A shadowy specialist police task force in Britain tasked with monitoring anti-immigration sentiment online has reportedly referred over a hundred social media posts to local police for potential arrests.
According to data released following Freedom of Information requests, the National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit has notified local police forces about 106 social media posts, The Daily Telegraph reported.
This included 50 posts in June in the wake of the disclosures surrounding the murder of teen Henry Nowak, who was stabbed to death by Sikh man Vikrum Digwa and had his pleas for help ignored by police officers, who refused to believe the dying student because his killer claimed to have been a victim of racism.
Footage of Nowak’s final moments sparked protests and riots in Southampton and drew accusations of two-tier policing on social media, with critics claiming that Nowak was treated differently from Digwa because he was white.
The National Internet Intelligence Investigations task force was established in the wake of the Southport riots, which erupted after Rwandan-heritage teen Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls and injured 10 others in a mass stabbing at a Taylor Swith dance party.
Rather than addressing the anger of the public and the role that immigration played in the tragedy, the left-wing Labour government of then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer branded the backlash as “far-right” and began a mass jailing campaign, arresting over 1,876 people, including some who merely posted on social media.
Police chiefs said they would not comment on the type of offending posts the National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit has flagged for arrest, claiming that doing so would jeopardise ongoing investigations.
Regardless, they said that the initiative was “still in the early stages of being established”, implying that many more posts will likely be flagged in the future.
Even without the task force at full tilt, the UK is already among the leaders in the Western world for arrests over internet posts, with the Times of London previously estimating that last year police arrested 33 people per day as of 2023 for supposedly offensive online content, or 12,183 in total for the year.
The National Police Coordination Centre, which coordinated the UK policing response during the COVID-19 lockdowns, claimed that its task force “supports policing’s understanding of protest-related activity in the online environment by developing a broader picture of emerging, potential risks”.
“Looking across force boundaries enables the identification of issues that may not be evident from information held within individual force areas alone,” it said.
Before focusing on backlash against immigration, the British government previously targeted opposition to the draconian lockdowns imposed during the Chinese coronavirus crisis. The government went so far as to deploy its specialist “information warfare” 77 Brigade of the British Army to influence public opinion and monitor high-profile figures, including journalists and politicians.
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