I’ve been banging on about the Government Green Paper “Watch this Space” for a few weeks now, it disturbs me immeasurably. I’ve seen how this kind of “oversight” turns into scope creep, and that’s not just from a project management perspective, it’s bigger, way bigger than that.

It’s also blatant if you look in the right place.

Anyhow. A few weeks ago I sat down and wrote a formal response to DCMS’s “Watch This Space” green paper, the consultation on a new strategic direction for UK media, which closes on 31 August. [1]

My argument, in short: transparency about what people are shown is tenuous at best, and a power for the government to decide which news counts as “trustworthy” is, in my opinion, outrageous overreach which should not exist at all, ever, but certainly not without first having published criteria, independent oversight, and a route for individuals to opt out.

My closing line was direct, help people judge for themselves, do NOT judge for them.

Then, as I do, I thought how is my response going to be handled and by whom? So I went looking, and found something well worth a bit of scrutiny.

What the department’s own paperwork says

DCMS’s privacy notice for this consultation, last updated 29 July, states clearly that responses will be processed with the help of AI, delivered through a third party working alongside DSIT, to help identify emerging themes across submissions. Human review is claimed, the specifics of what “review” means in practice are not. [2]

The third party is not named. The notice says only that your data will be shared with “a third-party provider” and DSIT will analyse, summarise responses and use technology such as artificial intelligence. The one supplier it does name is Qualtrics, and it names it for another reason: Qualtrics runs the survey itself, and may access responses to support the operation and moderation of the consultation. So the company doing the reading and the company hosting the form are described separately, and only one of them is identified. Erm, for a Yorkshire lass that sounds fishy.

Three other things are in that same notice, none of them flagged as you fill the form in.

Your response cannot be withdrawn once submitted. Your data may be transferred and stored outside the UK. Your data will be held for five years.

Qualtrics, incidentally, also came up in my mailbox for another reason recently..

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, sent out a user research survey. Its own note at the bottom reads exactly the way you’d expect: this survey is administered by a third party, Qualtrics, by taking it you agree to their privacy policy, blah, blah. [3]

Two very different organisations, a government department building a case for judging what counts as trustworthy news, and an AI lab, allegedly, trying to understand its own users, routing the same layer of listening through the same outside vendor. None of that is especially unusual. Qualtrics is a standard tool for this kind of work. Standard, meaning it’s pretty much everywhere, including underneath the process that’s meant to decide how the rest of us find out what’s true.

Why is that important?

Well. My submission contained a lot about one premise: before you build a system that judges information on someone’s behalf, the person whom you are judging should at least be able to transparently know who’s doing the judging, on what basis, and how it’s checked.

That’s the bit that piqued my interest.

Summarising thousands of consultation responses by hand isn’t realistic in this day and age of AI, and I’m pleased DCMS said that AI is involved rather than quietly concealing it.

However, it is a small, real example of exactly the thing I argued for: the process should be visible enough that the person submitting a response can see, clearly, what happens to it next. Right now I know a third party is involved and an AI is doing some of the reading. I don’t know what the human review actually checks, how errors get caught, whether my more pointed paragraphs will survive being reduced to a “theme”, or if indeed I may be tagged for actually having the audacity to have an opinion that I don’t need the Government to police my thinking.

There is another detail, which made me smirk. The notice hands your data to what it calls the “Department for Science, Technology and Innovation.” That department is actually called the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. A document explaining who will judge the accuracy of what you say cannot even get the name of the department right. Error or deliberate, who knows.

What concerns me

It’s not “should the government use AI to process consultations.” The pertinent question is the one my own submission already answers: if a system is going to judge or summarise what people say, on whose authority, how is it checked, and can I see the criteria before I’ve already sent my response in? DCMS’s own document names the tool and the process. It doesn’t yet answer that question. Neither, for what it’s worth, does the note at the bottom of Anthropic’s survey email.

I may find out what my submission becomes when the consultation closes and the summary comes back. The chances are I will not, consultations don’t have a great track record for actually being heard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respond.

The point is if we are being monitored, and we undoubtedly are, quite closely I would surmise, I’d really, really like to be able to understand what they do with my submission.

If you haven’t already, go and respond, it closes at 23:59 on the 31st August 2026.

Who checks it, against what, on whose authority and to what end?

References

[1] Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media, green paper and public consultation, published 23 June 2026. Consultation closes 11:59pm on 31 August 2026. Crown copyright, Open Government Licence. Verified live 21 August 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation

[2] Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media, green paper and public consultation privacy notice, updated 29 July 2026. Crown copyright, Open Government Licence. Verified live 21 August 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation-privacy-notice

[3] Anthropic user research survey, received by the author, August 2026. First-hand; the survey note states it is administered by a third party, Qualtrics, and that taking it constitutes agreement to their privacy policy.