Tony Diver – The Telegraph Aug 2, 2025
A Whitehall “disinformation” unit used tools created to hunt for jihadists to find critics of asylum hotels, The Telegraph can reveal.
The secretive team was this week revealed to have flagged “concerning” narratives about migrants to tech platforms during the Southport riots.
The disclosure prompted the Trump administration and US congressmen to warn of a free speech crackdown in Britain.
The Telegraph can now reveal that some of the tools used by the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) were originally developed to hunt terrorists.
In 2017, ministers commissioned Faculty, an AI firm, to help search for recruitment videos posted by Isil.
At the time, use of the technology was strictly limited to stopping British social media users from encountering grisly beheading videos and calls to commit acts of terrorism.
The firm developed tools that could automatically spot Islamic State content spreading online, so it could be flagged to tech companies by the Government.
‘Counter disinformation data platform’
The same firm has since been awarded a £2.3m contract to develop a “counter disinformation data platform” to look for posts that pose a “national security and public safety risk”.
The Telegraph has established that the platform is a direct descendant of the tool used by the UK Government to hunt for terrorists in 2017, although it has since been improved and updated.
A video released by Faculty shows Matt Collins, the current UK deputy National Security Adviser, explaining that the tool was required to prevent the spread of terrorist ideology.
“We had a concerted effort to basically encourage social media companies to do more to remove content which was radicalising individuals to either travel to Syria or to conduct terrorist attacks,” he said.
Faculty is understood to have sold the software to the Government to monitor foreign interference in elections, but has no power to stop it from being used for domestic purposes.
A second firm enlisted to monitor online trends was Global Strategy Network, an intelligence outfit established by Richard Barrett, the former MI6 head of global counter-terrorism.
The company has been used to look for content that could pose a risk to public safety, which includes posts about migrant hotels during the riots.
On Thursday, The Telegraph revealed emails between the NSOIT and TikTok, which showed officials in August last year raising concerns about posts that could incite violence.
They included posts about asylum hotels and reference to “two-tier” policing of protest, which later became a damaging political critique of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
On Sat, 3 Aug 2024 at 13:05, Redacted – Personal Information @dsit.gov.uk> wrote:
Hi Redacted
Thank you for your ongoing help in relation to Southport and for confirming your proactive efforts to support local law enforcement. Given the number of protests, and potential for the online environment to continue exacerbating tensions, we wanted to check whether you are still designating this as an incident and if you have raised the severity of that in any way?
I am sure you will not be surprised at the significant volumes of anti-immigrant content directed at Muslim and Jewish communities as well as concerning narratives about the police and a ‘two-tier’ system that we are seeing across the online environment.
As would be expected, this is manifesting in different ways across platforms but we are sharing some content here (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3) to illustrate the nature of what we’ve seen. The first includes a warning about blades being hidden in stickers – the text in this example is warning the public to avoid them but we have seen this image used in a range of contexts. The second takes a traditional ceremony and presents it as a show of weapons. The third misleads the reader about the nature of the protest in Leeds, we have seen this narrative appear in other content which misrepresent the government’s response to further a sense of division.
These are not specific to TikTok as we wanted to give you a sense of the different narratives; we realise that terms of service will vary across these examples and across platforms themselves.
Given the serious risk of misleading and false claims in relation to this incident fueling community tensions on a local level and the potential for further physical harm, we are keen to understand a) what content you are seeing across your platform; and b) any measures you have taken in response (particularly those we might not observe because they are automatically/swiftly catching issues).
We’d be grateful if you could come back to us on those two points as soon as you are able to.
All the best,
REDACTED
The revelation that the team was using terrorist-hunting software to monitor posts about immigration policy will raise further concerns about “censorship” of the internet by Labour.
Mr Trump’s State Department said on Friday it was concerned about free speech in Britain, and would “closely monitor” the situation to ensure American companies were not censored.
A delegation of US congressmen met Peter Kyle, the Technology Secretary, this week to make their fears of online censorship known.
Sir Keir is also facing significant backlash to new rules under the Online Safety Act, which require social media companies to verify the age of users to access adult content.
The threat of huge fines for breaching the rules has led to companies censoring harmless material out of an abundance of caution.
Free speech warnings
On Friday X became the first platform to criticise the new rules, warning that “free speech will suffer” if they are not changed.
A spokesman for Big Brother Watch, the civil liberties campaign group, criticised the use of anti-terror software to find opponents of government policy on asylum.
They said: “It is alarming that the Government is aiming social media surveillance technology at law-abiding British citizens.
“The Government should abandon its intrusive and unaccountable monitoring of legal online content and urgently commission an independent review of its so-called ‘disinformation’ units.”
A Government spokesman said: “National security is not only our top priority but also our foremost duty. We will not compromise public safety by letting harmful narratives fester and multiply online, leading to real world harm as we saw in the wake of the horrific Southport attack.
“Put simply, these are widely used analysis tools and we do not use them to track individuals. They monitor trends safely, legally and transparently.”
Paul Fuller
UNDERSTAND THIS
If the government did not want the migrants here
they would not have been allowed in
In 2 world wars we sealed all our borders
but they say we cant now ?
Every TV advert has white men eradicated
couples and families replaced by black men
Subliminals flashed on screen tell whites girls to go with black men
Rothschild’s take over of the BBC in the mid 1930s
has some pretty nasty racist sub plots particularly in soaps.
Every white person was pushed and hassled to have the covid jab
the migrants coming in were not.
Remember the israell minister who said quote
” it was the triumph of the jew in 2 world wars to set the 2 Anglo Saxon races at each others throats”
Russia is not your enemy neither is Iran or N Korea
your enemy is closer to home, its your zio-government
who has made you a second lass citizen in your own country
trump warns starmer about communist UK
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/trump-warns-uk-pm-starmer-to-stop-censoring-british-people-who-criticize-mass-migration/
LUCY CONNELY
The wife of a Conservative councillor has been jailed for 31 months after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire.
Lucy Connolly, whose husband serves on West Northamptonshire Council, posted the anti migrant message on X on the day three girls were killed in Southport.
The 41-year-old childminder called for “mass deportation now” and added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
No the racists are the politicians bringing them in to the UK
Judge Melbourne Inman KC told Birmingham Crown Court the sentence for these offences was intended to “punish and deter”. what a wicked bastard
REGIME CHANGE UK PLEASE
he UK is falling apart
we are over run by foreign nationals
The rotherham area had 1400 girls serially raped
some even killed
and government hid it up
people were pleading with trump to come take over and run the country as it slides into a full blown communist dictatorship
something must happen soon, please god
Authoritarian laws are not used to keep a country safe, they’re used to keep a country’s political class safe from accountability.
LOL..
teams of spooky overweight neckbeards in converse pumps ‘flagging content’ in regime ‘control centres’ full of overpriced taxpayerfunded* chinky tek landfill.. that smell of air freshener and fart gas, no doubt overseen by some shrewish lesbian with halitosis and a wiry quiff…
‘got one ‘ere’.. proffers agent pudding..’misgendering an eritrean troon from afghanistan via marseilles and waving the george cross flag in bedford’…..
* do you really think fifty dell PC’s cost eight hundred million pounds?…
nicola bulley
so its all come out now
senior policemen said she was followed by a migrant
whom they are pretty sure attacked her
police were told suppress this
bastards
As long as half-a-dozen Day-Glo Goons can coral thousands of protestors (like in that photo above) while seemingly strolling along without a care in the world…
I’m afraid that all the marching & flag-waving, huffing & puffing ain’t gonna do a damn thing to “persuade” the UK Stasi Regime that The Serfs are capable of anything other than letting-off a bit of “steam”… while getting sore feet in the process!
Would we be better off as the 51st State of the USA owning guns and having Constitutional Rights of Free Speech?
I believe it was Nico X who stated shortly after 9/11 that the Semitic State will eventually switch from ‘muslim terrorists’ to ‘white/neo nazi terrorists’ as the main ‘terroristic threat’ to society. He said the ‘islamic terror’ program was all a ruse, simply exploited to institute the laws to ultimately use again their real enemy: the white man, who could possibly rebel against the State orchestrating his demise via mass immigration. Once again, the prediction of the great one has come true & yet no columnist post offers.
i cant make up my mind about david icke
is he genuine hhmmm
we all know the TAP blog is a fake site
but we have had them on here
carl jones constantly trying to change the narrative onto natzis
and nico x wanting to bring in churchills buddy and general pervert
Aleiister Crowley
People are preparing to be arrested for showing support to Palestine Action and the Starmer government should not be surprised by this, they invited it. When arrest becomes the tool of repression the people who will not be silenced accept arrest. All that does is bring the case to court where it becomes a legal matter, and far from hoping to avoid explaining themselves to a judge or a magistrate some of those being silenced desire it.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hundreds-ready-arrested-mass-protest-133844722.html
It’s been a major week for our movement. Millions of people are waking up to the reality Palestinians in Gaza have been warning us about for the past few years: Israel is using mass starvation as a weapon of war and a tool in its genocidal mission.
Last night, we saw 60% of Democratic Senators finally vote to block weapons sales to Israel in a record-breaking vote on Bernie Sanders’ Joint Resolutions of Disapproval.
On Tuesday, Gallup released a poll showing only 32% of Americans now approve of “Israel’s starvation action in Gaza” – an all time low.
The people are with us. We’re winning the narrative war, and slowly building political power, but we are still very far away from where we need to be. We can’t yet stop our government from funding Israel’s crippling genocide, punish coporations for profiting off of mass death, or stop bombs from shipping across the ocean to murder Palestinian families.
Today is the last day of our annual summer fundraising campaign. Thank you for sticking with us as we’ve sent a flurry of emails this week.
Yesterday, we asked you to donate to direct aid fundraisers in Gaza and to keep calling Congress to demand the end of Israel’s brutal siege.
I’m asking you again to give today to make sure we have the funds we need to keep building long term, grassroots power. It will take all of us to change our political reality and make a material contribution to the movement for Palestinian freedom.
Can you give TODAY before midnight? Every donation advances our organizing – I work at addenbrookes hospital we have given what we can and have lost several members of staff who went to help
your british governments are traitors + terrorists
since long time ago . french + my germans too .
the terrorists call other decent people terrorists .
@ MM
it is futil to argue with a judge . they are traitors
like their freemason masters + politicians !
Nico X–always wanting his own column when the web-site is, according to him, a Jewy load of crap
Ellis taylor
no proof dunghill and crowley knew each other or ever met.
Zoo asks people to donate unwanted pets as food for its predators
A zoo in Denmark is asking for unwanted pets to be donated – not for further care but as food for its predators.
they published the unusual appeal on Facebook and its website.
The post says they can take smaller live animals such as chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs, which are “an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild.”
Look we in the UK may be able to help, we have a whole bunch of useless politicians we can donate
Have not been here for a while but in reply to fullerangus I can confirm God is neither dead nor asleep and has a plan to punish the UK for its corruption. One must have both courage and patience as we witness the destruction of 1/3 of mankind at the hands of these lunatics.
“…the renegade follower of Blavatsky, Annie Besant…was charged by her Black Masters with the mission of persuading the world to accept for its Teacher a negroid Messiah. We cannot suppose that humanity is so entirely base as to accept Krishnamurti.” –Aleister Crowley
Maybe not in 1924, but 100 years later the white man/woman is possessed by niggerism. Thus we see the mission of the mongrels in power (Jews) and their worship of Choronzon is to debase & niggerize-mongrelize the white race.
A.A.
lewis
nico never said this site is ‘crap’.