A surveillance tool built to hunt foreign threats is now quietly policing Britain’s own political conversation.
CAM WAKEFIELD
Britain’s intelligence apparatus was designed to do what one might reasonably expect: track terrorists and generally stop the kinds of people who enjoy blowing things up.
But that was before the digital gaze turned inward.
Today, it’s not jihadist forums or Russian hackers being scrutinized by the high-tech security tools of the British state. It’s British citizens. Ordinary ones. People whose greatest threat to society is expressing opinions that don’t align with the mood of Whitehall.
Take Faculty, an artificial intelligence firm, according to The Telegraph, was originally hired to help spot foreign interference in online discourse.
But the system it is provided, it turns out, can also be repurposed to scan lawful conversations within the UK.
More: Keir Starmer’s Censorship Playbook
Then there’s the Global Strategy Network, headed by Richard Barrett, a man with MI6 credentials and a mandate to monitor online material that could “pose a risk to public safety.” A wide definition, intentionally so, that has, in practice, scooped up political commentary about asylum hotels and “two-tier policing,” the latter a phrase that eventually became a thorn in the side of Keir Starmer’s government.
According to internal emails, the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT) contacted platforms last August about posts they believed might incite violence. The posts mentioned asylum accommodations. They also used that problematic phrase: two-tier policing.
This is where campaigners raise the alarm, and rightly so. What begins as a counter-terrorism measure ends up as a filter for public opinion. A tool created to protect democratic institutions is now monitoring the criticism of those same institutions.
If that sounds backwards, it’s because it is.
When the state gets involved in moderating political speech, particularly speech that is lawful (or should be), it shifts from guardian to gatekeeper. And whether it’s TikTok or X or a minor local newspaper, the effect is the same: platforms err on the side of caution and start deleting content not because it breaks the law, but because it might cause political embarrassment.
That’s not democracy. That’s brand management.
Across the Atlantic, this hasn’t gone unnoticed. President Donald Trump’s State Department has publicly expressed concern about free speech in Britain. It’s monitoring the situation and wants to ensure American tech companies aren’t being strong-armed into censoring UK or US users.
Several US congressmen have taken their objections directly to Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, demanding clarity on how exactly the UK is protecting free speech.
But it’s not just Britain’s Labour Government that is the villain here. Some of the blame must go across the aisle, too.
The Conservative Party; yes, that Conservative Party, is calling for a full investigation into the very surveillance unit it birthed, nurtured, and expanded while in government.
The NSOIT, formerly known as the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), has become a political football, tossed about with increasing desperation as public discomfort with government-sponsored speech monitoring grows.
It was the Conservatives who installed it in the first place, in response to fears of “foreign interference.” It was the Conservatives who gave it scope, funding, and a mission so broad it could stretch over everything from Russian bots to your neighbour’s Facebook rant about vaccine passports.
Now they’re aghast. Aghast that this apparatus is monitoring posts about asylum hotels and police bias. One might call it a bit rich. Others might call it precisely the sort of stage-managed indignation that comes from being in opposition and suddenly discovering principles that did not seem necessary while in power.
Shadow technology secretary Julia Lopez, with a move that would be commendable if it weren’t so obviously laced with political self-preservation, has now written to Peter Kyle demanding answers.
And she helpfully adds, yes, this did all start under her party. But now, apparently, they are worried about it.
Lopez’s letter acknowledges that the CDU’s mission has “sparked concern about overreach.” It is the political equivalent of saying, “Mistakes were made,” while discreetly stepping back from the smouldering wreckage.
Her call for the unit to focus solely on “intentional” and not on “legitimate public debate” would ring slightly less hollow had this principle been articulated when the CDU was quietly compiling lists of lockdown sceptics in 2021 and 2022.
Back then, critics of pandemic policy (Reclaim The Net covered it extensively) were often smeared as cranks and conspiracy theorists. Behind the scenes, they were being watched, flagged, and in some cases deplatformed, with no meaningful oversight, no transparency, and no recourse.
No one in the government blinked. Certainly not the party now pleading for sunlight.
Labour, for its part, insists that NSOIT is harmless. It does not censor. It simply “flags” content for review based on existing platform rules. It is all very hands-off, very above board. Just a few nudges here and there to help social media companies decide what is safe for public consumption.
It is also deeply naïve. Because in practice, those “flags” carry weight.
Platforms eager to avoid regulatory friction tend to comply. And whether or not NSOIT hits the delete button directly is beside the point. The end result is the same. Content disappears, often without explanation, and always without public accountability.
This is not a story about one team, or one government, or one batch of flagged posts. It is a story about mission creep, and about the dangerous assumption that the state, any state, should be involved in the moderation of lawful expression.
If misinformation is a problem, the solution cannot be quietly flagging dissent behind closed doors. If democracy is to mean anything, it must allow for uncomfortable speech. That includes speech that criticizes police practices, immigration policies, or the government itself.
The public has the right to debate these things. Loudly. Clumsily. Even offensively. And they have the right to do so without being quietly flagged by a government department set up to combat hostile foreign actors.
The Conservative Party is right to demand oversight. But they are also the reason it is needed in the first place.
This article (Britain’s War on Terror Turned Into a War on Tweets) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Cam Wakefield
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