Social Media Spying 2021

What forum members had been unaware of was the depth and scale of the investigation and continuing monitoring by Bristol City Council. It went over and above a single issue – which was found not have breached any forum rules – and was to persist throughout the year and into 2022. There is no way now to tell if it continues to this day.

It wasn’t until The Bristolian published an article on SEND Spying in July 2022 that the truth started to come out. The amount of surveillance was systematic and went on over a long period of time.

It’s worth me saying that my data has been hugely redacted. I also have not received all of it. This I know because other people who have done Subject Access Requests during this period of time have had data of mine in theirs that I’d never seen before. This was particularly in reference to FOI questions about education and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities that the council did not want to answer.

Bristol City Council was monitoring what members of the steering group had been saying online as soon as the new forum began to emerge.

Redactions in green are ones I have made.

Council officers were in the process of ‘gathering as much evidence as they can’.

When accusations of spying came out in the summer of 2022, council officers scrabbled to put together data they had collected.

Bristol City Council became obsessed with the thought that I was planning a group action JR against them. This was a fantasy.

Here, during the same period of time as the original known spying incident, shows Bristol City Council did not want to answer FOIs made by two people, one being me.