The UK’s new censorship industry

Alex Klaushofer

February 27, 2025 2 Reactions

In 2020, considering that the online platforms “used to spread identity-based hate and misinformation” were countering the official narrative, the CCDH turned its focus to “Covid-19 misinformation”. It repeated the tactic of trying to damage its opponents' reputation and business, suggesting that Substackers were “profiteering” by publishing vaccine-sceptic material. Channels carrying content which contradicted the government narrative needed to be completely shut down, it told MPs: “simply removing posts is not enough. Meaningful action needs to be taken”.

More recently, the CCDH claims to have discovered a new kind of “New Climate Denial", involving “attacks on climate science and scientists" and "rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions.” In an unashamedly totalitarian aspiration, it recommends that Google update its policy to ban “content that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change”.

All this would be bad enough if the CCDH were a lone operator. But the British government is supporting the development of new AI tools to enforce the official narrative more effectively in future. Recently it gave a £2.3 million contract to Faculty AI to build monitoring software which can search for “foreign interference” and “analyse social media narratives”. The Counter Disinformation Data Platform is part of the Counter Disinformation Unit, a body which attracted widespread criticism for amassing files on journalists, academics and MPs who challenged the government’s Covid narrative. A statement in the project documentation says the new tool “has the ability to be pivoted to focus on any priority area”.

Technology in the service of censorship sets us on the path to technocracy. The shift in values that has enabled this unholy alliance to come about has gone largely undiscussed in Britain. The idea that a child-like public must be protected from “harm” by an all-knowing establishment has somehow replaced time-honoured notions of truth and self-expression and there seems to be little or no recognition of there being different perspectives on a subject, of the risk of facts being hijacked by vested interests, or the public's hard-won right to freedom of speech.

A meeting of the UK Internet Governance Forum Meeting in late 2024 exemplifies these anti-democratic attitudes. A panel of people at the forefront of the new censorship industry discussed the public's lack of trust in government and institutions – a problem they attributed to misinformation and disinformation.

Chris Morris, the BBC's “first dedicated fact checker” and now chief executive at Full Fact, a charity describing itself as “a team of independent fact checkers who find, expose and counter the harm … of bad information” had a technocratic solution: a new AI tool which focuses on health misinformation in online videos, ranking them in order of the amount of “harm” they might cause. Meanwhile Logically, a technology start-up which “fights disinformation” was, according to Vice President of Corporate Affairs Henry Parker, developing an AI product capable of identifying “incorrect” information in large numbers of posts or videos.

As a non-tech person, I have no real idea how effective these “solutions” to the “problem” of humans talking freely about the world around them will be. But I do know this: definitely in the long term and probably in the short term, censorship won't work. Free speech is part of what it is to be human. We have an innate need to share our thoughts and feelings, to communicate with each other, to speculate and to express ourselves. Throughout history, rulers and regimes of all kinds have tried to suppress this inconvenient aspect of humanity. They have never succeeded, at least not for long.

At the same time, having spent a significant part of my career looking at authoritarian countries, I'm acutely aware of the costs of the attempt to control natural human behaviour. Decades after the fall of the Hoxha regime, Albania has by no means recovered from the corrosive legacy of the thought police. And recently a Syrian woman told me you can still say nothing about politics or life in the West following the fall of Assad. “You would go to prison,” she told me, miming the zipping of her mouth.

So it's difficult to be proud of a Western country that is going down this path. It's one thing to be part of a society that has taken time to develop and civilise; for a liberal democracy to deliberately choose to go backwards is another matter altogether. Historically, British thinkers have played a huge role in formulating the principles that underpin Western democracies. Writing in 'On Liberty' in 1859, John Stuart Mill considered the argument for free speech had been definitively won: “No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear.”

This is the first of a two-part article examining the hidden mechanisms removing freedoms in the UK.

Mercator readers come from all over the world. Do you see similar developments in your own country? Comment below!

Alex Klaushofer writes about the changing times on Substack at Ways of Seeing.

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