The Government released a green paper recently called “Watch this Space” which sets out a new strategic direction for the government’s media policy. I didn’t know such a thing as a green paper existed. It’s used to float an idea and invite public responses before it gets formalised into law, with the promise the public will be listened to. The consultation closes at midnight on 31 August.
Ian Murray, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts, the sponsor of the paper says “This work will ensure that our media continues to play its vitally important roles in entertaining, educating, serving democracy and supporting social cohesion in the UK, while putting audiences first”.
The paper is about the future of television, what the algorithm does, how it recommends news to your feed, what you are allowed to watch, and most importantly who approves newsworthy sources. This proposal deserves serious scrutiny. A cynic might even call it the Ministry of Truth.
The government wants social media platforms to make “trustworthy” news more prominent, easier to find and more likely to be at the top of your feed. That is curation.
The paper cites the BBC’s own finding that around half of AI-generated answers to questions about the news carried significant issues, and that a fifth of those citing BBC content introduced factual errors. It points to the summer of 2024, when what was classed as misinformation after the Southport killings spread through algorithmic recommendation and fed violence on the streets. It also notes that only 45% of adults feel confident judging whether a source is truthful. None of that is invented, and we are living in an information environment that is increasingly difficult to navigate, especially for the young, and it’ll get even harder as the machines that generate the content get better at sounding real.
To make some news more prominent someone has to decide which news qualifies as trustworthy, and my concern is who sets the standard. If I don’t agree with someone, but my view is not the “approved” view and therefore gets suppressed, how is anyone else ever going to have an alternative view? A singular view is dangerous. In its own words, it has not yet determined the criteria for what counts as a trustworthy news provider. It is proposing to build the mechanism first and define the standard later.
So a proposal to create a LAW to decide which sources of news the public see is being floated without any indication of WHO decides WHAT is true, what gets shared and what gets suppressed or banned.
In my humble opinion a power like that does not belong to the government in any way shape or form. We have a whole catalogue of history to look back on when something like this has been floated or implemented across timelines, and it has been proven time and again that the Government, here or anywhere else for that matter, does not deserve that level of power.
One part of being a human is the ability to discern for yourself what you believe to be true. We don’t all agree, to be honest if we did the World would be incredibly dull, but likewise we should not all be funneled into “approved” news. If so, what happens to alternative media or investigative journalism that doesn’t fit an approved narrative, and how do we know that narrative is actually the truth or just the “approved” truth?
The paper asks whether prominence should apply always, or only during a crisis which is precisely when the temptation to manage what people believe is strongest, and most difficult to challenge. The paper’s own worked example, the disorder of 2024, was a crisis. The moment you most want a trusted authority to sort truth from lie is the moment that authority is most likely to get it wrong, or to be leaned on by people who benefit from a particular answer.
Notice, too, what the paper does not offer. Its own diagnosis is that platform algorithms already decide what you see, tuned for engagement rather than truth, and that this falls hardest on the young. It reports that video-sharing and streaming now account for around three-quarters of all video time for people aged 16 to 24, that the same share get their news through social media, and that YouTube is the most-watched service for children between four and fifteen. A generation is forming its sense of the world inside a feed that is already curated, and the paper’s answer is to add a second governmental layer on top of it.
You are offered a choice between two curators. You are not offered the option of being trusted to choose for yourself. YouTube, for its own commercial reasons, is already urging its creators to object that the proposals would reshape what gets recommended, and when the platform and the citizen arrive at the same objection from opposite ends, the objection is worth taking seriously.
An algorithm you cannot see should not be an authority you cannot question, and a media environment where an official decides which views surface and which sink is a curated one, not a trusted one. The paper wants a healthy information environment, as do I. We just strongly disagree about who holds the pen.
The consultation is open until 31 August. You can read the paper and answer as many or as few of its questions as you like, through the government’s own online form, the questions on news prominence are numbers four and five. You do not need to be an expert to have a view, because the thing at stake is simply, whether the power to decide what is true is one any government should be handed, however good the reason, and however much you happen to trust the ones asking today.
Watch this space, they called it. I would rather we did more than watch.
Read the green paper and consultation on gov.uk
First published on LinkedIn.