No limit for this web of conspiracy theorists

At the weekend a rock was thrown into the turbid waters of the Covid conspiracy community, and the resulting ripples reached me personally a day later. The campaign group Big Brother Watch (which cut its teeth opposing the spread of CCTV cameras in the noughties) published a “report” about how state agencies in the UK had monitored output on social media and elsewhere concerning the pandemic. One of these agencies was the Army’s 77th Brigade whose job is to see what foreign powers are up to in the field of disinformation so as to counter it.

Uproar followed, especially among those who read the report’s headlines but not the report itself. This showed no secret surveillance and no action to intimidate or silence critics of