The man at the helm of Britain’s digital crackdown on lockdown sceptics is now the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, a report claims.
Senior Conservative Party MP Oliver Dowden, who now serves as the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, was the man at the helm of the UK’s crackdown on lockdown critics, reportedly instructing the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) to start targeting so-called COVID-19 “disinformation”.
Dowden’s position was revealed by UK newspaper The Telegraph, which follows an exposé last week detailing how the CDU conspired with A.I. and social media firms to monitor and censor critics of the British government’s lockdown policy.
According to the newspaper, Dowden spearheaded the unit’s war against “misinformation”, which involved contracting A.I. companies to scour the internet for posts deemed problematic by the state.
Reports back in March of 2020 detail the UK government as setting up a “team” aimed at tackling so-called “interference and disinformation” regarding the COVID pandemic, with Dowdon himself describing the unnamed unit as being “well placed to monitor interference and limit the spread of disinformation”.
Later that year, Dowden, alongside then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock, announced that social media firms had agreed to limit the spread of so-called “mis/disinformation content” surrounding COVID-19 or vaccines which were flagged to them by the British government.
The Counter-Disinformation Unit is later said to have fallen under the control of Michelle Donelan when she became the country’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary last September.
Unlike Dowden, Donelan reportedly took efforts to curb the powers of the CDU, with an inside source allegedly telling The Telegraph that she wanted the outfit either replaced or reduced so as to only focus “solely on foreign [material] and disinformation”.
Ironically, the publication now says that the CDU is under the control of acting Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Chloe Smith, whose husband is described as being a “well-known Covid sceptic”.
According to the report, Dowden has taken part in government efforts to curb outrage over the coronavirus snooping scandal, with the now-Deputy PM reportedly attending an “urgent meeting” discussing the crisis.
Such public indignation does not look likely to go away anytime soon, and tech-billionaire Elon Musk has boosted awareness of the revelations, describing the government agency’s activities as “terrible“.
It is far from the first time the UK government has come under fire for its desire to abuse modern technology, with Conservative Party efforts to force social media firms to monitor their user’s private chats provoking outrage among messaging firms.
Justified as an attempt to keep children safe online, the proposed directive to force automatic screening of messages for child abuse has been described as by definition undermining end-to-end encrypted messaging, in turn jeopardising digital privacy.
Speaking on the matter, Signal President Meredith Whittaker denounced what she called “magical thinking” within the UK government that digital privacy could somehow be maintained despite such automatic screening of messages, threatening that her firm would “100 per cent walk” from the UK market if the suggested rule became law.
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