Labour came to power in 2024 with five stated missions: to improve economic growth, the NHS, street safety, clean energy and the distribution of opportunity. If Keir Starmer had been honest about his plans, he would have pledged just one – restricting access to social media.
This is the goal the government has pursued obsessively. Starmer turned to it as his premiership collapsed around him, imposing a social media ban for under-16s. As Andy Burnham seizes the reins, he will have to grapple with divisions in his party over defence and welfare – but his MPs remain united in their crusade against so-called online harms.
That is why Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, is talking about a ‘final decision’ on our right to access VPNs, why Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, has made a show of leaving X and why Lucy Powell, the Labour deputy leader, wants to restrict what can be posted on social media during election campaigns. Forget net zero – in 2026, the easiest way to virtue-signal is to declare your contempt for online freedoms.
A green paper published recently by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport indicates that alternative media, which thrives in the online world, is next in the government’s sights. The document is the culmination of a long lobbying exercise by broadcast media to re-establish dominance over the information ecosystem. There is the usual saccharine fluff about how TV shows such as Adolescence can ‘give voice to our national story’ and the faintly Soviet role of television to ‘bring the nation together for shared experiences’. There is whingeing about how the ‘consumption of content in individually curated feeds is eroding the shared cultural and societal experiences associated with traditional broadcasting’. It is assumed that we are being made worse off by having choice over what we watch, as if people should be yearning for the halcyon days of Top of the Pops and The Generation Game, instead of thanking God that they were born too late to bear witness to such horrors.
We are told that ‘in countries with strong and well-funded systems of public service media, societal polarisation is lower’. The report referenced for this claim is by the European Broadcasting Union, an international group that lobbies for various broadcasters including the BBC and ITV. The public version of the report does not include any data sets, but the claim does not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, many countries where per capita funding of national broadcasters is lower, such as Japan and New Zealand, have lower polarisation scores than the UK. If broadcasters really are vital for ‘bringing us together’, then ours aren’t cost-effective.
Misinformation is a problem, but it would be wrong to pretend the legacy media is without sin
Although the recommendations have not been formalised – we will have to wait for a full white paper later this year for that – there is a clear policy direction. The green paper promises legislation to establish a ‘prominence regime’ for ‘trustworthy news content’. In plain English, this means the government wants to fiddle the algorithms so that ‘trustworthy’ news providers are favoured over independent media.
The green paper says there will be a transparent method for deciding who is trustworthy and that there will be a process of stakeholder engagement to decide how the method works. The selected stakeholders will inevitably be charities and lobbyists who are intertwined with broadcast media, and the document gives some clue as to what metrics they might use to judge trustworthiness. We are told that audiences still value ‘content that reflects the diversity of the UK and brings audiences together’. Meaning, presumably, that making ‘divisive content’ or operating without appropriate obeisance to diversity checklists will count against you in the government-regulated algorithm. An-other peccadillo is the ‘integral role’ broadcasters play in driving growth outside London and the south-east, so you can chuck levelling up into the mind-numbing social engineering projects which this framework will reward instead of, say, being entertaining, funny or interesting.
There will be some readers who share ministers’ anxieties about alternative media. Misinformation is a problem, but it would be wrong to pretend the legacy media is without sin. It was the BBC that doctored a speech by Donald Trump. It was the BBC that created a ‘misinformation service’, BBC Verify, which concocted a story about ‘ethnicity penalties’ issued by insurers in racially diverse areas. And it was the BBC that selected Marianna Spring, a woman who included falsehoods on her CV, to be the face of that misinformation service.
Leaked memos from within the BBC recently revealed that the organisation experienced ‘effective censorship’ of its trans coverage because of internal activism. While the corporation was inviting Stonewall in to help with its ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme, the real resistance to gender ideology began its life on social media. Sceptical parents, clinicians and teachers organised first on Facebook, and later on forums such as Mumsnet, years before the right-wing print press and the Conservative party finally got a handle on the matter. They often used the cloak of digital anonymity, because to publicly admit to ‘transphobic’ views could mean losing your job – or even lead to a visit from the police. It is this mechanism for collective action against political correctness that ministers seem intent on destroying. They will do so by forcing adults to submit their IDs to use the internet, banning the VPNs they might use to circumvent the checks and limiting the discoverability of controversial information whose content they decide does not ‘bring the nation together’.
In the free marketplace of content, there is a place for legacy media just as there is a place for alternative media. But we should always be sceptical of expensive lobbying efforts to impose regulations that will tip the scale in favour of established institutions. And we should be downright cynical when these regulations are being enacted by a government that has shown unrelenting contempt for free speech.
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