LONDON — Britain’s media censorship board is trying to woo Big Tech. But the Silicon Valley giants aren’t interested.
Tech firms including Google, Meta, and X have repeatedly spurned the British media censorship board in its mission to prevent state secrets spreading across social platforms.
The Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee is run by retired military officers and counts some of the U.K.’s biggest media brands, including Sky, the BBC, and the Times, among its members.
The committee is responsible for issuing DSMA notices, colloquially called “D-notices,” to British media — requests for publications to voluntarily withhold details that could ostensibly undermine national security, whether by outing intelligence personnel or sharing details of secret overseas operations.
While the informal letters are not legally binding, it’s rare that D-notices are refused. The lingering threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and the recently enacted National Security Act help lend the notices gravity.
The little-discussed committee has liaised amicably with stalwarts of the traditional press for decades. But in recent years, it set its sights on luring Big Tech to the table. In recognition of a fast-evolving online news landscape, the committee is eager to somehow apply the D-notice regime to the wider internet.
“We’ve been trying to break into the so-called tech giants,” said DSMA notice secretary and former military diplomat, Geoffrey Dodds, in an interview. He said Meta and Google were among the social media giants the committee had reached out to.
At present, governments can ask social platforms like Meta and X to remove content if it violates local laws or platform rules.
But Dodds suggested that tech giants could monitor their platforms like they do for illegal content, such as child abuse material — and, if they saw something pertaining to D-Notices, seek advice from the committee.
‘Spy Fever’
The DSMA committee’s most significant recent success may be keeping the full revelations of U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden out of many British newspapers, but its history goes back decades.
The D-notice system dates back to 1912, during the hysterical climate of ‘Spy Fever’ preceding World War I. In contrast to the punitive Official Secrets Act 1911, the “Joint Committee of Official and Press Representatives,” as the committee was known then, was an informal arrangement where military figures secretly hobnobbed with press barons.
To this day, the group celebrates with an annual dinner at the RAF Club, and perks for media members include organized tours around the intelligence agencies.
The DSMA committee claims to be independent from government, but is currently run by the Ministry of Defence’s director general for security policy, Paul Wyatt. The committee includes government members hailing from the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, MoD and the Home Office, and the meetings take place in the MoD.
Its non-governmental status, however, shields it from freedom of information laws.
The group’s D-notice regime covers five core areas: military operations or capabilities; the disclosure of weapons systems; counter-terrorist forces or intelligence agency activities; physical property and assets; and personnel and their families who work in sensitive positions.
However, the opacity of D-notices and the group’s vaguely defined remit has sometimes led to politicians attempting to exploit the system for their own ends.
“It is not unknown for senior people within government departments, political or official, to try and exert the influence of the government,” the DSMA’s deputy secretary, retired Navy Captain Jon Perkins, told POLITICO.
“But we always make the point that we’re not about embarrassment. We’re only about national security, so just because a minister somewhere is going to be embarrassed by the publication of a story … it’s completely irrelevant to us.”
Dodds says the last DSMA notice was issued in January 2024; another was sent out in late 2023 concerning the “movements of UK forces in the Middle East.” There’s evidence the body issues more informal advice on an ad hoc basis too.
In a meeting on April 25, 2023, Perkins said that the group succeeded in keeping material of “extreme sensitivity (in national security terms)” from “inadvertent disclosure” in the period between October 2022 to April 2023.
Publishers are also encouraged to seek advice if they have reservations about printing certain material. Data for the most recent six month period shows media organizations sought advice from the committee on 17 occasions.
Big Tech ‘won’t have anything to do with us’
The committee’s repeated efforts to extend the D-notice regime into the digital realm have been less fruitful, however.
Google was once a member of the DSMA Committee — the sole participant hailing from Silicon Valley — but left following the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013, which alleged widespread cooperation between Big Tech firms and Western intelligence agencies involved in unlawful mass surveillance.
“Google felt they were unable to sit on a committee, which is independent, voluntary, non-statutory,” said Dodds. “But nevertheless, they felt that they couldn’t sit on it because it was too linked to government.”
Dodds couldn’t share an example of a social media story the committee would have liked to suppress, but meeting minutes flag open source information and online citizen journalism as ongoing challenges.
In an incident highlighted by the group last year, a journalist held off from publishing details about the presence of British forces in a particular region, but pointed out this was already documented by open source evidence and was “widely known inside [the] country.”
In 2018, the U.K.’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) approached the committee and offered to broker an introduction to the tech giants. However, the offer was delayed due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was then unfolding, which culminated in a $5 billion settlement for Facebook over data privacy violations.
The U.K. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which took over responsibility for digital policy from DCMS last year, has not yet engaged with the DSMA on this topic.
Subsequent attempts by the committee itself have so far come to naught. The tech giants “won’t have anything to do with us at the moment for their own reasons,” said Dodds.
But Dodds hopes future government regulation of Big Tech could create potential leverage. “I suspect the U.K. government has got to come up with a grand bargain with the tech giants before they’ll come down to the types of security we’d advise.
“We’re waiting for that to happen … then hopefully, we’ll be able to get the tech giants back on board.”
Platforms or publishers?
At the heart of these efforts is the long-running debate on whether social media organizations are “platforms” or “publishers.”
“While social media organizations held fast to being platforms rather than publishers it would be difficult to get them to engage,” minutes from a DSMA meeting in 2019 note. “Nevertheless, the Committee felt that the Secretary should keep up the pressure (perhaps in liaison with DCMS).”
Google, Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.
In the face of rejection from Silicon Valley, the group’s minutes reveal they started to devise contingency plans. One idea was to start cultivating a relationship with Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator which has recently taken on a new role enforcing the Online Safety Act passed into law last year.
“Because OFCOM may in the future have regulatory duties relating to the prominence and ranking of online content, an arms-length relationship with OFCOM might potentially offer the Committee the opportunity to influence the very largest digital platforms to ensure their algorithms do not amplify articles which may damage national security or increase the risk to people’s lives,” read minutes from late 2022.
The group’s secretary was assigned “a watching brief” on Ofcom’s role in this space, but later minutes don’t mention the regulator.
An Ofcom spokesperson said as far as they were aware, the regulator had not been contacted by the DSMA.
A push to modernize
DSMA committee minutes indicate an ever-broadening remit.
Over the past several years, its scope has grown to include cyber incidents — such as when an MoD supplier was hit by a ransomware attack, certain details of which were successfully kept out of the press — as well as counter-terrorism policing and leaks.
Committee members also worriedly discussed misinformation around the Russia-Ukraine war at a meeting on May 12, 2022. “[The chairman] acknowledged that information warfare did not fall within the strict scope of the Committee’s remit but said he could not think of a better forum where it might be meaningfully discussed [sic],” read the minutes.
Members acknowledged the DSMA committee neither could, nor should, deal with misinformation. “Nevertheless it was concluded that there might be scope for a better method allowing for government and media sides to collaborate in advance in order to prick the bubble of ostensible lies told with malicious intent.”
As the committee attempts to modernize, the minutes — which until recently bore Dodds’ signature in the Comic Sans typeface — also reveal internal agonizing over the group’s lack of diversity. A survey found the committee was overwhelmingly “pale and male” and half of participants had attended a private school. But half of them had secured bursaries or grants to do so, indicating the group “was more diverse than might at first appear.”
The national debate on diversity “had moved into an emotive space,” warned the second deputy secretary, retired lieutenant commander Stephen Dudley, in a meeting in April 2023. He advised the committee to stay away from “increasingly vituperative exchanges” on “colonialism and identity.”
Regardless of the tech giants’ lack of cooperation to date, the committee remains steadfast in its aims.
As the media landscape evolves, “there’s probably going to be less print, just as much broadcasting, and a continued increase in social media and online [news],” said Dodds.
“So we need to get into this game.”
