A shadowy ‘disinformation’ unit in Whitehall used tools created to hunt for jihadists to find critics of asylum hotels. The Telegraph has more.
The secretive team was this week revealed to have flagged ‘concerning’ narratives about migrants to tech platforms during the Southport riots.
The disclosure prompted the Trump administration and US congressmen to warn of a free speech crackdown in Britain.
The Telegraph can now reveal that some of the tools used by the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) were originally developed to hunt terrorists.
In 2017, ministers commissioned Faculty, an AI firm, to help search for recruitment videos posted by Isil.
At the time, use of the technology was strictly limited to stopping British social media users from encountering grisly beheading videos and calls to commit acts of terrorism.
The firm developed tools that could automatically spot Islamic State content spreading online, so it could be flagged to tech companies by the Government.
The same firm has since been awarded a £2.3m contract to develop a “counter disinformation data platform” to look for posts that pose a “national security and public safety risk”.
The Telegraph has established that the platform is a direct descendant of the tool used by the UK Government to hunt for terrorists in 2017, although it has since been improved and updated.
A video released by Faculty shows Matt Collins, the current UK deputy National Security Adviser, explaining that the tool was required to prevent the spread of terrorist ideology.
“We had a concerted effort to basically encourage social media companies to do more to remove content which was radicalising individuals to either travel to Syria or to conduct terrorist attacks,” he said.
Faculty is understood to have sold the software to the Government to monitor foreign interference in elections, but has no power to stop it from being used for domestic purposes.
A second firm enlisted to monitor online trends was Global Strategy Network, an intelligence outfit established by Richard Barrett, the former MI6 head of global counter-terrorism.
The company has been used to look for content that could pose a risk to public safety, which includes posts about migrant hotels during the riots.
On Thursday, the Telegraph revealed emails between the NSOIT and TikTok, which showed officials in August last year raising concerns about posts that could incite violence.
They included posts about asylum hotels and reference to “two-tier” policing of protest, which later became a damaging political critique of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
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Policing by contempt
DANIEL JUPP
THE motto of the British police used to be ‘policing by consent’. I wrote an article a while ago about the history of British policing and the process by which it gradually lost the qualities that once made it a byword for how to police in a non-political, non-partisan and honest way.
To summarise the points I made then, the British police used to work in a way that bound them to local people and these ties were severed both by ideological indoctrination and operational and technological changes in how policing was conducted:
- Many officers came from and lived in the areas they policed. Local police forces represented local people in far more settled, stable and homogeneous communities. When you amalgamate and centralise police organisations, close down village and town police stations, and have a society where people move around a lot more and where mass immigration is occurring as well, the police become strangers with no sense of connection to local areas. This affects both how they view and treat those they police and how they are viewed by communities they police.
- This process was massively worsened by a transition from foot patrols to policing from cars in the 1960s and onwards. Familiarity with an area and its inhabitants was no longer something police acquired by regular patrols and interactions. People no longer saw police until after trouble had occurred, and preventive policing almost entirely disappeared except for Saturday-night patrols in city centres. Criminals act with greater impunity when they know the swiftest possible response has a 20- or 30-minute car journey and that for minor crimes any response is unlikely.
- Without framing formal DEI policies equivalent to or as obvious as US ones, the police in the UK responded to attacks on them on racial grounds (particularly after the 1993 Stephen Lawrence murder and the disastrous 1999 Macpherson Report with its critical race theory adoption of the notion of institutional racism) by prioritising submission to ethnic grievance industries and representatives, ‘community leaders’ exclusively from non-majority identities, and racist anti-white and anti-majority attitudes and recruitment practices. This alienated the police from white populations and from their concerns and from the principles of fair and equal policing for all.
- The transition from foot patrols and local police stations to car patrols and more distant town-based headquarters was accompanied by decades of recruitment to senior roles that replaced qualification on the job (rising from lower ranks based on actual experience) with more and more posts created that were administrative and bureaucratic in nature, with much more paperwork, and crucially much more concentration on senior roles being filled by people with university degrees. This infected the police with all the disastrous absurdities, prejudices and assumptions of academia, most of which were inimical to competent and fair policing practices. Many British police chiefs have been promoted into the position on the basis of ideological progressive conformity combined with innate point-scoring characteristics. These then impose ‘racially aware’ and ‘diversity and equity conscious’ attitudes on lower ranks and how they police.
What these changes have gradually created is a police force in which promotion, success and competence is judged not by impartial enforcement of the law and success in preventing crimes, but on conformity to politically correct attitudes and assumptions all wrapped in university jargon and academic research but producing, in the end, a consistent attitude of contempt towards the majority populace being policed. Like senior politicians such as Keir Starmer, the police now exist to enforce metropolitan dogma and progressive attitudes, a situation rendered obvious in two-tier policing even when this isn’t directly imparted to them as instructions from political masters.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on July 25, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
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