When Steve Reed, the now ex-communities secretary, unveiled his social cohesion ‘action plan’ earlier this year, he promised to publish an ‘evidence review’ on ‘the impacts of misinformation’. Commissioned by the government’s chief scientific adviser, it would focus on ‘how to measure the problem, assess harms and counter and mitigate these harms’.
That report has now been published and the headline finding is that ‘anti-LGBTQ+ narratives’ – such as claiming that state schools and other public authorities have been captured by gender ideology, and questioning whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports – are examples of misleading and false information that cause harm, alongside climate denial and deepfake images. The authors conclude that such misinformation, amplified by X’s sinister algorithms, poses a ‘systemic national risk’ and a ‘persistent threat to democratic governance, public trust, national security, and effective policy delivery’. In other words, if you claim that Imane Khelif, the gold medal-winning Olympic boxer, is a man, you are an anti-democratic extremist and should be silenced.
The authors – six academics from the University of Sheffield and one from Edinburgh – argue that new ‘statutory frameworks’ are needed because ‘a growing body of empirical research’ provides ‘robust causal evidence’ that exposure to misinformation leads to ‘increases in hate crimes’, ‘shifts in politically relevant beliefs’ (i.e. wrongthink) and ‘changes in public health compliance’.
They boast of synthesising the findings of 228 academic papers, but confess that ‘not all full-text articles were reviewed in their entirety due to time constraints’ – there were only seven of them, after all – so they had to rely on Claude and NotebookLM to produce summaries. In other words, they fed the papers into chatbots because they couldn’t be bothered to read them. That’s quite an admission, given that one of the conclusions of the report is that the information ecosystem has been corrupted by AI.
But fear not. These conscientious researchers invited 11 ‘experts’ to review their findings. Who were these independent authorities? Three of them – Stephan Lewandowsky, Sander van der Linden and John Cook – are academics who share exactly the same alarmist views about misinformation as the authors and whose work they cite favourably throughout – while another was Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index (which issued a report urging advertisers to shun conservative publications).
Not surprisingly, none of these ‘experts’ raised the alarm about the report citing ‘research’ by the Center for Countering Digital Hate to substantiate its conclusion that voluntary self-regulation undertaken by social media platforms, such as X’s ‘community notes’ feature, has failed. That’s the activist lobby group co-founded by Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, which published a strategy paper in 2024 saying its no. 1 priority was to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’. Is this really what Angela McLean, the government’s chief scientific adviser, considers robust evidence?
Claiming 7 October was a false flag operation is apparently not as harmful as saying trans women aren’t women
In case you think accusations of political bias are unfair, consider the following. Despite the 136-page report claiming to address the dangers of misinformation to Britain’s social cohesion, there is nary a mention of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have been in wide circulation since the slaughter of 1,200 Jews by Hamas on 7 October 2023. There are three references to ‘gendered disinformation’ and three to ‘health-related false and misleading information’, but only one to anti-Semitism. Claiming that the massacre in southern Israel was a false flag operation orchestrated by Mossad on the orders of Benjamin Netanyahu is apparently not as harmful as saying trans women aren’t women.
Alex Burghart, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has condemned the report and accused Labour of planning to usher in an Orwellian thought police under the guise of combatting misinformation. I would love to dismiss that as hyperbole, but it’s all too plausible. One of the recommendations of this censors’ charter is that the government should fund a ‘comprehensive, wide-ranging, and monthly updated database of false and misleading narratives spreading in the UK’ – compiled, no doubt, by the authors themselves. A state–funded repository of wrongthink! Let’s hope that Andy Burnham’s degree in English literature will help him to see that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of fiction, not a how-to manual.
Comments