The Government is Keeping a List of People Who Question its Policies

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.