Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent
The TelegraphJun 02, 2023
According to data released by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), the UK government's Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) collected posts from Telegram about Professor Carl Heneghan, an Oxford epidemiologist who was critical of lockdown measures.
The CDU — which assesses online disinformation and leads government response to such threats — also allegedly collected posts on London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine research fellow Dr. Alex de Figueiredo, and Molly Kingsley, who campaigned to keep schools open.
In tandem with Big Tech and media conglomerates, the government actively spied on and censored highly-respected scientists to keep them from challenging pandemic lockdowns. Public policies may have changed had the nation been aware of prominent experts' dissenting views, but freedom of scientific debate was stifled in favor of ideological ruling. It's time for this report to be independently investigated.
The CDU is not a secret authoritarian spy agency — it's a publicly known division of the PM's cabinet and abides by the laws of the UK. Moreover, while data may be gathered from a social media platform, any decision to take down individual posts is at the discretion of the forum concerned, not the government. Furthermore, since the CDU uses third parties to analyze disinformation, it's misleading to suggest that the government 'spied' on critics of pandemic policy.
There's a 15% chance that the Conservative Party will form the first government after the next UK general election, according to the Metaculus prediction community.