Did dark money and dirty tactics swing the Scottish election?

[Emrys]

[Note: If you clicked into this thread with an idea that it would claim the SNP's near-overall majority was the result of "dark money and dirty tactics", that's not what it's about at all. The article below consists of short paragraphs, so it's almost impossible to summarize meaningfully within DU's rules, so you'll need to click through if you want more meat. As an SNP voter, I don't have many complaints about the outcome whatever shenanigans went on, though I'd like to see cleaner elections run in general. Green voters have much more justifiable cause for anger.]

Rules flouted as sites promoting Unionist tactical voting spent more money on ads than the SNP, while ex-BNP ‘greens' siphoned off potentially crucial votes
...
Last week, the Guardian reported that unionists were spending heavily online in a bid to deny the SNP a majority. But it’s only now that the full scale of this campaigning can be seen.

A group called ‘Young Unionists’ spent more than £20,000 on Facebook ads, including more than £5,000 in the final days of the campaign. Tens of thousands of voters were pushed to the VoteUnion tactical voting tool.

Under new election legislation, digital adverts in Scotland are supposed to carry details of who paid for them. But Young Unionists’ ads had no such imprint and there was no name attached to the campaign.
...
When I unfurled my two-foot-long, peach-coloured list ballot paper on Thursday, my eye was drawn to a logo of a leaf with ‘Green’ in capital letters. This was the ‘Independent Green Voice’.

Thanks to investigative site the Ferret – which, full disclosure, I chair – I knew that Independent Green Voice was a tiny party whose five candidates included two former British National Party activists and a man accused of Holocaust denial (he denies the allegation). But did all Scottish voters know this? There are plenty of signs that they didn’t.
...
These voters mattered. In Glasgow, for example, where Independent Green Voice took 2,210 votes, the Green Party fell 914 votes short of a second seat on the regional list. In South of Scotland, the Greens were just 115 votes short of taking a seat. Independent Green Voice won 1,690.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/did-dark-money-and-dirty-tactics-swing-scottish-election/

[CentralMass]

1. Did they consult the GOP ?