Secretive Whitehall units have been monitoring government critics’ speech online – including MPs, academics, journalists, human rights campaigners and the public – under the guise of combatting ‘disinformation’.

Our report, Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech, revealed for the first time the truth behind the government’s five anti-fake news units and how their mission of ‘countering disinformation’ quickly turned into countering dissent across the UK.

Disinformation is a real problem – but it’s also a term at risk of political exploitation by governments. In a democracy, politicians, the press and the public should all be free to scrutinise and criticise the government – without their speech being logged in government reports, wrongly smeared as ‘misinformation’, or suppressed or censored online.

Read the full report here or get the key findings here.

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The Pegasus Project: Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon / Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Daniel Nemenyi: Submarine state – On secrets and leaks

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