A secretive unit that has been monitoring lockdown critics broke the Government’s own rules. The Telegraph has more.
Last week, the Telegraph disclosed that the Counter-Disinformation Unit collected social media posts that were critical of Government Covid policies, including the decision to close schools and the debate over the mass vaccination of children.
It can now be revealed that this unit ignored official Cabinet Office guidance created for civil servants and communications professionals when it classified legitimate opinions as disinformation.
A manual titled ‘Resist 2: Countering Disinformation Toolkit’ was produced by the Government Communication Service in 2021 and is intended as an aid for civil servants and communications professionals to identify misinformation – false information that is inadvertently spread – and disinformation – false information that is spread deliberately.
In a section that seeks to explain how to spot disinformation, readers are warned that opinions should not be considered as such.
Despite this instruction, it appears that social media posts where people expressed concerns about government Covid policies were monitored by the secretive unit.
The manual states: “The most common way to first notice mis- and disinformation is when you encounter messages that draw your attention and raise concerns.
“A message is a form of communication aimed at a group of recipients. It may for example take the form of a social media post, tweet, meme, or comment, or a letter, flyer, poster, or slogan.
“Is the message an opinion? Opinions are usually subjective, which means that they cannot be verifiably false. If the message is simply a statement of opinion, you should not treat it as disinformation.
“However, if the opinion is based on verifiably false, deceptive, or manipulated information that has the potential to cause harm, it may be worth investigating further.”
Molly Kingsley, a former lawyer and journalist who founded the children’s campaign group UsForThem, was one of the people who posted opinions critical of government policy and later discovered some of her posts were collected in reports sent to the CDU.
She said: “This is very sinister. It shows that they were materially extending the remit of what they were meant to be doing and weren’t following the guidelines.
“It becomes state censorship or at the very least, flagging opinions which are unpalatable for the government. This is not what is supposed to happen in a free democracy.
“The opinions I and others expressed were about ethics and morality, almost like conscientious objections. Who did they think they were to be flagging that?”
One legitimate opinion that was marked for the CDU’s attention was a tweet from journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer raising concerns about the collateral damage lockdowns can cause.
She wrote: “Another personal experience of the damage lockdown causes from a @talkradio listener. Her fiancé’s business is closed down, her father’s cancer treatment cancelled and her grandma is scared to even leave her home. This lockdown is a national tragedy way beyond Covid deaths.”
Worth reading in full.
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Thanks for this – interesting.
Seems like governments were responsible for a lot of it, directly and indirectly. So much for the government being pushed into action by the public clamour.
I think the biggest reason the press followed government policy on covid is money. Always follow the money. At the beginning of lock down most corporate advertising plummeted, at the same time money from government advertising for covid measures rocketed, along with money from “vaccine” manufacturers. No journalist was allowed to bite the hand that feeds.
Spot on. They were paid. Who are the biggest financiers of the fake news? Government and Pharma. UK Guv spent some £500 million on the BBC et al to spread the propaganda?
Funny how the ‘money’ never makes into these useless whitewashing Covidiot inquiries.
Medical Nazism. TPTB learnt that the sheeple love to follow and will happily kill themselves ‘if it saves one life’.
Which shows they were and are in the wrong job.
They could have parroted the official line perhaps with a quizzical look to imply their hands were tied. Algorhythms are not so clever as to pick up body language.
No – I firmly believe the vast majority of journos were as stupid and credulous as my neighbours and swallowed the lies whole.
Honourable exceptions exist but they had to speak via podcast or substack- I’m thinking Planet Normal and the many people of integrity on substance.
“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
Lines from the preamble to “Journal of the Plague Year”, Daniel Defoe’s forensic reconstruction in the year 1722 of London’s Great Plague of 1665.
Meaning British media has been going for over three hundred years. Over the last thirty years, the silicon chip has taken invention to a whole new level. Witness the pandemic that never was and the climate heist.
The madness of crowds has a lot to answer for. Keep those critical faculties primed.
In my mind there is no question it was ordered at a global level, which applies to the whole ‘pandemic’ narrative – and not only the latter: where is the media questioning of Net Zero, of the gender narrative, of the billions and billions senselessly spent on Ukraine?
Unlimited immigration is only now being questioned – after how many years? – because so many populations are becoming sick and tired of the various atrocities performed by our invited guests.
Richard Nixon warned in 1983 in this short video against the power of the media – perhaps hardly surprising – but his comments were very intelligent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEX6ONLvJg0.
The world’s media are currently owned by a surprisingly small number of individuals. The questions is, who are they taking their orders from?
Thanks for that Richard Nixon link. Can’t find link to cassette recordings, but Nixon tapes from inside Oval Office make for interesting hearing:
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
Very interesting, thank you. Does every ex-President have such a library? That would make a lot of fascinating reading.
The saddest thing is that the mass psychosis and hysteria of the Covid crisis is nothing unusual. Which, unfortunately, implies it can happen again.
In Adolph’s Germany most of the population believed in and supported the great leader.
Likewise Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, all totalitarian systems were capable of whipping up mass hysteria.
We laugh at the medieval witch hunts – human nature hasn’t changed that much.
It is happening again right now – Climate hysteria!
I never understood why journalists were afraid to do their job. But it’s clear they were psychologically nudged by government groupthink and captured regulatory agencies in cahoots with big pharma to peddle a false narrative. David Southwell’s article is an honest and articulate exposé of what went wrong during the pseudo pandemic. Well done.
Money – they have mortgages to pay and families to feed like everyone else…
The BBC was probably one of the worst. I recall a highly plausible story of a BBC reporter sent to cover an anti-lockdown protest, with the sole purpose of capturing any violations of social distancing rules. The reporter admitted this when asked.
“..is fed to us by governments, authorities and experts even in, or especially during, ’emergencies’.”
Like so many well meaning articles what is missing is what really matters. Nothing about the paymasters of all those listed. The Big Pharma. Strange omission for an experienced journalist.
6. Unlimited taxpayer funded government advertising in MSM, printed and broadcast.
No excuses.
The only questions were asked by Mark Steyn, who was sacked, is now wheelchair bound, bankrupted by the establishment.
Every ‘journalist’ who submitted copy to either justify or disregard the greatest crime in British history should resign.
Now.
Articles such as these tend to discount the enthusiasm with which ordinary citizens were torch-carriers for extreme Covid policies. Determining whether media was responding to that, or driving that, is chicken and egg.
Julia Hartley Brewer of Talk Radio appeared to be a lone voice of sanity. The BBC a government mouthpiece, as it is with the Climate lie
I always found it strange we were shown videos of Chinese people collapsing in the street with covid but never saw any such thing in the West. Was it a Chinese invention Psy Ops to break Western economies.
They are still not doing their job now. They should be calling out the climate nonsense all those dangerous clowns in Davos, questioning Nut Zero and basically anything that comes out of a politician’s or scientist’s mouth. There are some brave ones Neill Oliver, Mark Steyn, Bev Turner and of course all those at TDS to name a few but the rest are just abject cowards.
Indeed, and look at what happens to them; quietly sent into the dusty attic, if they keep their jobs at all.
What this article fails to mention is the role played by the mainstream media (and the BBC in particular) in bullying the Johnson government into adopting such over-the-top and excessive policies in the first place. If you remember, Boris Johnson was initially favouring a ‘herd immunity’ approach, one which might well have seen the UK following a similar path to Sweden during the pandemic, a country whose population suffered far less economic and societal dislocation and whose excess deaths ended up the lowest in Europe. The general media ‘pile-on’ during that period in March 2020 when scare stories from Italy and elsewhere were circulating daily proved far too much for Boris and his ministers to withstand. So the path we eventually chose reflected possibly a lack of moral fibre amongst Conservative ministers and the change that seems to have taken place during the last 30 years in which governments, lamentably, often change course and have their policies shaped by the hue and cry emitting from a generally shallow, left-leaning and holier-than-thou media.
If journalism has a public policy role beyond mere description or stenography, it should be to relentlessly question what governments, authorities and, yes, even ‘experts’ are saying and doing.
I would suggest from that paragraph – especially experts!
So-called Experts got us into that mess (and others – Climate, Ukraine). In the case of “Covid” only a small subset of credentialed experts were listened to, other critical experts were shunned, shamed and silenced, and that is why the whole horrific debacle was as bad as it was!
Neil Fergus – Good
Sunetra Gupta – Bad
Jay Bhattacharya – Bad
Martin Kulldorf – Bad
Anthony Fauci – Good
Bill Gates (!!!!!) – Good
“This is Why the Media Failed During Covid”
And failed over immigration, rape gangs, climate change, the 70 year long failure of the NHS, anti-white racism, “transgender” crap, wokery, debanking, EEC/EU and Brexit… it’s a long list.
Is there a pattern I wonder?