a comprehensive guide to censorship and indoctrination

Dr Gary Sidley

In May 2026, a Government-commissioned paper was published, titled ‘False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice’. Despite its relatively benign heading, it reads like an instruction manual to enable state control of the population’s beliefs and behaviour and, as such, is arguably one of the most chillingly authoritarian documents to be considered by the political leaders of a supposedly open and democratic society.

At the request of the Government Office of Science, the paper was written by a group of social scientists at an organisation called, Behavioural Research UK – a research consortium hosted by Edinburgh University whose stated mission is to conduct ‘interdisciplinary behavioural research … addressing societal challenges’. Its personnel includes researchers from the University of Oxford, University College London, and the UK Health Security Agency, and one of the organisation’s co-directors is Professor Susan Michie, a prominent ‘nudger’ during the covid event and currently the Chair of the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights. In compiling the document, Behavioural Research UK purportedly conducted a rapid review of the relevant literature, followed by a consultation with ‘11 experts working in the field of false and misleading information’ who were recruited for a ‘consensus-based exercise’ via ‘a rigorous filtering process to ensure high-quality input’ – I think we can reliably conclude that this selection procedure resulted in a band of ‘experts’ who, collectively, were less than representative of the wide spectrum of opinion about what constitutes misinformation and the means by which it should be countered.

The recommended manipulation techniques

So what strategies did this learned band of partisan scholars endorse as the most effective in evoking right-think in the general population? In the words of the authors, to counter misinformation requires a response that ‘must be sustained, adaptive, and layered across prevention, correction, education, and regulation, in a whole-of-society approach’ (p47). In other words, a global, multi-tentacled system of state censorship and mind control.

The specific recommended interventions – ranging from a focus on the individual to intervention at the systems level – were as follows:

Read More – The Government’s Manipulation Manual