The Government is keeping a blacklist of people who question its policies, with social media posts criticising the Government being monitored and investigated by officials. The Metro has the story.
Negative X and Reddit posts from unsuspecting Brits attacking the UK’s anti-terror programme Prevent were added to a database of critical online comments.
Metro has obtained a list of nearly 80 critical posts found and logged by the Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU), which oversees Prevent, between March 2024 and February 2025.
One campaign group whose tweet was recorded in the database said the revelations raised “serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest” in the UK.
Jacob Smith, who fought for a year to get the Home Office to publish the information, said: “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”
StaCU is an “opaque” body set up in February 2024 to address and investigate complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding programme designed to stop people becoming terrorists.
As well as processing reports made directly to the unit, officials appear to be actively scouring the net for critical posts about Prevent.
Freedom of Information requests – seen exclusively by Metro – have revealed the 77 negative online comments logged by StaCU.
Many of these posts came from ordinary Brits who wouldn’t suspect that Government officials would be looking at their feeds.
A large number of the investigated comments are claims that Prevent is “biased” in how it trains public sector staff to spot the early signs of radicalisation.
One X user ended up on the list because after they claimed they called the training “complete bullshit”.
They complained: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”
Another poster complained that they “sat through Prevent training at work… and the narrative was very much that the far Right is the biggest threat”. They added: “I kid you not!”
While many claims relate to claims that Prevent is overly focused on Right-wing extremism, other posts investigated by StaCU are negative about the Government in different ways.
One tweet claims that Prevent “closes down conversations in the classroom” because “Muslim children are seen as a ‘threat'”.
Another X user is on the list because they alleged that Muslim children could be referred to Prevent for “saying Free Palestine”.
Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaigning organisation, had one of its tweets logged which said: “How data is managed and stored under the Prevent programme lacks transparency.”
Open Right said it was “deeply concerned” about revelations its own critical posts were being stored by the Government.
Its Programme Manager for Pre-Crime, Sarah Lasoye, told Metro: “Prevent has expanded far beyond its stated aim of identifying people considered’“vulnerable to radicalisation’, and has increasingly been used to justify extensive surveillance.
“It is deeply concerning to see the Prevent duty being used to enable the monitoring of people and organisations simply because they are critical of the programme. That raises serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest.
“There is also a troubling lack of transparency about what happens to the information gathered through this social media monitoring: how long it is retained, who it is shared with, and ultimately what the Government is using it for.”
Worth reading in full.
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I remember listening to a Radio 4 programme about misogyny. The conversation went onto Prevent, and if that could be brought into this matter to tackle it. The Prevent person replied – uhm, well, we do have some involvement, but it is small, our main area of concern is Islam. The Radio 4 presenter very swiftly shut the Prevent person down with – thank you very much, now let’s move onto blah blah.
I would imagine most people who comment on this site, are on the list.
Of course it is. I am not surprised. I am certainly on it. Probably from well before my anti lock-down tirades. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
Confident regimes would not do this. It reveals they know we know they know.
Seems they learnt a lot from Erich Honeker’s Stasi.
Frightening. But I guess that because I have voiced concern – my name will also go on the list.
This began under the ConArtist!!
Stacu, Stazi, Stacu, Stazi, Stacu, Stazi…
May I please add
Stasi – Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) 1950 to 1990 East Germany, Domestic surveillance and political repression. Employed roughly 91,000 full-time staff and hundreds of thousands of informal informants. Maintained files on millions of citizens to suppress opposition against the ruling communist party.
Allegedly, disbanded in 1990, but in fact alive and well in the (soon to join) EU with its operations based on the legendary Germanic model.
I remember Mum telling me that when she first returned to Germany having left it just after WW2, when her part had become the DDR, party officials would come and sit in the living room of her relatives houses where she was visiting, to make sure nothing untoward was being said. Having grown up with Hitler and forced to join the Land Army, she was less than amused and glad she’d married an Englishman. I wonder what she would think of the direction we are going in now.
‘Vat is your name?’
‘Don’t tell im, Pike.’
.
Unfortunately in the UK now, it’s a case of:
Go gently into that good night,
Rage not against the dying of the light…
Well, if they’re reading BTL in the Daily Sceptic, then I would think most people on here are susceptible to be on that list.
It’s a badge of honour, if you ask me.
I’ve got the Lord High Executioner’s song from the Mikado running through my head: I’ve got a little list. They’ll none of them be missed.
The communists in Czechslovakia called thier compliance unit “Státní bezpečnost”, which means State Security. It looks like we’ve arrived in the future promised by the fall of communism by going back 35 years. This is happening all over Europe.
incidentally I just saw a military aircraft going over, the first one I’ve seen in many, many years.
That’s because it takes the RAF’s plane that long to cover the entire country. Fortunately it’s contracted to Prevent to stymie all the Far Right terror plots. There must be one hatching near you at the moment.
Wait… the RAF has a plane?
a ‘sopwith camel’. spare parts are like rocking horse manure..
They had two until last week.
Barnham does want to take the UK back to the 1970s….
1930#/40s Germany Geheime Staatspolizei.
Gestapo. Here it’s The Met.
Sadly, this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.
No problem. That nice rich American guy came over here a few years ago and told us all the icebergs would melt.
The Stasi is here
I’m telling on you.
When commercial organisations set up arrangements to monitor complaints they do so with the objective of eliminating the causes of complaint. This is especially true in regulated businesses in the financial sector. Businesses know the customer is always right and complaints are helpful in improving the business, staff training etc.
The state sector seems to take a different approach. They assume the public are wrong and campaigners against any of their policies especially so. Complaints are not a reason to improve service or staff training as engagement with any public sector body will soon show you.
While there may have been such organisations beforehand it was the Cameron-Clegg “Nudge Unit” which formalised and expanded the government’s propaganda activities. So much for being “conservative”, “liberal” or “democratic” as their party names implied – hint: they were none of those things.
As the Labour government seems to keen on retrospective legislation perhaps Reform should announce that anyone taking part in government propaganda and secretly damaging the lives and freedom of private citizens or lawful campaign groups will be considered to have committed an offence when the law is changed in ?2029.
While I applaud the reciprocal nature of this there’s no need to change the law – unless there’s a time limit on prosecutions for breaking GDPR and related law. What is needed is the will to enforce existing law and bring those prosecutions.
Yes, it’s impossible to separate any of the main parties from policy since all pay allegiance to the European collective. Brexit was a failed ploy by the Tories to get a vote to remain and give up all vestiges of sovereignty. They failed so concocted an exit agreement that gave very few benefits. Unfortunately it did demonstrate to every other country in the collective that they were not alone in their resistance. So the latest trick is to create tension and fear, all dissenters will be recorded for future disposal.
Not so sure about your comment on regulated businesses in the financial sector in view of ongoing dispute with a couple of clearing banks which the Financial Ombudsman Service is doing its best to avoid having to adjudicate
Businesses used to know the customer is always right and complaints are helpful in improving the business. However in Corporate-Fascist Britain, the Big, Corporate businesses, Utilities, Banks, Telecoms, Supermarkets, now behave exactly like the state sector, and behave as though the public are wrong, ignorant or malign in almost all disputes
And then regulations are used to stop newcomers from setting up a company that is better run than the established ones and where ‘customer service’ actually exists.