#orwellian

ANDREW DOYLE: New "Misinformation" Plan By Government Advisors Is Deeply Orwellian

Andrew Doyle: This is an attack on democracy. Ultimately, that's what it is.

Toby Young: I'm Lord Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union. My guest on the Free Speech Union podcast this week is comedian and free speech campaigner Andrew Doyle. Like me, he's sounding the alarm about a little-noticed report. Commissioned by the Government Office for Science, it contains some alarmingly Orwellian proposals to stop us spreading what its authors call misinformation, but what most of us would call telling the truth.

Doyle: Phrases like, Imane Khelif is a man, that's the boxer who won in the women's boxing category at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which is almost certainly a statement of fact, is now in a column as an example of misinformation.

By: Amy Gibbons

Published: Jul 19, 2026

Anti-transgender views have been classed as “misinformation” in a government-commissioned report.

The study urges the Government to use psychology to prevent the spread of narratives it views as potentially “misleading”.

The tactics are recommended for use in schools and public communications to stop “false” ideas taking hold in society.

The 136-page report, by a group of seven academics and commissioned by the Government Office for Science, categorises “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” as a type of “false and misleading information” seen in the UK.

But the Conservatives, urging Andy Burnham to condemn the document, have likened its proposals to the activities of the Thought Police in George Orwell’s 1984, and called it an “outrageous attack on our rights”.

[ Andy Burnham, who takes over as prime minister on Monday, has been urged to condemn the report. ]

The Government insisted on Sunday that the report was “independent” and did not represent official policy.

The study, from May 2026, was designed to inform government policy on “identifying and tackling harmful misinformation”.

It uses data compiled by EU-funded fact-checkers to identify 11 key categories of “false and misleading information”, backed up by a list of examples.

One of the categories included is defined as “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives, ‘gender ideology’ claims targeting schools and public institutions, Pride event misrepresentation and transgender athlete controversies”.

The examples – published alongside the report – include the case of Imane Khelif, the Olympic boxer who became embroiled in a row over biological sex when competing as a woman in Paris in 2024, despite allegedly failing sex tests the previous year.

Khelif won gold but was subsequently banned from competing in all future World Boxing events in the women’s category in the absence of proof of being biologically female.

The list suggests that saying “Imane Khelif is a man” would be an example of “racist/Islamophobic misinformation”.

[ Imane Khelif won a gold medal in the Olympics in Paris, but has since been banned from World Boxing events in the women’s category. ]

Other types of “misleading” information identified by the report include “electoral fraud claims” and attempts at the “institutional delegitimisation” of the EU.

Another category on immigration covers “false claims about migrant entitlements, misrepresentation of the demographic composition of migrant arrivals, and the misattribution of criminal acts to migrant communities”.

The report also describes “content associating minority communities with crime or cultural threat” as misinformation driven by racism.

Alex Burghart, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: “While Labour claim to be combating misinformation, they are in fact preparing to usher in an Orwellian thought police with the power to censor common-sense values and opinions held by millions of people.

“It’s little surprise that a Government so wedded to cover-up and concealment should seek to suppress dissent. But it is no less alarming for that.”

Report calls for ‘psychological inoculation’

As a “first line of defence”, the report urges ministers to invest in “prebunking” – a technique designed to put a halt to “false” ideas before they take hold.

It specifically highlights “psychological inoculation” – which involves “presenting someone with a weakened form of a misleading claim” to build “psychological resistance against future manipulation” – as a “promising” tactic.

The authors also encourage the Government to ramp up its monitoring of misleading information and prioritise tackling the “harms” caused by certain claims, rather than focusing too much on the “intent” behind them.

To keep track of the problem, ministers are urged to create “a comprehensive, wide-ranging, and monthly updated database of false and misleading narratives spreading in the UK”.

[ Alex Burghart, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, led the Conservative attack on the report. ]

Mr Burghart, a former Tory minister, described the idea of “psychological inoculation” as “frankly terrifying”.

He said: “It could end up restricting speech from those fighting for biological women’s rights, telling the truth about grooming gangs or criticising the EU.

“If PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham has any respect for free speech, he must ditch this outrageous attack on our rights. Whatever he does, the Conservatives will always fight for our democracy.”

The Government already has a unit dedicated to tackling “misinformation”, which was controversially used to “spy on” anti-lockdown campaigners during the Covid pandemic and flag “concerning” narratives about asylum seekers during the Southport riots.

The Counter-Disinformation Unit was set up by Conservative ministers in 2020 to tackle “false coronavirus information online”, but – as The Telegraph later revealed – was also used to crack down on dissent from those who disagreed with official policy.

The secretive unit – now known as the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) – was also used to target social media posts criticising migrant hotels and “two-tier policing” during the riots prompted by the murder of three girls in Southport in July 2024.

Officials working for the Technology Secretary flagged videos with “concerning narratives” to social media giants including TikTok, warning that they were “exacerbating tensions” on the streets.

It is unclear exactly where NSOIT draws the line when it comes to misinformation. Asked about its remit last year, a Labour minister said the unit focused on threats to “national security and public safety”.

A notice on the government website says: “NSOIT leads the UK Government’s operational response to information threats online, and ensures the Government takes necessary steps to identify and respond to acute misinformation (i.e. incorrect or misleading information) and disinformation (i.e. information which is deliberately created to cause harm) that pose risks to UK national security and public safety.

“NSOIT is focused on the greatest risks to public safety and national security, which are agreed by ministers and regularly communicated to Parliament.”

A government spokesman said on Sunday: “This is an independent review and does not represent government policy.

“It is, and always will be, an absolute priority for the Government to protect our democratic processes, including freedom of expression.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/RHBbW ]

==

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

BTW, Imane Khelif is a man. He has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), XY chromosomes and an operational SRY gene. By definition, 5-ARD is a male-specific disorder. Only men have 5-ARD. Only men can have 5-ARD.

He might not have known he was male when he was growing up, but there's no excuse now.

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 21, 2026

Yesterday saw the anointment of Andy Burnham as our new Prime Minister. He had not worked in parliament for over a decade, has no serious mandate from the public to lead the country, and has been helicoptered in by his colleagues in the hope that he can recover what is left of the reputation of the Labour Party. Given that Keir Starmer has presided over the most authoritarian government in living memory, is it possible that Burnham will see the error of his predecessor’s ways?

The early signs are not good. Burnham has already appointed two staff members from Hope Not Hate, a militant leftist organisation that has a habit of smearing people with mainstream opinions as ‘far right’. And the Telegraph has now revealed that a new report commissioned by the Government Office for Science early this year and published in May could end up influencing the Burnham government’s future direction on online misinformation and issues relating to free speech. It offers a guide to what it calls ‘psychological inoculation’ of the public. In other words, how to play mind games and manipulate the great unwashed into behaving themselves.

If Burnham has any sense at all, he will denounce this report at the earliest opportunity. Its fundamental ethos is illiberal and anti-democratic. It is called False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice, and it was produced by a consortium called Behavioural Research UK. It is without a doubt one of the most chilling and authoritarian documents that has ever been commissioned by a British government. It’s worth looking closely at its contents, because it might well become a roadmap for Burnham’s policies.

The report is Orwellian not simply in its recommendations, but in how it presents itself. The authors repeatedly describe it as an ‘evidence review’, but it actually contains numerous policy recommendations. Perhaps the most egregious is the suggestion that the public should be ‘inoculated’ against misinformation through a process of ‘prebunking’; a sinister euphemism for censorship. It describes prebunking as the ‘first line of defence’. Here is the relevant passage as it appears in the report:

‘Prebunking refers to a broad category of strategies aimed at stopping people from accepting false and misleading information before they encounter it. The most widely employed of these strategies is psychological inoculation, the core idea is that presenting someone with a weakened form of a misleading claim builds psychological resistance against future manipulation. Psychological inoculation typically consists of two elements: alerting someone in advance that their beliefs may come under attack (e.g., “warning: someone might try to influence you by claiming X”), and offering a preemptive counter-argument that undermines the false claim before it takes hold (e.g., “this is misleading, because Y”; van der Linden, 2025).’

The report offers vague guidance to the government on how to psychologically manipulate the public so that it is not susceptible to ‘misinformation’. It does not address the key problem: that ‘misinformation’ is often the term used by those in power to describe information that is accurate but inconvenient. The report does not consider the ethical aspects of treating the public like toddlers who can be tricked into certain modes of behaviour. Moreover, it refuses to specify how the manipulation might work in practice.

Let’s take one of the policy suggestions: ‘Game-based inoculation interventions’. One assumes that this is referring to computer games produced for schools and workplaces. We’ve seen this kind of nonsense from the Labour government before. Back in January, the Telegraph reported on the state-funded Pathways game, aimed at secondary school children and sixth form students, that warned them that questioning mass migration could result in a referral to the counter-terrorism unit.

It features a character called Charlie (pronouns they/them, naturally) who is lured onto the slippery slope of radicalisation by watching online videos. It’s difficult to decide which is more cringemaking: the game itself, or the government’s faith that such overt propaganda will have the desired effect.

We see the same paternalistic philosophy in this recent False and Misleading Information report, an attitude that evidently mirrors that of Burnham’s government.

Consider the following passage:

‘Importantly, online information environments are not neutral or unmediated: platform algorithms already curate what users see by ranking, promoting, and demoting content at scale. As a result, the question is not whether information should be curated, but who exercises this curatorial power and under what conditions. At present, these decisions are largely made by private platforms, often with limited transparency or accountability, raising concerns about the concentration of informational power. This reframing has important implications for policy debates, suggesting that efforts to address false and misleading information must also engage with questions of governance, including the role of regulatory oversight, democratic accountability, and user choice in shaping algorithmic systems.’

Nobody denies that algorithms shape what we see online. But the assumption of the report appears to be that the public are like automatons that simply ingest misinformation and are reprogrammed accordingly. That humans are sentient and thinking creatures capable of forming their own opinions is barely acknowledged. Furthermore, the report’s conclusions lay the groundwork for future censorship under the guise of ‘curation’. In all these questions of ‘who exercises this curatorial power and under what conditions’, the report’s authors fail to grapple with the key lesson from history: those in power cannot be trusted to decide on the acceptable parameters of thought and speech.

The report is reminiscent of a speech by Ursula von der Leyen, unelected president of the European Commission, who in 2024 declared that she wanted to create a ‘European Democracy Shield’ to protect citizens from ‘misinformation’ (i.e., information that the EU doesn’t like). She likewise compared free speech to a virus:

‘As technology evolves we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation. Because research has shown that pre-bunking is much more successful than debunking. Pre-bunking is basically the opposite of debunking. In short, prevention is preferable to cure. Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus. Instead of treating an infection, once it has taken hold, that is debunking. It is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated. Pre-bunking is the same approach.’

It is impossible not to be reminded of the question posed by the Ancient Roman poet Juvenal: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?

The report by Behavioural Research UK was submitted along with supplementary materials that are similarly ominous. To identify the kinds of narratives it considers examples of false and misleading information, the authors analysed thousands of fact-checks compiled by the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) between June 2021 and January 2026. Drawing on the EDMO’s monthly briefing series, they created a number of thematic categories, including immigration, climate change, elections, health, and ‘Gender, LGBTQ+ & EDI’.

The examples are revealing. Apparently, it is ‘racist/Islamophobic’ misinformation to say that ‘Imane Khelif is a man’. Khelif won gold in the women’s boxing category at the 2024 Paris Olympics, but has since been banned by World Boxing unless he can provide proof of his sex. (Note that the pronouns I have used in this last sentence are apparently a form of ‘misinformation’, even though they happen to be accurate.)

Freedom of speech also entails the freedom to be wrong. When the report frames ‘false and misleading information’ as a ‘systemic national risk’, it is preparing a defence of future censorship. This passage is especially telling: 

‘There are conceptual and policy challenges associated with how terms to describe false and misleading information are used and interpreted, but debates in the literature around these should not become a distraction from action to address harms. Research, policy and practice are increasingly moving away from categorising types of content (as mis-, dis- or malinformation, for example) towards strengthening the resilience of the broader information environment.’

Note the use of activist language in the assumption that words cause ‘harms’. The report explicitly advocates a ‘harms-based approach’ that grossly overstates the impact of false information. Falsehoods are a natural and inevitable aspect of the marketplace of ideas. John Stuart Mill explained in On Liberty that free speech is the key component of a process of ‘exchanging error for truth’. This concept appears to be lost on the authors of the report, whose authoritarian instincts mean that they would simply prefer to stamp out dissent.

Worse still, in the above passage the authors seem to be claiming that debates about what constitutes ‘misinformation’ are a hindrance to the goal of eliminating what they have failed to satisfactorily define. They may as well have written: ‘The government gets to decide what is true and what is false, and shouldn’t waste time debating with its critics before censoring at will.’

We should be extremely concerned about a government that accepts any of the recommendations in this report, or that has any intention in engaging in ‘psychological inoculation’ of the public. The authors are fully aware of the risk of their approach, but in their 136-page report they only once acknowledge it: ‘false and misleading information is sometimes hard to differentiate clearly from legitimate opinion, thus creating a risk that aggressive moderation could inadvertently suppress legitimate dissent or protected speech’. Let’s hope that Burnham’s government takes heed of this one sentence and ditches the rest.

==

‘Planned Community’ under Israeli surveillance and military control: prison camps to confine and concentrate Palestinians.