{"id":313084,"date":"2025-08-04T06:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T06:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=313084"},"modified":"2025-08-06T07:17:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T07:17:17","slug":"labour-targets-anti-migrant-protesters-with-terrorist-tracking-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=313084","title":{"rendered":"Labour targets anti migrant protesters with terrorist tracking software"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony Diver \u2013 The Telegraph Aug 2, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

A Whitehall \u201cdisinformation\u201d unit<\/a> used tools created to hunt for jihadists to find critics of asylum hotels, The Telegraph can reveal.<\/p>\n

The secretive team was this week revealed to have flagged \u201cconcerning\u201d narratives about migrants to tech platforms during the Southport riots<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The disclosure prompted the Trump administration and US congressmen to warn of a free speech crackdown in Britain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 2017, ministers commissioned Faculty, an AI firm, to help search for recruitment videos posted by Isil.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The firm developed tools that could automatically spot Islamic State content spreading online, so it could be flagged to tech companies by the Government.<\/p>\n

\u2018Counter disinformation data platform\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The same firm has since been awarded a \u00a32.3m contract to develop a \u201ccounter disinformation data platform\u201d to look for posts that pose a \u201cnational security and public safety risk\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

They included posts about asylum hotels and reference to \u201ctwo-tier\u201d policing<\/a> of protest, which later became a damaging political critique of Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

On Sat, 3 Aug 2024 at 13:05, Redacted – Personal Information @dsit.gov.uk> wrote:<\/h3>\n

Hi Redacted<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As would be expected, this is manifesting in different ways across platforms but we are sharing some content here (Example 1<\/u>, Example 2<\/u>, Example 3<\/u>) 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

We’d be grateful if you could come back to us on those two points as soon as you are able to.<\/p>\n

All the best,
\nREDACTED<\/p>\n

The revelation that the team was using terrorist-hunting software to monitor posts about immigration policy will raise further concerns about \u201ccensorship\u201d of the internet by Labour.<\/p>\n

Mr Trump\u2019s State Department said on Friday it was concerned about free speech in Britain, and would \u201cclosely monitor\u201d the situation to ensure American companies were not censored.<\/p>\n

A delegation of US congressmen met Peter Kyle, the Technology Secretary, this week to make their fears of online censorship known.<\/p>\n

Sir Keir is also facing significant backlash to new rules under the Online Safety Act,<\/a> which require social media companies to verify the age of users to access adult content.<\/p>\n

The threat of huge fines for breaching the rules has led to companies censoring harmless material out of an abundance of caution.<\/p>\n

Free speech warnings<\/strong><\/h2>\n

On Friday X became the first platform to criticise the new rules, warning that \u201cfree speech will suffer\u201d if they are not changed.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

They said: \u201cIt is alarming that the Government is aiming social media surveillance technology at law-abiding British citizens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Government should abandon its intrusive and unaccountable monitoring of legal online content and urgently commission an independent review of its so-called \u2018disinformation\u2019 units.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Government spokesman said: \u201cNational 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPut simply, these are widely used analysis tools and we do not use them to track individuals. They monitor trends safely, legally and transparently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Government \u2018disinformation unit\u2019 uses the same surveillance programs to monitor and identify critics of asylum hotels that it used to hunt \u201cterrorists\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":313086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[52,59,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Implants_and_surveillance_technology","category-Surveillance","category-european-migrant-crisis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=313084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313085,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313084\/revisions\/313085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/313086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=313084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=313084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=313084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}