Tom Slater
speaker
895 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3d ago
Tom Slater’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Threats such as they are, which do exist.
There are attempts to, you know.
influence the information space that have always gone on and uh particularly in the social media range.
But really I think it's just a kind of code for trying to police discussions domestically.
So whilst we haven't got a lot of um meat on the bone as to what this new organization, what this new institution would do, I think from very recent experience we can work under the assumption that this is going to be as much about policing the opinions
of citizens of this country as much as it is trying to keep the fake news of foreign states at bay.
During COVID, I think we saw this pretty clearly.
Uh Big Brother watched some great reports on this, pointing out that these these organizations within government, the counter disinformation unit, the rapid response unit, were drawing up reports on just critics of the lockdown, people like Carl Hennigan, and also seemed to have this kind of hand in glove relationship with the social media companies where they had trusted flagger status to flag up their posts so that in the end that they might be in some ways squashed, deboosted or
ultimately deplatformed.
There's also been a lot of discussion in recent years about the quite shady role that an organization called the Reese called Riku, which is within the Home Office, has been playing in terms of trying to shape public discussion in and around terrorist attacks, trying to push certain narratives, liaising with families and family liaison officers in the wake of high profile terror murders or racially aggravated
Yeah.
murders and kind of feeding into what the the family statement should be, trying to kind of qualm tempers and what have you.
So the kind of very recent track record of these organizations has been not with the threat posed by Russia in mind or Iran or whoever, but the threat posed by people in the country
Able to voice opinions that the establishment disagrees with.
And one thing that is fascinating is that is a really a dis whilst that's potentially always been the case, that is a very distinct trend you see over the past 10 years.
To the extent people can report on this, you have anti-disinformation capabilities within government, which previously might have primarily concerned themselves with external actors, found themselves in the wake of about 2016, and there's probably some reason for that, shifting their attention.
Towards their own populations.
And I think it's become clear now that it's almost impossible to disaggregate this war on disinformation.
with just a war on political positions that the establishment happens to dislike.
So yeah, there's not much we know at this point, but prior experience would suggest that we'd be pretty alarmed and skeptical about this new organization.
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