This snooping was wrong, it hangs over my proud Army career like a black cloud

I WAS serving in the British Army in March 2020 when I was seconded to 77th Brigade, on the basis I would be helping root out foreign state misinformation on social media.

We were told what was legally allowed – such as ‘scraping’ online platforms for keywords – and what was illegal. This included repeatedly looking at a named UK individual’s account without authorisation, although some people would do that from their own accounts after their shift.

We would take screenshots of tweets from people expressing dissatisfaction with the UK Government’s action against Covid. The project leader would then gather these screenshots and send them to the Cabinet Office. Feedback from the Cabinet Office would direct us over what to look for the next day.

To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population… the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated – it was simply fear.

We learned from the feedback that the Government were very keen on hearing what the public thought of their Covid response.

I entered this role believing I would be uncovering foreign information warfare. Instead, I found the banner of disinformation was a guise under which the British military was being deployed to monitor and flag our own concerned citizens. There may have actually been social media campaigns from China to promote lockdown policies but because we were directed to monitor sentiment towards the success of lockdown, we would have completely missed them. I had the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it.

Recently, I looked over my medals and thought of all I have done in my career – things I am proud of, in the defence of the people of this country – except my work on ‘disinformation’ in 77, which hangs over my career like a black cloud.

It was about domestic perception, not national security. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened. This domestic monitoring of citizens seemed not to be driven by a desire to address the public’s concerns, but to identify levers for compliance with controversial Government policies.

I do not doubt that the activities I participated in were conceived for good reasons, but they were undemocratic, wrong, and should not be allowed to happen again.