The Labour government’s attachment to artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to make more sense now that it has emerged ministers are preparing to use the technology in their battle against free speech.
Officials from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have awarded a £2.3 million (€2.78 million) contract to Faculty AI to build monitoring software that will trawl social media for “concerning” content upon which “action” can be taken.
The department, quoted in The Daily Telegraph, claimed this AI tool will only be looking for posts “which pose a threat to national security and public safety risk”—particularly concerning the influence of foreign states during elections.
But heavily redacted documents obtained through freedom of information requests show that the technology could just as easily “be pivoted to focus on any priority area,” in the same way that assurances on the supposed limitations of Brussels’ ‘Democracy Shield’ initiative are thin to the touch. This could no doubt include the kind of content for which thousands of British non-criminals have been pursued by police forces targetting so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents.’
Two Greater Manchester Police officers this weekend visited a grandmother at her house and questioned her about posts on Facebook in which she called on Labour councillors mixed up in a WhatsApp scandal to resign. After being questioned, 54-year-old Helen Jones made it clear that her freedom of speech had been truly squashed by the event:
It was actually quite scary. It made me think I best just keep quiet for the rest of my life, because you just can’t say anything these days.
Similar events have taken place—and, indeed, continue to take place—across the Continent, including in Germany, where attacks on free speech just helped the right-wing populist AfD gain second place in national elections.
Information regarding the possible wider uses of AI for targeting ‘concerning’ content in the UK was unveiled by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, which is also currently waging a major battle against the introduction of a live facial recognition surveillance zone in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
Children’s advocacy campaigner Molly Kingsley, who was spied on by the government because of her criticism of lockdown policies, said she was “concerned and deeply disturbed by the ambiguity and potential reach of these latest plans to turbo-charge the UK’s censorship apparatus.”
Far from being a surgical strike weapon for use against serious external threats, all that will separate us from an era of total narrative control—one of the key conditions for totalitarian tyranny—is one or two executive decisions.
Faculty AI’s claim that it wishes to “protect people by assessing threats to their livelihoods” offers little in the way of comfort.
