UK government asked Facebook to remove a post that was restricted to be seen by “Friends Only”
UK government asked Facebook to remove a post that was restricted to be seen by “Friends Only”
The UK government managed to find and report posts on Facebook that were restricted from being viewed by “friends only”, asking Facebook to remove them.
“Ministry of Truth” stands for “Orwellian” – “Ministry of Propaganda” and the report, compiled by the privacy and civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, focuses on how the UK authorities choose to deal with controlling the pandemic narrative and Exactly who they enlisted to help.
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Noting at the beginning of this report that who controls the past controls the future, and in some ways more dangerously, “Who controls the present controls the past,” the report relies on the testimony of Army whistleblowers and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.
One of the FOIs revealed that after Facebook was contacted by a government Rapid Response Unit (RRU) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care in April 2020, content viewed by “friends only” was simply not seen. But flagged for removal by the government.
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The case involved a courier whose route was shared in the post at Covid centers, but which the government said – for some reason – put these centers at risk. They even invoked the GDPR. And somehow, Facebook’s “privacy settings” went out the window.
It all boils down to what some observers see as an almost totalitarian panic: how a “private” post became owned by government snoops, Facebook’s role, and even how the post would have put Covid centers at risk. The content has become public knowledge. Not to mention that their position was universal.
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Facebook seemed willing to cooperate in the case, forwarding it for review — but then it turned out, according to Facebook’s communication with the Cabinet Office, that the courier itself decided to deactivate the account.
This case was more importantly “the hotline between the Whitehall (UK government) and the main social platforms,” and this relationship was not strained at all: it was a cordial one, “among the individuals being sent emails on a first-name basis,” the report documents.