Tuesday, November 26, 2024

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COVID-19

UK Government Denies Targeting COVID-19 Policy Critics on Social Media

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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.

The government has denied targeting individuals, saying the unit was banned from flagging journalists and MPs to social media platforms.

The CDU was set up on March 5, 2020. According to government ministers, it monitors online narratives and trends, and has worked “closely with social media platforms to quickly identify and help them respond to potentially harmful content on their platforms,” including “removing harmful content in line with their terms and conditions, and promoting authoritative sources of information.”

The Telegraph on Friday accused the unit of secretly monitoring the activities of critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies such as lockdowns, school closures, mask mandate, and the proposed vaccine passport.

According to the report, documents released through Freedom of Information and data protection requests showed the CDU had flagged 24 social media comments by Molly Kinsley, who founded of children’s 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.

The report said De Figueiredo’s tweet was first flagged by Logically, an artificial intelligence firm the CDU used to trawl the internet. Another government unit, the now defunct Rapid Response Unit (RRU), was said to have “logged” articles written by Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.

The report also said the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, where the CDU was embedded at the time, had a “trusted flagger” status on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, meaning the companies would fast-track their requests for content moderation.

The RRU, which was also set up in March 2020, was closed last year, while the CDU is still operating now within the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology.

A government spokesperson denied that individuals had been targeted.

“The unit’s purpose is to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security,” they said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.

“It has never tracked the activity of individuals and has a blanket ban on referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms. None of the people named in this report were ever referred to social media platforms by the government and any claim otherwise is objectively false,” they added.

Meta, which owns Facebook, hasn’t responded to an Epoch Times request for comment. The same request emailed to Twitter was returned with an automated response consisting of a poop emoji. Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, announced on the platform in March that the emoji would be sent automatically when journalists sent requests for comment.

Civil Liberty group Big Brother Watch, which dubbed the government’s counter disinformation units the “Ministry of Truth” after the propaganda department in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” renewed its call for the CDU to be “suspended immediately [and] investigated.”

Former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg called on the ongoing COVID-19 Inquiry to investigate “the oppressive methods used to override dissent.”

“It is clear from [Former Health Secretary Matt] Hancock’s messages that steps were taken to manipulate public opinion and now it appears underhand[ed] methods may have been employed to stop free speech,” he told The Telegraph.

Rees-Mogg was referring to Hancock’s WhatsApp communications with officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, which were published in March. One of the messages on how to communicate with the public about the emergence of the Alpha variant of the virus read, “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”

The call to investigate the CDU comes after Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreed to hand over “all unredacted WhatsApp” messages to the COVID-19 inquiry.

Lady Hallett, chair of the official Inquiry, Lady Hallett, requested the messages last month, saying they were significant for their insight into core political and administrative decision-making by the UK government during the pandemic.

The Cabinet Office has argued that the messages are unambiguously irrelevant to the inquiry, but Hallett dismissed the argument.

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This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Epoch Times can be found here.

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The fake ‘Covid cases’ were secured by a PCR test that its inventor Kary Mullis said could not tell if you were sick and used very high amplification that was bound to elicit fake ‘positives’ by being triggered by genetic material nothing to do with ‘Covid’. Fake ‘cases’ were further secured by diagnosing other illness as ‘Covid-19’ including other forms of respiratory disease. This is why cases of flu (with ‘flu-like symptoms’) disappeared worldwide when ‘Covid-19’ (with ‘flu-like symptoms’) was hoaxed on the scene. Fake deaths from ‘Covid’ were manipulated by the insane policy of putting ‘Covid-19’ on the death certificate of anyone who tested positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ who died from any other cause within 28 days (sometimes more) of the fake ‘test’. People dying from falling down the stairs, road accidents, even gunshot wounds, were officially designated ‘Covid’ deaths by this blatant sleight of hand. Hospitals in the US were given massive financial incentives to diagnose ‘Covid’ – $4,600 for diagnosing regular pneumonia; $13,000 for ‘Covid’ pneumonia; and $39,000 for anyone they put on a ventilator that would almost certainly kill them (and have ‘Covid-19’ on their death certificate). Add to this the scandal of Remdesivir which Fauci imposed on hospitals for those testing positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ which was well known to cause multiple organ failure including the kidneys leading to the abdominal cavity and lungs filling with fluid that caused respiratory failure that was designated ‘Covid-19’. Add further the use of the end-of-life drug Midazolam that prematurely killed thousands of old people in care homes that was presented to the public as ‘the first wave of Covid’. From this – and I could say so much more – comes this question: WHERE’S THE BLOODY ‘VIRUS’?

The fake ‘Covid cases’ were secured by a PCR test that its inventor Kary Mullis said could not tell if you were sick and used very high amplification that was bound to elicit fake ‘positives’ by being triggered by genetic material nothing to do with ‘Covid’. Fake ‘cases’ were further secured by diagnosing other illness as ‘Covid-19’ including other forms of respiratory disease. This is why cases of flu (with ‘flu-like symptoms’) disappeared worldwide when ‘Covid-19’ (with ‘flu-like symptoms’) was hoaxed on the scene. Fake deaths from ‘Covid’ were manipulated by the insane policy of putting ‘Covid-19’ on the death certificate of anyone who tested positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ who died from any other cause within 28 days (sometimes more) of the fake ‘test’. People dying from falling down the stairs, road accidents, even gunshot wounds, were officially designated ‘Covid’ deaths by this blatant sleight of hand. Hospitals in the US were given massive financial incentives to diagnose ‘Covid’ – $4,600 for diagnosing regular pneumonia; $13,000 for ‘Covid’ pneumonia; and $39,000 for anyone they put on a ventilator that would almost certainly kill them (and have ‘Covid-19’ on their death certificate). Add to this the scandal of Remdesivir which Fauci imposed on hospitals for those testing positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ which was well known to cause multiple organ failure including the kidneys leading to the abdominal cavity and lungs filling with fluid that caused respiratory failure that was designated ‘Covid-19’. Add further the use of the end-of-life drug Midazolam that prematurely killed thousands of old people in care homes that was presented to the public as ‘the first wave of Covid’. From this – and I could say so much more – comes this question: WHERE’S THE BLOODY ‘VIRUS’?