Rick Medlock

Following the @Telegraph news story today on censorship, the attached photos are the list of my articles, tweets and comments flagged by the Counter Disinformation Unit as potential ‘disinformation’. It starts in 2020, continues throughout 2021 and into 2022 and even 2023, and covers topics that were ostensibly controversial (eg, questioning the vaccine roll-out to kids) and those that should have been incontrovertible (eg, "let children use playgrounds, MPs demand"). We don’t know definitively how much of this translated to censorship, but like many critics of the Government’s pandemic ‘truths’ — lockdowns, school closures, masking children, vaccinating healthy children — I had a recurring sense that my social media accounts were being hobbled or suppressed in some way. The @UsforThemUK social media accounts received repeated warnings that the group would drop down in terms of priority on newsfeeds if we didn’t remove content flagged by Meta as 'disinformation'. For many individuals, accounts were expressly suspended or shut down. Circumstantially, then, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether monitoring at times traversed into censorship. I feel vindicated in my suspicions if also saddened by the arrogant authoritarian overreach. But the most serious implication of all this is that for an extended period, one narrative has been amplified and another subdued. Many of the positions that I and others targeted by the CDU had advocated would, I believe, not only have been viewed as reasonable positions to take pre-2020, but to argue against them would have been considered extreme. If you doubt that is true then consider how society would have judged anyone in 2019 who advocated mandatory isolation of children for weeks at a time; masking of children for 8 hours a day including through lessons to ‘mitigate’ against a virus which never seriously threatened them; injection of children with novel products despite no long term safety data existing. None of these were moderate policy decisions. They only became legitimised and normalised because dissenting voices were systematically suppressed. Given that the information now being flushed into the public domain stems from only a small number of individuals who have submitted subject access requests, we should assume that today's examples, and those previously detailed in the @BigBrotherWatch report, are the tip of a larger iceberg. Adding to the work of the Government’s spy units were fact checkers and ‘trusted news’ initiatives which further skewed discourse, and of course the outright shaming and smearing of those of us who argued against what we saw as the descent into a dangerously illiberal and unethical regime. The reality of 2020-22 is that we were living through a period of State-sponsored extremism to which virtually no challenge in the public square was permitted. It hardly needs pointing out that this is at extreme odds with the notion of liberal democracy with which we tend to associate much of the developed West. All of this could be examined by the Covid Inquiry, but of course today's revelations also make it less likely that a meaningful, successful, public inquiry is now possible.