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Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters with me, Winston Marshall, at the Spectator offices in London.

Last week, The Telegraph published a very important story.

They revealed that the counter disinformation unit had been set up by the Conservative government during lockdown to counter disinformation,

supposedly, or suppress free speech, as others are saying,

online, particularly around lockdown. And this report was described by Elon Musk as terrible,

but it isn't necessarily the first we've heard of suppression of free speech over the last

three years. Here to discuss it is author of the investigation

and Whitehall correspondent for The Telegraph. Tony Diver. Tony, thank you for joining me.

Morning. Well, congratulations on what I consider a very important piece. Can you tell me what

you discovered? What's the significance of this story?

Well, what we revealed in that story is that there were two units operating at the heart of

government during the pandemic, which were scouring the internet, Twitter, Facebook, and

everywhere else, newspapers, looking for views that they consider to be disinformation about

COVID. They were, and it was set up based on legitimate concerns about conspiracy theories,

spreading about vaccines and the like. We've all seen those on the internet. We've seen

some of that damaging content, but they set up basically to look for this disinformation.

But what happened was these units cast their nets very wide. And what they did was scooped up a lot of dissenting views on the

...