{"id":65398,"date":"2023-06-05T05:55:14","date_gmt":"2023-06-05T10:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65398"},"modified":"2023-06-05T05:55:14","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T10:55:14","slug":"uk-government-denies-targeting-covid-19-policy-critics-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65398","title":{"rendered":"UK Government Denies Targeting COVID-19 Policy Critics on Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"
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UK Government Denies Targeting COVID-19 Policy Critics on Social Media<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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\"The<\/a><\/div>\n
The logos of mobile apps Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Messenger displayed on a tablet on Oct. 1, 2019. (AFP via Getty Images\/Denis Charlet)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The UK government is facing renewed pressure to shut its Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) after the unit was accused of tracking the activities of vocal critics of COVID-19 policies when flagging so-called disinformation.<\/p>\n

The government has denied targeting individuals, saying the unit was banned from flagging journalists and MPs to\u00a0social media platforms.<\/p>\n

The CDU, which was set up on March 5, 2020,\u00a0monitors<\/a>\u00a0online narratives and trends, and has\u00a0worked \u201cclosely with social media platforms<\/a>\u00a0to quickly identify and help them respond to potentially harmful content on their platforms,\u201d including \u201cremoving harmful content in line with their terms and conditions, and promoting\u00a0authoritative sources of information,\u201d according to government ministers.<\/p>\n

The Telegraph<\/a> on June 2 accused the unit of secretly monitoring the activities of critics of the government\u2019s COVID-19 policies such as lockdowns, school closures, mask mandate, and the proposed vaccine passport.<\/p>\n

According to the report, documents released through\u00a0Freedom of Information and data protection requests showed the CDU had flagged 24 social media comments by\u00a0Molly Kingsley, who founded the children\u2019s welfare campaign group UsForThem in response to school closures, and one post on Twitter by Dr. Alexandre De Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who opposed the mass COVID-19 vaccination of children.<\/p>\n

The report said\u00a0De Figueiredo\u2019s tweet was first flagged by\u00a0Logically, an\u00a0artificial intelligence firm the CDU used to\u00a0trawl the internet. Another government unit, the\u00a0now-defunct\u00a0Rapid Response Unit (RRU), was said to have \u201clogged\u201d articles written by Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University\u2019s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UK Government Denies Targeting COVID-19 Policy Critics on Social Media The logos of mobile apps Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Messenger displayed on a tablet on Oct. 1, 2019. (AFP via Getty Images\/Denis Charlet) The UK government is facing renewed pressure to shut its Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) after the unit was accused of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[33840,5570,14545,33841,1169,765],"class_list":["post-65398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-lily-zhou","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-narrative-control","tag-narrative-mangement","tag-social-media","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65399,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65398\/revisions\/65399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}