That's a pretty myopic view. The vast majority of debate by the major players was reasoned and respectful.

When you have a few million people piling on and being asked to give their opinion, though, of course you're going to get all sorts of extreme views. This was predicted and pretty forcefully argued as a reason to not run the poll.

As inevitably happened, each side seizes, not on the respectful and reasonable arguments of their opponents - there's no media interest in that. Instead, they focus on the extreme elements of the other side and go all snowflake. Why? Because in their minds they're not running an honest assessment of pros and cons of either side: they're running a media circus and a scoreboard.