Donald Trump’s administration has said it is “greatly concerned” about free speech in Britain.
It comes after a secretive Whitehall “spy” unit was revealed that targeted social media posts criticising “two-tier policing” and migrant hotels.
A spokesman for the US State Department said Washington was monitoring the issue “closely and with great concern”.
Videos containing “concerning narratives” were flagged by officials to social media firms – with the warning that they were “exacerbating tensions”.
Topics which were flagged included asylum seekers, immigration and two-tier policing, emails recovered by a US congressional committee revealed.
Civil servants working under Technology Secretary Peter Kyle within the Government’s National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) complained about numerous posts during the Southport unrest last year.
The team, which is based in Kyle’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, was previously called the “Counter Disinformation Unit”, and was used by the Government during the Covid pandemic to monitor anti-lockdown campaigners.
The Prime Minister had pledged to stop the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by 2029 due to increasing “community tensions”, as well as their cost of £4million every day to taxpayers.
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Donald Trump’s administration has said it is ‘greatly concerned’ about free speech in Britain
GB News |
Elon Musk’s social media platform X released a statement on Friday, warning that Britain’s new online safety legislation poses a serious risk to freedom of expression through overly aggressive implementation
The platform said: “When lawmakers approved these measures, they made a conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety’.”
The UK Government introduced its long-awaited Online Safety Act last month, adding strict age verification barriers to thousands of popular websites, forums, and social media services.
Despite criticism, Labour has firmly rejected calls to reverse the legislation.
The secretive Whitehall “spy” service warned there were “significant risks” of protests at migrant hotels becoming violent because of the posts in a flagged email sent by an unnamed civil servant.
PA | The riots in Southport last summer, during which these emails were sentThe official added there was a “definite sense of urgency” about the posts in Whitehall.
The emails were sent on August 3 and August 4 last year, during the worst weekend of the summer unrest when protesters attacked migrant hotels throughout the UK.
Another email sent the same weekend included officials warning the social media site that users were posting about “two-tier” policing at Southport rallies.
It said: “I am sure you will not be surprised at the significant volumes of anti-immigrant content directed at Muslim and Jewish communities as well as concerning narratives about the police and a ‘two-tier’ system we are seeing across the online environment.”
