IN LATE MARCH 2020 A BRIGADIER from the British Army’s 77th Brigade arrived in Whitehall to find a Cabinet Office in disarray. The country was in the early days of lockdown. Polling suggested public support, but who knew what might happen in the weeks and months ahead?
Nothing like lockdown had been tried before and Westminster, incurably online as usual, was paranoid. What might start trending from the trolls on Twitter and Facebook? The brigadier, who had cut his teeth fighting social media disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign actors, reassured the ministers and civil servants he was here to help.
Within a few weeks he and his team, a motley crew of British army reservists, former translators and “cyber experts”, were sitting in a safe house somewhere in Berkshire monitoring Twitter and other social media sites for any dodgy takes that might undermine the Government’s pandemic response.
Over the next two years, they and other government disinformation and media monitoring units would report on everyone from pub landlords and Conservative MPs to Peter Hitchens’s tweets. One unit, tasked with identifying harmful narratives, even flagged up Professor Carl Heneghan, a man who would later advise the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
How we arrived at this farcical episode is the
