Surveillance, censorship and propaganda
Update on the various Government units who manipulated the narrative during the covid event
GARY SIDLEY
Most people now recognise that throughout the prime covid years (2020 – 2022) we all endured an exceptionally high level of state-generated propaganda and manipulation intended to promote both acceptance of the ‘deadly virus’ narrative and the corresponding restrictions. The role of behavioural scientists in this systematic endeavour has been well documented, their ubiquitous deployment of ‘nudges’ striving to frighten, shame, and scapegoat us all into compliance with unethical and counterproductive public health diktats. Another source of narrative control, however, was conducted by a number of rarely-discussed government departments dedicated to shaping the beliefs and behaviours of the general population in a direction favoured by our ruling elite. It is these shadowy government departments that will be the focus of this article.
In January 2023, Big Brother Watch (a civil liberties campaigning organisation) published a comprehensive overview of the insidious manoeuvrings of five government units during the ‘pandemic’. What follows is a reminder of their activities around the time of the covid event, along with an update as to their more recent undertakings.
1. Rapid Response Unit (RRU)
Created in July 2018 as a central element of the Government Communication Service, the initial remit of the RRU was a broad one, officially described as a ‘rapid response social media capability to help support the reclaiming of a fact-based public debate’. From early 2020 its focus narrowed, the bulk of the unit’s work being dedicated to combating ‘false and misleading’ covid narratives and ‘working with social media platforms to remove harmful content’. Considerable financial resources were dedicated to the RRU, for staff and sophisticated digital equipment, an example of the latter being a ‘social listening tool’ that gave them the capability to ‘tap into’ and monitor numerous online conversations. The RRU was, therefore, able to routinely furnish its host department – the Cabinet Office – with briefings about any stories that were gaining traction on social media, thereby providing the government with potential targets for censorship or other forms of narrative control (for example, search engine optimisation to reduce online visibility).
In 2021, the RRU also published a weekly ‘Vaccine Hesitancy Report’ that flagged tweets expressing concern, not only about vaccine safety, but also about the authoritarian attempt to introduce vaccine passports. Furthermore, the unit was not averse to resorting to pejorative labels, describing the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer and politician Richard Tice as ‘vaccine sceptics’. Even the outputs of academics like Carl Heneghan (Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine) were included in the RRU’s surveillance activities; for instance his questioning of the scientific basis of the ‘Rule of 6’ was sufficient to attract their attention. Clearly, there had been significant mission creep away from the RRU’s initial aim of ‘reclaiming a fact-based public debate’.
What are they doing now?
The RRU was disbanded in August 2022. The information acquired in now archived, but – no doubt – will be made available to future governments as required.
2. Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU)
The CDU was established in March 2020 with the broad remit of monitoring covid disinformation (defined as ‘false coronavirus information online’). Operating out of the Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, it subsequently broadened its remit to incorporate the ‘inadvertent sharing of false information’. Although the CDU has been reluctant to disclose data about its budget and staffing numbers, Big Brother Watch reported that their parent department (the DCMS) had spent over £1 million on social media monitoring – including two huge contracts with Logically AI, a company dedicated to ‘building decision intelligence for high-stakes information environments’. The details contained within these contractual arrangements strongly suggested that the CDU conducted extensive surveillance of discussions and trends on social media platforms. Indeed, Logically AI were willing to deploy highly dubious methods: for example, in summer 2021, they illegally hacked the private messaging forum of HART (a group of experts challenging the dominant covid narrative), subsequently claiming that HART’s critiques of lockdowns, mask mandates, and mRNA ‘vaccines’ constituted ‘misinformation’.
Throughout the covid event, the CDU enjoyed a special relationship with social media companies, referred to as ‘Trusted Flagger Status’. As an example of what this privileged arrangement involved, YouTube disclosed how the CDU were granted a dedicated web form for direct contact with the company, opportunities for ongoing discussion and feedback about YouTube content, and online action reviews for increased actionability. Disingenuously, the CDU always claimed that they did not have the authority to force social media platforms to remove content. Nonetheless, it is clear that their highlighting of information that did not correspond to the dominant covid narrative would, inevitably, put considerable pressure on the companies to delete this content; in the words of Big Brother Watch, ‘Giving officials an unaccountable hotline to flag lawful speech for removal from the digital public square is a worrying threat to free speech’. This censorship-at-arms-length arrangement – power without visible responsibility – clearly suited the state.
Subsequent evidence confirmed the CDU’s censorship role. For instance, in 2022 Nadine Dorris (then the Culture Secretary) told the House of Commons, ‘We work to remove that content online, which is both harmful … and provides misinformation and disinformation. Daily we have those contacts with the online providers and the work is ongoing’. Those whose social media activity fell within the remit of this covert surveillance included MP David Davis (for his views on modelling), journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer (for highlighting the negative consequences of lockdowns), political commentator/pub landlord Adam Brooks (for his opposition to vaccine mandates), and Big Brother Watch (for campaigning against mandatory Covid-19 certification).
What are they doing now?
Throughout the covid event, the CDU was – undoubtedly – the most active (and controversial) component of the government’s mission to control the narrative, habitually smearing and/or censoring a range of individuals and organisations who were legitimately challenging the lockdown-and-jab approach to ‘pandemic’ management. It is therefore imperative to determine what this Orwellian adjudicator of truth is up to now.
In February 2023, the CDU changed its name to the ‘National Security & Online Information Team’ (NSOIT) and is now hosted by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The stated purpose of the NSOIT is ‘to ensure that the government understands the scope and reach of harmful mis and disinformation and can take appropriate action’, focusing on any content which they judge to pose ‘a risk to public health, public safety, or national security’ – a remit so wide that one might reasonably suggest that their central function is to prevent any narratives contrary to the government’s approved perspectives (on infectious diseases, the consequences of climate change, and global conflicts) from reaching the public square.
The details of current and recent activities of the NSOIT are difficult to ascertain, although it has been revealed that – during the riots that followed the murder of three children in Southport – the unit monitored social media activity in search of ‘far right’ agitators. Most Freedom of Information (FOI) requests seeking the specifics of their undertakings are refused, the department resorting to various justifications for this secrecy: disclosure ‘could allow malign disinformation actors to tailor their tactics to evade our monitoring capabilities’; ‘the information relates to the formulation and development of government policy’; and the assertion that the ‘public interest’ is best served by concealment. Furthermore, on the rare occasion when they have released internal policy documents, the contents have been heavily redacted.
A common assumption running through many of the CDU/NSOIT responses is that the government is the only valid source of accurate information. Multiple requests to the department regarding who ultimately determines what is categorised as mis or disinformation have been ignored or deflected, sometimes with a display of condescension – for instance, a query about the potential for vaccine harms was met with the retort, ‘The science is clear… vaccines save lives and are the most effective public health intervention since clean water’.
As with the CDU during the covid era, the NSOIT continues to hold ‘Trusted Flagger Status’ with the major social media platforms, providing them with a prioritised communication channel to highlight the online content they are concerned about, while – ostensibly – leaving it up to X, Facebook, YouTube etc. to decide whether to remove the flagged information. This insincere claim is akin to a local gangster informing a neighbour that the mafia boss is not happy with that person’s recent behaviour and that he/she might wish to change their ways.
Clearly, the NSOIT operates as the sole arbiter of truth, with an unlimited censorial remit, and the authority to withhold information about their activities – a potent and pernicious cluster of characteristics that is alien to a free and open society.
3. 77th Brigade
The British army has held a psychological warfare capability since the start of World War I, the current manifestation of this function (the 77th Brigade) coming into being in 2015. By 2019, the activities of this unit included controlling the narrative on social media and the dissemination of UK-government-friendly podcasts and videos – indeed, David Miller (a professor of political sociology) claimed ‘the 77th Brigade engaged in ‘manipulation of the media … including fake online profiles’.
Although purportedly dedicated to only targeting overseas adversaries, during the covid event the 77th Brigade contributed to the government’s efforts to counter online misinformation about the ‘pandemic’ by offering support to the Cabinet Office’s RRU, activity that would likely have involved domestic surveillance. Indeed, a former 77th Brigade whistle blower told Big Brother Watch that he conducted ‘rudimentary scrapes of the English-speaking Twittersphere’ using keywords such as ‘ventilator’ and ‘lockdown’, trawls that would inevitable have snared British citizens. A response to a Freedom of Information request confirmed that the 77th Brigade was involved in controlling the ‘pandemic’ narrative.
What are they doing now?
Officially, in keeping with their original remit – as described by politicians shortly following the department’s emergence in 2015 – the 77th Brigade should be engaging in ‘non-lethal warfare’ (sometimes in collaboration with NATO allies) countering disinformation and cyber-attacks emanating from the UK’s overseas adversaries. Predictably, details of specific missions are difficult to ascertain. What is clear, however, is that the resources and operational costs of the unit have escalated since its advent, reaching £14.5 million in April 2024. Furthermore, in light of the 77th Brigade’s activities during the covid era, it is reasonable to assume that they would not be averse to conducting surveillance of domestic ‘adversaries’ when deemed helpful by our governing elite.
4. Government Information Cell (GIC)
Hosted by the Foreign Office, the GIC was formed in February 2022 and specifically tasked with identifying and countering ‘Russian disinformation’ (both at home and abroad) about the war in Ukraine. Given this specific remit, together with their recent formation, it seems unlikely that they had any appreciable involvement in perpetuating the official covid narrative, although a UK Foreign Secretary’s confirmation that the GIC ‘works in partnership with all relevant parts of Government’ (including the CDU/NSOIT) suggests that this possibility cannot be totally rejected.
What are they doing now?
Based on their original raison d’etra, it is likely that the GIC’s primary focus remains that of countering foreign propaganda. The staff employed in the unit (all of whom have been seconded from other government departments) will undoubtedly possess a strong working relationship with social media platforms, albeit an arrangement that falls short of Trusted Flagger status.
As with the other (previously mentioned) shadowy units, the nature of their current activities is opaque; the Foreign Office has refused requests to share examples of the information the GIC posts on Russian social media. However, the admission that the unit’s staff possess expertise in ‘behaviour and attitudinal change’ indicates that their current role is wider than ‘countering disinformation’.
5. Research, Information & Communication Unit (RICU)
The Research, Information and Communication Unit was established back in 2007 by a former MI6 officer named Charles Farr as part of the ‘Prevent’ anti-terrorism strategy. Operating out of the Home Office, its original focus was primarily about countering al-Qaeda propaganda. But, while the initial intent may have been to impede Islamic State’s operation to groom violent extremists, RICU’s remit soon expanded to incorporate the manipulation of ‘narratives’ that might erode trust in government institutions; as one commentator succinctly described it, ‘The mission has crept from stopping bombers to managing political dissent’.
In the decade prior to the covid era, there were a number of examples of this mission creep. Arguably the most blatant was in relation to the London Bridge terror attacks of 2017 when eight people died after a van was driven into pedestrians, the occupants subsequently engaging in a stabbing rampage in a nearby market. In the aftermath of this terrorist atrocity, RICU fabricated a sequence of community responses intended to demonstrate empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, thereby guiding the narrative away from displays of anger. These supposedly unplanned ‘grass root’ reactions to the killings included: street posters; social media hashtags (#TurnToLove, #ForLondon, #LoveWillWin, #WeStandTogether); street posters; and the staged appearance of 100 imams at the crime scene. In these pre-covid years, similarly contrived responses were deployed after the reported decapitation of British aid worker Alan Henning by Islamic State in Syria in 2014 (involving a tabloid front page image of a woman wearing a Union Jack hijab) and after a far-right extremist drove his van into pedestrians near a north London mosque (involving the creation of an untruth about an imam protecting the terrorist from a beating by aggrieved bystanders).
According to a 2016 Guardian article, RICU employs a varied range of professionals (psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, digital media experts, film makers) structured into three teams with distinct functions:
i) Monitoring & coordination, studying digital and legacy media;
ii) Insight & analysis, researching audience reactions;
iii) Domestic & international campaigns, delivering covert propaganda.
In keeping with other shadowy government departments, RICU typically achieves its aims indirectly, working through third parties and community groups. Their favoured collaborator in these acts of covert engineering of the beliefs of the populace is Breakthrough Media, a company who work with ‘anyone with long-form video content who wants to grow their presence online’ with the aim of ‘preventing online harms’.
Amazingly, RICU-inspired contrived reactions to terrorist atrocities are not always developed ‘on the hoof’; some are pre-planned, a phenomenon referred to as ‘controlled spontaneity’. These well-rehearsed dramas in response to future negative events aim to convey the state’s desired messages to the on-looking population. The concept of controlled spontaneity was apparently spawned in 2012 in anticipation of any attack at the London Olympics, the intention being to diffuse public anger; the reaction to the London Bridge rampage – described above – is one such example. While the goal of this project – to transform rage and potential aggression into (apparent) indicators of love and societal cohesion – may be an altruistic one, it overlooks the human need to grieve after profound losses, a process that typically involves anger and sadness, prior to acceptance and reconciliation.
Furthermore, it is reasonable to speculate as to other, less philanthropic applications of this ‘controlled spontaneity’ tactic. Given the existence of RICU’s controlled spontaneity scripts, and the fact that Breakthrough Media (their preferred 3rd-party intermediary) have a central goal of preventing ‘online harm’, it is highly likely that RICU would have been actively involved in propagating aspects of the government’s official ‘pandemic’ narrative during the covid event. One obvious example is the ‘Clap for Carers’ ritual when, for 10 consecutive Thursday evenings in 2020, people ‘spontaneously’ stood on their doorsteps and applauded our healthcare staff – a powerful display of virtue and togetherness (aka ‘ego’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges) to encourage us all to follow the government’s diktats. Similarly, the rainbows in windows spectacle, which ‘sprung up’ in March 2020, purportedly as a symbol of hope, is unlikely to have been a bottom-up response to a novel virus. (It is, of course, impossible to confirm RICU’s involvement in these initiatives as they refuse to respond to Freedom of Information requests).
What are they doing now?
So what are the multidisciplinary staff at RICU working on over recent years? More of the same, it would seem, in respect to both aims and methods.
RICU continues to work through 3rd-party intermediaries, with Breakthrough Media (now re-named Zinc Network) as a favoured partner – one prominent claim on the communications company’s website is that they focus on ‘countering extremism and radicalisation’ using a ‘combination of robust research, behavioural science and creativity’.
A 2026 Daily Mail article, drawing on the testimonies of anonymous whistle blowers, strongly suggests that RICU dedicates a significant proportion of its time to countering narratives that are at odds with the views of government institutions rather than striving to prevent violent acts of terrorism. The activities of this clandestine unit has – apparently – resulted in many Whitehall insiders believing that RICU is now ‘out of control’. In 2025, RICU gave its support to the controversial Home Office recommendation that the police should record more ‘non-crime incidents’ – in effect criminalising narratives that deviate from the official government perspectives on race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. And this year, whistle blowers have asserted that RICU have been deeply involved in shaping publicised responses to two high-profile atrocities:
i) The stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie – When Stephen Olgivie was brutally stabbed in Belfast, allegedly by a Sudanese asylum seeker, it triggered anti-immigration street riots. According to anonymous insiders, RICU immediately swung into action, advising the Northern Ireland police about how to ‘control the narrative’. This included determining which messages the authorities should share with the media, so as to ensure that the protesters were portrayed as unsympathetic thugs, and identifying (and censoring) online calls for protest.
ii) The murder of Henry Novak – Following the horrific murder of Henry Novak, a teenager, in Southampton by Vickrum Digwa (a Sikh who initially had falsely claimed he had acted in self-defence after being racially abused), RICU personnel strived to reduce racial tensions by shaping the statements issued by the family of the victim.
Clearly, RICU remains dedicated to covertly engineering the thoughts of the general population in times of crisis, rather than – as per its original remit – striving to reduce the likelihood of murderous terrorist acts.
Concluding comments
From this overview of the activities (past and present) of five obscure government departments, five common themes emerge:
1. Censorship and propaganda. Euphemistically described as ‘controlling the narrative’, censorship and propaganda are elements of their core business. Silencing or marginalising voices that conflict with official government narratives, and shaping the beliefs and behaviour of British citizens, constitute the bread-and-butter activities of these units.
2. Sole arbiters of truth delusion. Like the Ministry of Truth in the 1984 George Orwell novel, all five departments hold the unshakable assumption that they are the only source of truths. Their blinkered pursuit of their objectives – and the CDU’s responses to Freedom of Information requests – reveal no hint of any reflection on the possibility that the ‘misinformation’ which they claim to counter may often incorporate valid perspectives.
3. Mission creep. These clandestine government units – with the possible exception of the GIC – ultimately engaged in activities that were far beyond their initial remits, their tentacles (conducting surveillance, censorship, and mind manipulation) seeping into areas of everyday life that would be out of bounds to the ruling elite in a free and open society.
4. Opaqueness. All these shadowy departments are extremely reluctant to share details about their current and past undertakings, typically justifying this secrecy with claims that disclosure would compromise ‘national security’; a highly dubious evasion given their habitual intrusions into the social media narratives of ordinary people. Given these circumstances it is reasonable to assume that – despite being taxpayer funded – we only learn about a small fraction of their manoeuvres.
5. Power without responsibility. At least three of these five government-funded mind-manipulation agencies have delivered many of their interventions via third-party intermediaries, such as social media platforms or advertising companies, an arrangement that allows the government to deny any culpability when they are later challenged.
Four of the five government units that were involved in censorship and propaganda at the time of the covid event remain operative today, yet we are – in all likelihood – aware of only a tiny slither of their often highly dubious activities. In a free and open society, this is unacceptable.
It is imperative that more people become alert to the fact that unaccountable and censorial civil servants invade their privacy, and rights to freedom of expression, on a daily basis, either directly or through online intermediaries and compliant corporations. Yet based on their conduct during the covid years – for instance, recommending covid vaccines for children, universal masking, lockdowns – it is reasonable to conclude that the government, and other elements of the political elite, are the prominent sources of misinformation. Anyone who believes in an open, liberal society should be extremely concerned about the existence of these censorship and surveillance units and seek their imminent closure.
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(UKR)