Shutting down the Covid dissenters

Molly Kingsley, executive founder of UsForThem, argues we need more transparency about the actions of government units towards lockdown critics during the pandemic.

Regular Battle of Ideas festival speaker Molly Kingsley is one of the founders of UsForThem, which campaigned against school closures during the pandemic. Along with her colleagues Arabella Skinner and Ben Kingsley, she is the author of a new book, The Accountability Deficit: How ministers and officials evaded accountability, misled the public and violated democracy during the pandemic.

Here, Molly pieces together her own experiences, those of UsForThem and other disclosures about the actions of government agencies in monitoring critical groups and restricting access to audiences on social media. She argues that there should be far greater openness about what happened.

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It was with great interest that I read in The Mail on Sunday this weekend that the British Army’s 77th Brigade, it’s cyber warfare group, had been deployed against pandemic policy dissidents within the UK. I believe I have spent much of the past three years on the receiving end of this operation.

For those of you who have not come across me before, I am a founder of a campaign group called UsForThem. We set up the group in Spring 2020 originally to fight against school closures. The campaign quickly attracted a groundswell of grassroots support and, because of that, a degree of prominence. I started writing fairly regularly for mainstream press, including the Telegraph, where I had a regular slot in the autumn of 2020. Our group has been consistently vocal in speaking out against the pandemic policies, which we believe have reaped huge harm on a generation of children.

From the outset, the campaign suffered an abundance of smearing alongside the support. Initially we had no reason particularly to feel surprised about that. Views were strongly held on all sides of those divides and it just seemed that we had attracted the ire of some fanatical supporters of the main teaching unions and the pro-lockdown, zero-Covid wing of the medical community.

By the spring of 2021, however, we suspected something odd was happening to my own and the group’s social-media accounts, though we could not rationally explain it. Official warnings started to appear on anodyne posts. Social-media accounts that had at first exploded with followers, slowed or stopped growing altogether. A personal social-media account was hacked and hijacked.

So when, in January of this year, the Daily Mail broke the story of how secretive government agencies had been spying on critics of pandemic policies, I submitted subject-access requests and was appalled by what came back: four pages of entries indicating that the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) had been monitoring my campaigning activities throughout the period. That discovery was widely reported, including the fact that none of the comments flagged by the CDU could sensibly be classed as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ - it was just opinion and, in some cases, anecdotal evidence direct from our parent network, critical of or inconvenient to government policy.

Since news of the CDU’s monitoring of our campaign group, and my own campaigning in particular, broke earlier this year, I have strongly suspected that the investigative news reports about the CDU had only scratched the surface of the state-sponsored censorship operation. Until this weekend, such disclosures as there had been focused predominantly on the role of the CDU in monitoring social-media feeds, but although we had not known exactly which government units were involved, it had seemed not only possible but likely to us that since 2021 this sinister activity extended beyond the mere monitoring of social-media channels.

UsForThem, and I personally, have been subjected to periods of intense online trolling, increasing at moments of peak profile for our campaigns. These had felt at times to be sophisticated and coordinated attacks; we started to ask ourselves if it really could have been the case it was just ‘ordinary’ angry people behind them. On numerous occasions, our campaign website has been hacked and we have multiple examples of emails going missing altogether including - ironically - an email that I know I had spent time carefully drafting and I felt certain had been sent in June 2023, to Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch. That email attached my subject-access request results, which I had sensed were going to be a significant story. It was only some weeks later that Silkie told me she had never received the email.

We have also had more than one instance of people ostensibly offering support to our campaigns while seeking access to our core team and communications platforms. At the time, we thought we were being paranoid, but I now believe these may have been attempts to infiltrate our core campaign team.

That the government monitored and censored its critics during the pandemic is beyond doubt. My strong conviction, however, is that the government’s suppression of unfavourable social-media commentary is still ongoing. My Twitter posts consistently garner very high traction in the first half hour or so, but then mysteriously hit a wall. In the past few weeks, people have told me they were unable to find me in search results, which seems to indicate I’ve been shadow banned, at least for some. Our group’s social-media follower numbers seem similarly to have been capped, despite posts receiving in some cases hundreds or even thousands of retweets.

I feel there is also now a legitimate question to be asked about how far the government’s censorship operations have extended beyond censorship on social-media platforms. In September 2022, UsForThem was unexpectedly de-banked by Paypal. Although Paypal reversed its decision when we fought back with parliamentary support, we are yet to receive any credible explanation as to the reason it happened. The fact that our de-banking coincided with that of a number of other prominently critical organisations, including the Free Speech Union, left us wondering if Paypal had been acting on their own initiative or whether it could have been part of an attack instigated elsewhere.

Although there is much that we do not know about the role and scope of activities of the CDU and related units, we know that its censorious ambitions have strayed far beyond any sensible definition of ‘disinformation’; we also know that it is particularly focused on ‘vaccine narratives’, and that this includes not only what one might consider ‘traditional’ anti-vax and conspiracy theories but also – as we have detailed in The Accountability Deficit – discussions around vaccine side effects and vaccine harms, concerns about the speed of medicine approval processes and, incredibly, in the words of Sarah Connolly, head of the CDU, mere commentary 'around monetary and big business links to pharma’. Perhaps most sinister of all, it appears those questioning the coercive nature of the government’s pandemic-response policies have been targeted.

If the aim of this military-grade psyops has been to make its targets feel paranoid, distracted, confused, upset and discombobulated – it has worked. I have felt all of these things. There is an inevitable opacity to this situation such that those on the receiving end have often struggled to gain a full understanding of what has occurred: in our own case, Paypal at first stonewalled our requests for information and has latterly refused to provide legally mandated transparency of its de-banking decision in response to data subject-access requests. It is extremely difficult to extract information from government departments if you do not know which department is responsible for the murky operation in question.

While it is good now to see some light being shone on these dark activities, those of us on the receiving end, and the broader public for whom the result has been such a dangerously skewed narrative, are entitled to full transparency over the extent and scope of the censorship carried out by public servants in the public’s name. Censorship and the effect of propaganda should be a core module of the Covid Inquiry - but perhaps that is impossible whilst the censorship operation is still continuing.