The UK is weaponizing a COVID-era 'disinformation' agency against those posting about the riots

The U.K. established a spy agency in 2019 called the Counter Disinformation Unit. Its stated purpose is "to understand disinformation narratives and attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment to ensure that the government understands the scope and reach of harmful mis and disinformation and can take appropriate action."

Like the Harris-Biden administration and the Stanford Internet Observatory across the Atlantic, the CDU has leaned on social media companies in recent years to flag and censor supposed disinformation. During the pandemic, for instance, it monitored lockdown and vaccine critics and targeted critics of government policy.

Amid calls for review and controversy over its censorious practices, the CDU was rebranded as the National Security Online Information Team.

Notwithstanding ongoing concerns over its apparent attempt to replicate the Chinese communists' surveillance regime, the British government has found yet another narrative it would like the NSOIT to cure.

'Keyboard warriors also cannot hide.'

Axel Rudakubana, the 18-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants, apparently stormed into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, on July 29 and butchered three girls — Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King. Rudakubana also grievously wounded five other children and two adults.

The initial refusal of authorities to indicate the attacker's nationality or release his name upon his arrest — apparently customary when dealing with minors who are suspects — prompted many to suspect that he was an asylum seeker captive to a radical ideology.

Protests and riots, fueled further by longstanding frustrations with unchecked migration, British Islamicization, coverups, and a failure of assimilation, soon began to sweep the country.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Sky News Monday, "There has to be a reckoning."

"Those individuals who are involved in the disorder need to know that they will pay a price," said Cooper. "There have already been hundreds of arrests, and we have made very clear to the police they have our full support in pursuing the full range of prosecutions and penalties, including serious prison sentences, long-term tagging, travel bans, and more."

While hundreds of rioters have reportedly been arrested, authorities are also going after those whose related posts and comments online are supposedly false or inflammatory.

Cooper further emphasized that "keyboard warriors also cannot hide" and will be "liable for prosecution and strong penalties too," reported the BBC.

According to the Telegraph, the NSOIT is now being used to monitor social media posts regarding the riots.

Peter Kyle, the new leftist government's technology secretary, has asked the NSOIT to track online activity regarding the discussion of the butchered Southport girls and the protests.

Silkie Carlo, the director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, told the Telegraph, "There are serious questions as to whether NSOIT is fit for this task, given its chilling track record of monitoring the lawful and accurate speech of journalists, scientists, parliamentarians, human rights advocates and members of the public during the pandemic when they rightly questioned the government’s pandemic management."

'This is '1984' in practice.'

"It's worrying to see NSOIT brought into action shortly after its controversial activities were exposed, and before it has been subject to the important independent review the culture committee called for," added Carlo.

Carlo subsequently wrote in an op-ed:

The explanation of 'internet lies' is a neat way to package the long-term break down in law and order, disintegrating social fabric and simmering racism in our country – and it comes with the very neat response of online censorship that benefits elites who have never really trusted us with free and open access to information online.

A government spokesman downplayed the online surveillance and information clampdowns, telling the Telegraph, "We have been abundantly clear — what is illegal offline is illegal online, and it’s right that any thugs stoking violence on the streets meet the full force of the law."

"We make no apology for monitoring publicly available content that threatens public safety. The information is flagged up to social media firms when it is likely to have breached their terms of service, and the police when it meets a criminal threshold," added the spokesman.

Apparently the NSOIT is not alone in making sure that Britons are sharing only government-approved information online.

Stephen Parkinson, director of Public Prosecutions of England and Wales, recently told Sky News, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for [racially inflammatory] material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."

"People might think they're not doing anything harmful. They are," added Parkinson. "And the consequences will be visited upon them."

Fr. Calvin Robinson responded to Parkinson's comments, telling "Blaze News Tonight," "This is '1984' in practice."

Regardless of how they've framed such efforts, Robinson indicated further that the police and the government are working to stop information from spreading that "they don't see as true; that we may see as true but they don't."

In addition to the British government working harder to control the flow of information online, leftist Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised a "wider deployment of facial recognition technology."

Carlo responded, saying, "This AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK."

Big Brother Watch indicated that the vast majority of police live facial recognition matches in the U.K. are false positives, meaning "they have wrongly flagged innocent members of the public as people of interest."

Daragh Murray, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, told the Guardian, "There is a clear danger that in responding to a tragedy and public unrest we expand and entrench police surveillance without appropriate scrutiny. Given that the police have responded to disorder and riots for decades, why is facial recognition needed now?"

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