A children’s rights advocate and lockdown critic has said she was censored on social media and monitored by the government’s Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), which had a “pages-long list” of everything they had been collecting on her.
“I was really shocked when this list—a huge, pages-long list—came back of everything that they had been monitoring on me,” Ms. Kinglsey told Mr. Hall.
Ms. Kingsley said there was something noticeable in some of the content collected on her since the end of 2020, some of which she said was “manifestly not disinformation.”
“Some of it was opinion,” she said, such as that “schools should not be closed a second time.”
“And some of it was actually facts,” she said, continuing: “It was anecdotal evidence from our parent network. You know, parents are distraught about having their kids masked again. In what world is that disinformation?”
Big Brother Watch exposed that MPs and journalists had been targets for monitoring, including David Davis MP, Peter Hitchens, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and Lockdown Sceptics founder and Free Speech Union director Toby Young.
‘We Were Censored’
The children’s campaigner said that during the pandemic, her and UsForThem’s social media accounts were being suppressed, saying: “We kept having sort of blocks put on our social media accounts or warnings slapped over them. It was very obvious to me for quite a long period, social media posts seemed to be very suppressed.“So either things didn’t get traction, or then for quite a long period, things would get an awful lot of traction. So tweets would be retweeted, you know, hundreds, sometimes thousands of times, but follower numbers would never grow.”
As well as being censored on social media, Ms. Kingsley said “it became very noticeable that we were being commissioned less in mainstream press.”
Contemplating why she thought she was being suppressed, she said: “What’s that old adage, when you’re trying to censor information? ‘It’s not the information that’s wrong. [...] It’s because the policy is wrong.’
The Thin Line Between Dictatorship and Democracy
The UsForThem co-founder also detailed how the pandemic period altered her opinion of British governance, saying she did not think that the pandemic era was an “aberration in an otherwise perfectly smooth-running democracy.”“I come out of this period feeling that much of what I thought about the British state was, if not a lie, certainly very hollow,” she said, adding, “I think the line between autocracy or dictatorship and democracy is much thinner than I ever possibly could have imagined.”
The children’s advocate continued: “We’ve got a lot of laws, a lot of statutes, a lot of regulations, a lot of committees, a lot of parliamentary time spent, you know, debating, questioning, running select committees. But actually, I think what I realised is none of that matters if you don’t have accountability.”
Counter Disinformation Unit Rebranded
In November 2023, the government renamed the CDU the National Security Online Information Team, reportedly shifting away from its pandemic-era activities and focusing on combatting the deliberate spreading of false information by foreign states.Mr. Young told The Epoch Times at the time that the rebrand itself was “disinformation.”
“Renaming an anti-disinformation unit to disguise its true purpose and make it sound like just another dull bureaucratic agency is straight out of 1984. In fact, it’s a form of disinformation,” he said.
A government spokesman said, “The name of the team has changed to more accurately reflect their remit and works to tackle some of the most significant national security risks facing the UK.”
