Critics of Covid restrictions were targeted by a counter-disinformation team at the heart of the Government, according to a Telegraph investigation. Here’s how it begins.
A secretive Government unit worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies during the pandemic, the Telegraph can reveal.
The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic “threats”, and was used to target those critical of lockdown and questioning the mass vaccination of children.
Critics of lockdown had posts removed from social media. There is growing suspicion that social media firms used technology to stop the posts being promoted, circulated or widely shared after being flagged by the CDU or its counterpart in the Cabinet Office.
Documents revealed under Freedom of Information (FoI) and data protection requests showed that the activities of prominent critics of the Government’s Covid policies were secretly monitored.
An artificial intelligence firm (AI) was used by the Government to scour social media sites. The company flagged discussions opposing vaccine passports.
Many of the issues being raised were valid at the time and have since been proven to be well-founded.
The BBC also took part in secretive meetings of a government policy forum to address the so-called disinformation.
On Friday, MPs and freedom of speech campaigners condemned the disclosures as “truly chilling” and “a tool for censoring British citizens” akin to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
Much of the Government’s wider work on disinformation is shrouded in secrecy for “national security” reasons. Large parts of official documents are still redacted.
In America, Twitter has released similar information showing how the US government also introduced a secretive programme to curtail discussion of Covid lockdowns.
It can now be revealed that the activities of Prof Carl Heneghan, the Oxford epidemiologist who has advised Boris Johnson, and Dr Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), were monitored by government disinformation units.
Molly Kingsley, who set up a campaign to keep schools open during the pandemic, also had her social activity monitored.
As well as the CDU, the Government operated a Rapid Response Unit (RRU) in the Cabinet Office that hunted online for content it considered disinformation.
The CDU, which is still operating, was embedded in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
The department has “trusted flagger” status at social media companies including Facebook and Twitter, which means that requests for content to be removed are fast-tracked for consideration.
In some cases, individuals whose social media posts were recorded by the units have subsequently faced sanctions by Twitter and Facebook. Ministers denied asking for posts by Prof Heneghan, Dr. de Figueiredo or Ms Kingsley to be removed.
The Government has said that the CDU “is focused on helping the Government understand online disinformation narratives and understand attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment”.
The Government also ran a Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, which brought together civil servants from the DCMS and technology giants – including Facebook and Google – as well as the BBC to discuss how to limit the spread of what was considered COVID-19 disinformation.
This forum and the two units were not the only way the Government tried to apply pressure on social media companies during the pandemic.
The Lockdown Files, published by The Telegraph earlier this year, revealed that Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, repeatedly lobbied Sir Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister and now a Facebook executive, about vaccine misinformation.
Facebook has been open about its efforts to tackle misinformation about Covid. During the pandemic, it removed posts and in April 2020 alone put warning labels on about 50 million pieces of content.
The CDU was established in 2019 and was focused on the European elections before turning to focus on the pandemic.
During Covid, the unit worked closely with the Cabinet Office’s now defunct RRU, whose responsibilities included tackling “purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation”.
The RRU has admitted in an FoI obtained by Big Brother Watch and passed to the Telegraph that it made requests for social media posts to be taken down.
As part of its work, the Cabinet Office also passed the CDU “media monitoring” reports.
Documents revealed that the material flagged to the CDU included articles published by the Telegraph.
One of these was a piece by Ms. Kingsley published in February 2022, arguing that it was “indefensible” that children’s lives were still not back to normal when the rest of society was. She urged ministers to make a clear statement that children’s extracurricular activities should not be subject to additional curbs.
One of Ms. Kingsley’s tweets from December 2020, in which she said it would be “unforgivable to close schools”, was also passed to the CDU.
Worth reading in full.
I gave a quote to the Telegraph that wasn’t used. So I might as well include it here.
“The great danger of entrusting the state and state-funded companies to monitor and, in some cases, suppress ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ is that politicians and officials won’t be able to resist the temptation to classify perfectly legitimate criticism of their policies as falling into those categories and then using their ‘trusted flagger’ status with social media companies to get it removed, as happened during the pandemic.
“What started out as an understandable desire to protect the public from foreign, cyber-security threats has morphed into a tool for censoring British citizens.
“It’s in the Conservative Government’s interest to put a stop to this because you can bet your bottom dollar these tools will be used on a far greater scale to suppress dissent by a Labour Government.
“The solution is to build much stronger free speech protections into the Online Safety Bill so social media companies can be taken to court for removing the expression of perfectly legitimate points of view.”
Stop Press: The Telegraph Investigations Team has more on the Counter Disinformation Unit here. Meanwhile, Fraser Nelson has written about how Facebook is a law unto itself when it comes to censoring content it’s decided is ‘false’ or ‘misleading’.
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Brilliant headline ….thats going to confuse some people or promote the “mask a la chin”look for the convinced..
I hope they feel badly misled by our authorities.
One of the biggest problems in our society is that we’ve lost our suspicion of authority. It urgently needs to be restored.
We need a majority of people whose starting point is that anyone in authority is probably lying to them and needs to demonstrate otherwise, not the other way around.
Tvoc’s are also deadly to the environment, especially the marine environment! So when all these things find their way into the water courses as many do, God help the fish!
I think it’s mainly the US being assaulted with this BS atm. No sign of anyone displaying signs of being ‘MK Ultra’d’ round my way yet anyways. At least the muppets are easy to spot and give a wide berth though. I just avoid anyone who has a fanny pad or bra cup strapped to their mush. I think jockstrap versions are also available.🧟♂️👀🤦♀️
Check out this nifty little 30sec video. Do you think this is enough to vindicate that judge in Germany who was sent down for 2 years for protecting the rights of children and not behaving like a complete Nazi?
https://twitter.com/TheSocrateej/status/1691137859485573120
Love these vids!
I can immediately make up an argument against that: If viruses are that small, cloth mask fibres are like concretewalls compared to them and will stop a real lot from getting past and every virion that’s stopped reduces the risk of infection! If in doubt, do it like Trish and wear underpants over your head! A little protection is still a lot better than no protection!
That’s obviously nonsense but true believers won’t accept that.
Yes I’ve mentioned this before, it’s like throwing pingpong balls at a builders scaffolding, just to get a sense of the scale!
Or mosquitoes and chain-link fences.
Anyone dumb, gullible and cowardly enough to wear a mask to protect them from viral infection deserves everything they get.
What we should make a point of doing is approaching them and asking how many Covid jabs they’ve had, then stand and wait for the penny not to drop…🤯🙈
You might have a long wait! These people are idiots.
For a hundred years or more we have known…
Medical masks were never intended to protect the wearer, nor designed so they could. Their use is specific to prevention of cross infection of open wounds from resident disease causing bacteria in the nasopharynx of medical staff which might be carried in droplets exhaled by them during surgical procedures. Such infection is direct person to person in near contact, since the droplets do not become airborne and soon fall to ground.
They can also protect immune compromised people from droplet infection by bacteria from others.
They cannot protect against viral infection as these are spread in the form of aerosols, not droplets, exhaled into the air (medical masks, bits of cloth cannot prevent this) which circulate in the air and can linger for hours. These airborne viral aerosols are then inhaled (masks that are not air-tight, cannot prevent this), and the level of infection depends on the viral load in the air and duration breathing it in.
Similarly the amount of airborne virus in an environment depends on how many infectious people have visited it, and the duration of their stay.
Open environments… outdoors… it is very difficult to be infected unless an individual is in close, face to face, prolonged or intimate contact.
Summary: if you can breath out, you can spread a respiratory virus;if you can breath in you can catch it.
There is then the question: can you actually find a virus in the air? No one has yet overcome the challenge BTW. It is a supposition only.
Natural selection, basically.
“He cites a number of studies showing masks make little or no difference in reducing the spread of Covid”
Why, especially now that everyone has had “it” probably several times, and that everyone has been “vaccinated”, is “reducing the spread of Covid” an important or desirable goal? What exactly do people mean when they say “reducing the spread of Covid”? If such a thing were possible, what does it achieve? It makes absolutely no sense to me. Let’s say you wear masks for a few months and it “works” – then you stop wearing masks and everybody who “avoided” being “infected with Covid” will then promptly “get it”, will they not?
It’s fine up to a point to talk about masks being harmful or “not working” but I think you have to question the base assumption. Let’s say that a mask could be made that 100% stops you getting Covid and is absolutely not harmful to your physical health. Would you wear it? Would it be desirable to make people wear them? Logically you would have to make people wear them forever. The whole thing is founded on muddle headed thinking.
It’s purely so they can test the waters to see the public’s levels of compliance. That’s why no amount of scientific study or any sort of logic is remotely useful. There’s a mountain of this now and the masktard Nazis just over-ride it all anyway, same as with all things jab-related. Facts don’t matter when you have the next phase of the totalitarian plan to progress to. What you want to glean is an indication of just how effective your intensive PsyOp has been on the masses before you move things up a notch. That’s why this season’s new look is such a hit with those who enjoy the prospect of sleepwalking into tyranny and feel thinking independently is over-rated;
https://twitter.com/CartlandDavid/status/1696067132029571132/photo/1
Certainly those with an evil agenda know very well that there is no science or logic behind it. But my point is that even sceptical journalists mention “reducing the spread of covid” as if it were a meaningful or desirable outcome, and I think that’s very dangerous for the reasons stated. The start and end point should be “there was no pandemic, no public health emergency, covid if it exists is mild for most, we must live with it, and any notion of reducing its spread is simply plain silly”.
So true. They are testing the waters to see how far we will let them so. So we must “nip it in the bud” and DO NOT COMPLY from the start!
See https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c for a full analysis of “virology”. It is shocking.
Words and definitions matter. There are no vaccines for respiratory virus according to the proper definition of vaccine. There was no pandemic in the proper context of the meaning of that word.
Disease can spread, but not ‘be’ spread. It is the disease-causing pathogen that can ‘be’ spread.
Vaccines – effective ones – can only protect the person vaccinated, they provide no protection to anyone unvaccinated.
Totally agree.
Having never owned a mask of any sort, I’ll sleep soundly tonight.
“A study from South Korea has found that N95 masks can release harmful chemicals at levels eight times higher than safety guidelines suggest.”
No S***T Sherlock.
A mask is a medical device, a medical intervention, for which one must give fully informed consent & mask guidelines in the Health & Safety legislation state that an individual risk Any assessment has to be carried out before one can wear one.
Anyone who is insisting that you wear one – in a shop, in a medical setting – can be challenged by asking for their name & for an individualised risk assessment to be arranged by an appropriately qualified occupational health practitioner. Tell them that they will be personally liable for any harms incurred by wearing said mask without following the H&S legislation.
Folk will back down when they are being made personally liable. They go along with the crowd, no way do they want to stand out from the crowd when they have nowhere to hide.
The N95 is so called because it is claimed it can stop 95% of particles 3microns and above – the size of exhaled water droplets – and their integrity decreases with time, so that after about 10 minutes of wear, they become moist from exhaled breath which facilitates the transit of pathogens through the fabric in either direction to either surface.
Any safety device which is not 100% effective all the time is not a safety device, it’s a hope and prayer, a talisman, a superstition.
I agree but in this context it is being used as a medical device, therefore it has to be consented to be worn & that consent needs to be fully informed otherwise it is not valid consent & any harms arising from its use are accountable to a named individual who has coerced its use.
It’s a sign of compliance & the useful idiots who are involved in the coercion have been fully programmed by the narrative & know not what they do.
It gets better than that: Popular masks aren’t usually N95 masks, they’re labelled KN95. That’s because they’re a Chinese imitation of US N95 masks (EU FFP2) produced without quality control. At least in Germany, it’s illegal to use KN95 masks in healthcare setting instead of N95/FFP2 masks. But that’s not widely known among the general public.
Indeed, the KN95 is a cheap Chinese knockoff of the real N95s.
But a virus particle is though to be about 100 nanometres or smaller (strangely no one has an electron micrograph of Covid) so an N95 mask is also useless. You see, there is no end to the lies.
Were any actual N95 masks tested or just KN95 masks? My understanding was that KN95 was a marketing designation (Kounterfeit N95?) and had no actual efficacy claims though I’m willing to be disabused.
The KN95 is a cheap Chinese knockoff of the real N95s.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/mask-cult-back-pandemic-propaganda/5830335
A proper carve up of the mask nonsense.
What a surprise. So many people were stupid enough just to do what they were told to do, rather than thinking it through, although to be fair there was dearth of proper independent advice for a long time.
What does not appear to be mentioned though is the actual environment within which the measurements were done. It should be well known by those concerned that the air content is a major factor. E.g. the humidity levels, what the ventilation is like, is there any treatment for recycled air (in air con systems), and a long list of things that can be done to modify it. Things like Ultra Violet C sterilisation can be done, e.g. Ultimately, if they say nothing about it at all, are their results of any use?
‘The sample with the highest amount of TVOCs had 4,808 cubic meters per microgram’ ?!?
Wow. If this does not herald the permanent end of masks, there is really no hope for our species. Homo sapiens are really not as sapient as they claim to be.
Masks are clearly an IQ test. Those who still wear them have failed, lol.
Nothing about the masks was true . I feel sorry for those who wore it & even more for those who are still wearing it