website. If you look top and centre, you will see node 116 for instance - that turns out to be the home page of the Mail on Sunday website. In fact, most of the major links to and from the Stonehenge Alliance website seem to be the Daily Mail. We ran the analysis a second time, but removing the links to the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail. This time all the major linkages were to and from the Archaeology Department at University College London. That might suggest that the Stonehenge Alliance is less of an alliance and more of a self-licking lollipop; generating populist news stories and then feeding off and believing your own propaganda......