The Telegraph – The Government’s sinister disinformation unit is threatening free speech again

Isn’t it curious how almost every problem this country faces seems to have a ready-made solution rooted in digital authoritarianism?

Less than one month into his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer was faced with an unthinkably monstrous fatal stabbing of three little girls, followed by some of the most shameful scenes of street violence in our country’s living memory. His government’s response has notably included online censorship powers and AI facial recognition surveillance.

There could hardly be a more brute, physical, real-world problem than people in Britain attacking each other, destroying small businesses and vandalising people’s homes because of their perceived ethnicity, religion and colour. And yet some Labour ministers have responded to this backwards brutality by pointing the finger at online disinformation and agitating for state-backed social media censorship – and now Technology Secretary Peter Kyle is reviving Whitehall’s disgraced Counter Disinformation Unit (now deceptively rebranded as the National Security Online Information Team) which was responsible for the secretive, politicised and sometimes unlawful speech-policing against Brits during the pandemic.

The government’s “counter disinformation” activity during Covid, exposed by Big Brother Watch and The Telegraph, included spreading actual disinformation about British broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer across the UK and even US governments because she opposed the prospect of mandatory vaccines in schools. “Countering disinformation” also meant keeping tabs on former minister David Davis MP, noting that he was “influential” and “highly critical of government”, because he questioned mandatory vaccine passports and lockdown modelling.

It even included keeping notes on social media posts by world-leading scientists like Professor Carl Heneghan, deploying a secretive Army unit to keep tabs on domestic political dissent, making “daily” extrajudicial censorship requests to foreign social media companies to suppress lawful online speech in Britain.

If the history of chaos that threatens democracy teaches us anything, it is to protect our democratic rights with more vigour, not less, when they are under threat. At a time when parts of the population are in complete disharmony, to crack down on free speech would be a grave mistake.

Not only would renewed censorship inflame tensions, sow distrust and undermine democracy – it would fail to address the cancer of hatred in our country. The so-called experts at the Center for Countering Digital Hate went so far as to say “American social media giants are to blame for the chaos in Southport.” It is a “textbook example” of how “disinformation” can lead to real-world violence, the group said – ironically, on social media.

That’s because early posts spreading across online platforms falsely alleging that the Southport suspect was an asylum seeker. But these lies were spread by hardened racists, Islamophobes and far-Right agitators – they are a blatant symptom of the problem, not the cause. But had the suspect been an asylum seeker surely we can agree that the racist thuggery that followed would have been just as heinous? And who would the digital censors have blamed then, without “disinformation” as the problem in need of a censorial solution?

No one that is serious about anti-racism should make such a lazy assertion that misinformation must obviously result in real-world violence, framing it as some kind of natural consequence. It is not.

How we diagnose these problems is important because with lazy explanations come lazy policies. The explanation of “internet lies” is a neat way to package the long-term break down in law and order, disintegrating social fabric and simmering racism in our country – and it comes with the very neat response of online censorship that benefits elites who have never really trusted us with free and open access to information online.

To explain how groups of Britons have set fire to hotels full of men, women and children, we need to focus on those individuals and the wider health of our society, not give Government censors a blank cheque to decide what we can read, see, or hear.

– Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director

The Telegraph – Secretive Covid-era ‘spy’ agency brought in to monitor social media during riots

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