A government committee has concluded that the British public cannot be trusted to scroll responsibly. The cure it proposes is more government. Ministers are cooking up plans to force YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to shove BBC, ITV and Channel 4 content to the front of people’s feeds, asked for or not, all in the noble cause of fighting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport says this will help Britons “discover trusted news sources.” This means the state has picked your news for you and would prefer you stop wandering off.
Ofcom found that social media is now the main news source for 51 percent of adults and 75 percent of people aged 16 to 24. The remedy it proposes is to fit a hand-picked club of approved broadcasters with a permanent escalator to the top while everyone else is left taking the stairs.
And who’s the headline act on this trusted-news scheme? The BBC, yes, the very one whose director general and head of news both walked the plank last November after a Panorama documentary stitched together separate chunks of a Trump speech so artfully that its own internal report found it “materially misled” viewers.
That’s only scratching the surface of the BBC’s shortcomings. The real question underneath is who gets to define “trusted.” The answer is the same people running the scheme, which is convenient.
The reported roster is BBC, ITV and Channel 4, with Channel 5 and S4C wearing the same public service badge and newspapers possibly getting an invite.
The trick lives in the technical detail. On TV, “prominence” is ancient furniture. You can legally bolt BBC One near the top of the channel guide, and the Media Act 2024 dragged that habit onto smart-TV home screens. A recommendation feed is a wholly different beast. It sorts content in real time by what you personally watch and click and share. Forcing “prominence” onto that means reaching into the machine and hauling chosen publishers above where your own behavior would have left them.
It’s less a gentle nudge than a crowbar.
YouTube has already pushed back. David Wheeldon, a senior public policy executive at the company, wrote back in April that prominence rules “could force YouTube to give special treatment to a small group of organizations hand-picked by a government. For creators and media companies that are not chosen, the risk is real.”
He added more. “By forcing these channels to the front of the line, everyone else gets pushed back, regardless of what viewers actually want to see. This makes it harder for creators to grow an audience and earn a living. If governments start picking the winners, independent creators become the losers.”
There are only so many slots at the top of a feed. Every one handed to a state broadcaster is one yanked away from somebody who earned it. The independent creator filming in her kitchen, the scrappy local outlet covering the council meeting nobody else will sit through, the upstart who built an audience the hard way; all elbowed aside so everyone’s favorite punching bag can have the good seat by the window.
The plan also arrives dressed up as “voluntary.”
According to the Financial Times, platforms could be asked nicely first, with legislation tucked in the drawer for whenever they don’t fancy obliging.
That is an interesting use of the word “voluntary” but it’s sadly how things in Britain work these days.
There’s always a chance the policy might die with this government, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer prepares to leave office, but the instinct behind it may not.
Prime ministers rotate out like duty managers at the end of a rough shift, yet the urge to decide what grown adults are allowed to see signs a much longer contract.
