There’s a backlash developing in the UK about how the government controlled information during and around the plandemic. This article is going to cover how the UK extended their propaganda and censorship in the Covid era to the major social media platforms. It will look at the Counter-Disinformation Unit, the use of AI technology, the 77th Brigade, Full Fact, and the Rapid Response Unit.
Work exposing ‘The Ministry of Truth’ by Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation and covered subsequently by The Telegraph on the 2 June 2023, have brought the spotlight on the Covid Information War.
CDU – Counter-Disinformation Unit
Here in the UK a Counter-Disinformation Unit (‘CDU’) was set up in March 2020 for the British government to “crack down” on “false coronavirus information online” and its role to centre on fighting what the government calls disinformation.
Taken from their website, the CDU “leads the UK government’s operational response to disinformation threats online”.
Apparently they ensure the government takes necessary steps to identify and respond to acute misinformation and disinformation (ie information which is deliberately created to cause harm) in areas of public interest.
Of course the key question is - who decides which is which?
Do you fully trust that your government has all the answers and isn’t swayed by political or financial motives?
It’s not to say that there isn’t misinformation to be found on the internet – everyone quotes the example of drinking bleach. However, hiding behind a few scant examples has been a determined case of overriding censorship to suppress any argument against the heavy-handed policies adopted by the British government in their handling of the plandemic and especially those critical around lockdowns and vaccines.
The purported purpose of the CDU’s work is focused on helping the government understand online disinformation narratives and attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment. They produce misinformation reports including who has been sharing and commenting on “disinformation”. They are also known as “trusted flaggers” by social media sites such as YouTube/Google, which provide them with communication channels to flag suspected disinformation.
The irony is, that those of who believe the pandemic to have been a plandemic to sell us mRNA technology, believe it is the government and the presstitiute media who have done exactly this.
Remember Matt Hancock’s admission that he wanted to scare the pants off everyone – isn’t that artificially manipulating the narrative?
Trust the Science
Apparently the CDU takes an “evidence-based approach” to countering harmful disinformation online.
Again we need to ask the hard questions.
Was government following evidence-based science when it introduced mass school lockdowns or mass pharmacological interventions for children, for wearing masks in public areas, for discharging patients from hospitals into care homes whether they had tested positive for Covid or not?
How can we rely on this hypocritical government, partying away while the nation was in lockdown, to be the keepers of ultimate truth?
The CDU analysed social media for this deemed disinformation, and it was often not anonymised. More than one individual has found themselves the target of online censorship for expressing an opinion, including doctors, politicians and leading academics.
There are specific examples given in the report such as those of politician David Davis and journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer. Including issues such as drawing attention to deaths from cancer that may have been impacted by the NHS’s COVID-19 focus, leading to fewer referrals for malignancies, were flagged as misinformation as opposed to acceptable criticism.
The CDU states on their website that;
In some cases, such content may include special categories of personal data, such as political, or philosophical opinions. [Further] We may share our analysis with other government departments [and] CDU may notify the relevant platforms.
Not Orwellian at all then!
Use of Artificial Intelligence in the fight against disinformation
The CDU have employed artificial intelligence firms to help conduct analysis.
From Freedom of Information Requests (FOIA) Big Brother Watch has uncovered that two separate grants totaling over one and a quarter million pounds were awarded to an AI company called Logically.
According to the report;
The company offers AI-based tools to assist in fact-checking, tools to fight extremist content and a platform allowing users to monitor “threats” and counteract them. This involves issuing takedown recommendations to platforms, something that the CDU admits to doing, as well as identifying the audiences impacted by misinformation and facilitating communication with them, including the production of rebuttal content. The Government has used this artificial intelligence firm to comb social media sites and alert them to discussions, for example, opposing vaccine passports.
Big Brother Watch also uncovered a grant of £1.3 million to controversial tech company Faculty Science to offer technical support on understanding the threat of disinformation and how to counter it. Faculty is a large British AI and machine learning firm that has already signed several contracts with the NHS.
Faculty includes Daesh propaganda and child abuse material alongside disinformation as comparable online harms its AI tools are deployed against, suggesting the tactics used against “harmful and illegal content” are similar.
A further £114,000 was awarded to the Disinformation Index for 6 months of research services to help detect disinformation at scale in April 2020. Its core product is a list of news outlets deemed to be “high-risk for disinformation”, which advertisers and platforms can use to de-list and de-rank outlets seen to be untrustworthy.
These three contracts strongly imply that the CDU conducts extensive, large-scale monitoring of discussions and trends on social media. Disinformation may even be treated as a threat on a par with violent extremism.
Take as another example, Covid-19 passports. Is it not concerning that a private company, at the behest of the government, secretly monitored, recorded and reported on mainstream political dissent under the guise of tackling disinformation whilst the issue of Covid-19 passports was a controversial, live and important debate in Britain?
Calls to sign a petition where surveilled
Shocking Abuse of Power
Following the article in the British newspaper The Telegraph exposing the CDU, there have been increased calls for the CDU, which has been described by freedom of speech campaigners as a “shocking abuse of power”, to be fully investigated.
Many of the issues being raised by sceptics were valid at the time and have since been proven well-founded.
One major case in point was the assertion that infection acquired immunity was better than vaccine acquired immunity. For stating that this was the case the well known journalist Alex Berenson was removed from Twitter. He later won a court case and had his account reinstated. However, thousands of other users do not have Berenson’s resources. Documents attained for the trial reveal how the Twitter leadership were in disagreement and highlights the still-unanswered question of whether Twitter banned Berenson because it feared government or corporate retribution for allowing him to continue to publish on its site.
Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said:
The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation. The war on misinformation has suffered serious mission creep and become a blank cheque for the government to secretly monitor and control narratives online in a shocking abuse of power.
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted funding civil servants, AI companies and even the British military to monitor academics, journalists, campaigners and members of parliament who have criticised government policies, despite many of those criticisms being later vindicated.
The British military referred to in the above would be the 77th Brigade as headed up by Tory MP Tobias Ellwood. (See Big Brother Watch website for more information.)
In November 2020, for example, the 77th operating alongside the intelligence agency GCHQ began their vaccine propaganda campaign. This was reported by the media as a battle against “antivax militants”.
Part of the propaganda demonising anti-vaxxers
Information War
It is fair to say that military tactics have been employed against the general population when it came to the “war” on Covid. Even the language used speaks as to how the plandemic was conceived.
The 77th specialises in information warfare (surveillance and propaganda). Their stated objectives are to change the behaviours of adversaries. They work alongside other specialist warfare information units such as Huteigtheen.
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Within the brigade is the Web Ops Team that engages in online surveillance. They use social media to influence perceptions and promote operational outcomes. Plus a Production Team which produces video, audio, written content and other digital products all designed to deliver behavioural change.
The 77th produced a report known as the “Disinformation Daily”. One such report obtained by Big Brother Watch under FOIA for the 2nd June 2020, features three key headlines with the accompanying tweets.
Reports that COVID-19 may be a vascular disease.
An “anti-authority conspiracy video” making “untrue and misinformed claims regarding UK laws”
A video claiming the “UK government has threatened, manipulated and deliberately terrified” citizens during the pandemic.
As to the first, this was in relation to an article in the Lancet. Another paper on the topic has now been published in the Harvard Medical School. Tweets including from NHS staff identified by the 77th as concerning that people may conclude it was primarily a cardiovascular disease and therefore advocate unapproved treatments. Other tweets highlighted included those questioning blood clot risk. All three reports included tweets that were clearly identifiable as British subjects.
A whistleblower (AB) spoke to Big Brother Watch;
AB told us that his work with 77x was mostly “monitoring the sentiment of the British public and how they perceived the Conservative administration doing a COVID-19 response”. He said that although there were not explicit instructions to monitor UK sentiment or British people, soldiers in the unit received positive feedback when they passed tweets along those lines up the chain.
There were minimal safeguards in place to ensure that British people were not caught up in their “sifts” of Twitter and AB said that the reality was that “it would be impossible not to also pick up British citizens at the same time”.
Included within their report is a two and a half page testimony by AB.
I was sold on the idea of countering misinformation emanating from Russia or China...“After this [basic] training, we worked in shifts running searches of Twitter by keywords that were often dictated by the central team leader in 77x – usually in the morning, leaving me with the impression that the search terms were directed by that day’s newspapers. An early and popular keyword was ‘ventilator’...We would send screenshots of Tweets from people who appeared to be British expressing dissatisfaction with the UK Government’s action against COVID-19, such as Labour activists concerned about inadequate supplies of ventilators, to our team leader who would gather them together and send them to the project lead...unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality, which is of course vanishingly rare, they could be a foreign agent and were fair game to flag up.
I found the banner of disinformation was a guise under which the British military was being deployed to monitor and flag our own concerned citizens to the government...I am concerned that the government was so interested in individual Twitter posts that they devoted an entire unit to monitoring what scared and otherwise powerless people had to say, and I regret that I was a part of it.
Normal UK parliamentary scrutiny almost evaporated as a result of both the lockdowns and the Coronavirus Act. The UK State franchise exploited this opportunity to give itself carte blanche to break the law in pursuit of it’s goals, all in order to “keep us safe”.
Fact Checkers
The CDU, the 77th Brigade and various intelligence agencies also worked hand in hand with so-called fact checkers. These fact checkers however masquerade as independent to fool you when they are anything but! Take as an example, Full Fact. In September 2020 they wrote;
PCR tests are generally seen as the gold standard for Covid 19 testing...This test is typically highly accurate.
This is actually misinformation. The test can only detect the presence of possible Sars-CoV-2 and it’s accuracy level is highly debatable and dependent on the threshold used.
Fact checkers have in fact, been created as watchdogs for the ‘Ministry of Truth’. Using childish concepts like “bad information”, which is insulting to our intelligence, they appeal to those with implicit trust in authority. One of the hardest things to get over is that they all worked in concert to put forward one singe story line. Any deviation, any challenges to the official narrative, weren’t (and aren’t) allowed.
During the plandemic Facebook’s platform Instagram worked with fact checkers including Full Fact to deploy a rating system. They applied a label telling users what was true, partly false or false. Partly and false were removed from search results and hashtags denied. Bots then sought out all matching content and labelled it accordingly. Sweeping Instagram free of any opinion deemed by the authorities to be counter to what was officially considered true.
Unbelievably Full Fact are a charity. However, when you dig a little deeper we discover Full Fact are paid by organisations like Facebook, Google, Pierre Omidyar (billionaire eBay founder), Rolls Royce and the City of London, among others. Not to mention they have various political ties.
In other words they ask us to trust them with their authoritative voice – they’ve done the fact checking so you don’t have to. Especially in case you find something that disagrees. Although given to the extent that the internet has been politicised and weaponised against us, doing independent research is harder then ever. The tactics, as have been described, mean that a basic search of Wikipedia and Google will return content absent those voices deemed “disinformation” rendering it essentially state propaganda. Meanwhile, fact checkers masquerade as independent, when they are anything but.
Social Media
Whilst old stream media were deeply involved in pushing the one allowable Covid narrative, it was in the field of social media that governing bodies were concerned they could lose their grip on what was and what wasn’t acceptable discussion.
Emails between the Department of Health and Social Care and Twitter at the start of the pandemic underline the close relationship between the company and the CDU. In one email from 23rd March 2020 a Twitter staffer told officials that the company is “speaking regularly with the DCMS disinformation unit”.
The CDU collaborated with social media to monitor the activities of prominent lockdown critics and those who questioned the mass vaccination of children. How dare they. Don’t they realise they were putting millions of people’s lives in danger!
Again according to the Telegraph article, some critics had their posts removed from social media sites and suspicions have been growing that this was due to the CDU flagging them to social media platforms. Naturally the government denies it.
This also has implications that, rather than being independent hosting platforms, social media are now responsible for what users post. This has been proven in the Twitter files where evidence shows that the Biden administration, for example, specifically requested Twitter close down the accounts of individuals. On reading The Telegraph article Musk responded to the revelations about the CDU by tweeting one word – “terrible”.
Rapid Response Unit
The Big Brother Watch report also delves into the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) which sits in the Cabinet Office.
Officials denied that the RRU would be a “fake news unit” or a “rebuttal unit” at its launch in 2018 but by March 2020 a government press release announced the unit would “crack down” and “combat false and misleading narratives” about coronavirus by either issuing “a direct rebuttal on social media” or “working with platforms to remove harmful content”.
The RRU has utilised a social listening tool called Brandwatch to tap into conversations on social networks. Another AI powered tool it claims to be able to monitor “thousands” of conversations online, producing a huge range of analytics on both topics and individual accounts. This can include sentiment [positive, neutral, negative] and emotional [anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise] analysis of interactions, examining the demographics of accounts involved in a conversation, and producing word clouds of related terms in posts.
Big Brother Watch reports;
In March 2021, two contracts collectively valued at more than £2.5 million were awarded to Engine Partners, a conglomerate of specialist marketing agencies, for work around vaccine hesitancy. With attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines being a key area of work for the RRU, these contracts are likely to relate to the unit. The larger of the two deals, worth £2,503,792 was to create a Vaccine Hesitancy Platform for the Cabinet Office while the smaller, worth £68,000 was for intelligence and media monitoring relating to the platform.
It identified four groups: already vaccinated; vaccine acceptors; vaccine rejectors and the undecided. Messaging was then designed to target these groups to “to increase vaccine confidence and raise awareness of misinformation”, whilst the true source of the messaging was obscured.
In the marketing consultancy’s own words the project aimed to “change behaviour”, working alongside the 77th brigade.
Covering Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, the RRU categorised platform policies across different pandemic-related areas, with headings including: contradicting official guidance; vaccines; and prevention, cures and treatments.
The RRU’s capaabilites are broad and include: monitoring and recording critical social media posts across a range of government policy areas, recommending review and removal, pushing official narratives by rebutting or re-framing the debate, issuing guidance to government press departments and influencing search engine results in favour of the government. The Cabinet Office also work with what are termed in the industry as influencers such as Jake Sweet with his 11 million TikTok followers.
What these tool have in common is their ability to influence the public mood and discourse and shape what people discuss online. These are abilities that Whitehall officials should not be able to use in the shadows, yet the public know little about what the Rapid Response Unit does.
monitoring and silencing critics online has become part of the government’s communications methodology, and it has been made possible by invoking the greater purpose of countering online “misinformation”.
The report provides details in regard to when these tactics were employed against individuals, such as Peter Hitchens and Ross Clark, whilst working for the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail. The accusations? Sharing a Spiked article in which an epidemiologist criticised the government’s approach to the virus and questioning some of the modelling used by the government when formulating coronavirus policy.
Does this sound like disinformation to you?
One email chain obtained under FOIA covered the RRU’s analysis of the announcement of regional tiers for coronavirus restrictions in late November 2020. It shows the RRU judged tweets from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer MP and the Labour Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham to have “amplified” people taking issue with the lack of business support funding for Liverpool and Manchester.
Again does this sound like disinformation to you?
Hundreds of ordinary people also had their accounts looked into by the fake news team after questioning the different lockdown tiers being applied across the country. Sounds like a good use of taxpayer money to me.
The RRU also produced weekly vaccine hesitancy reports. These included those, including parliamentarians, that were opposed to vaccine passports. (It’s easy to forget that before Omicron came along there was considerable pressure to introduce these despite widespread opposition). Evidence also suggests that the unit conflated opposition to coercion with vaccine hesitancy.
The report details numerous examples of where any scepticism raised was filed under vaccine hesitancy.
The RRU monitored journalists, politicians and academics. These included Professor Deeks, University of Birmingham biostatistician and Chief Statistical Advisor to the British Medical Journal, Professor Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Just as revealed in the Twitter Files, Big Brother Watch have got hold of emails obtained under FOIA showing the Cabinet Office directly asking Facebook to take posts down or limit them to friends only. Using first name terms they ask this post criticising test deliveries to be removed urgently. Showing they could see private posts as well as the obvious cordial relationship that existed between them.
Conclusion
You may think that people who question vaccines, the wearing of face masks or the global plandemic should be surveilled and censored by the military, intelligence agencies, corporate approved fact checkers and the government.
Perhaps you think their opinions are a threat to public health and should be removed from public debate as they have been. However, understand this, this information war isn’t limited to “anti-vaxxers” or lockdown sceptics, it will be used against any and all information which runs counter to officialdom.
Although the pandemic triggered the most recent establishment of the CDU, its work has since expanded dramatically to cover what the Department of Digital, Culture Media and Sport calls “periods of acute disinformation risk”. In addition to working on COVID-19, the CDU has worked on the May 2021 United Kingdom Local Elections, COP-26, the NI Assembly Elections, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.