The UK government is currently consulting on plans, set out in the Watch This Space green paper, media literacy strategy and a linked evidence review, that would give “trusted” and public service sources greater prominence on platforms and search results. Backers call it protecting people from misinformation. Critics call it a quiet way to shape which voices reach an audience at all, without ever formally banning anyone. This piece looks at what’s actually in those documents, and what happens when the “approved” version turns out to be wrong.
“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar; you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
I came across that line again recently. It’s Tyrion Lannister’s, from A Clash of Kings, and it stopped me cold.
I don’t think the British Government is literally trying to silence everybody (yet), and I haven’t uncovered some secret Whitehall plan hidden in a locked filing cabinet.
It stopped me because I’d recently read, or at least skimmed, three documents out of Whitehall and the policy world around it that left me with the same uneasy thought.
Government being worried about false information wasn’t what concerned me. That would be reasonable.
The worry is that government increasingly seems interested in shaping what people see, which sources they trust and what information reaches them most easily.
The documents were:
A Safe, Informed Digital Nation: Government’s Media Literacy Action Plan.
False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice.
And Watch This Space: A New Strategic Direction for UK Media.
Read separately, each can be presented as sensible, measured and well intentioned.
Read together, they start to feel like something else.
Media literacy sounds harmless enough
Most people would support media literacy.
People need help recognising scams, fake accounts, manipulated images, fabricated stories and deepfakes. That means teaching children and adults to question what they see, check sources, compare claims and think before sharing nonsense.
There’s nothing controversial in that.
The concern is that media literacy can drift from helping people examine information towards telling them which sources deserve their trust.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Teaching somebody to examine evidence helps them form their own judgement. Telling them that certain institutions are inherently trustworthy begins to replace that judgement.
That distinction is easy to lose when everything is wrapped in reassuring language about safety, resilience and informed citizenship.
Nobody says (outright), “We’d like people to trust the approved version.”
They say they want to build confidence, protect social cohesion and make reliable information easier to find.
It sounds better.
Researching false information sounds sensible too
The second document looks at false and misleading information, how it spreads, what harm it may cause and what interventions might work.
Again, none of that is inherently sinister.
Governments should understand organised deception, fraud, foreign interference and deliberate attempts to manipulate the public.
The difficulty is the phrase “misleading information“.
False information is easier to understand. A claim is either factually wrong or it isn’t, although even that can become complicated when evidence is incomplete or changing.
Misleading information is much less stable.
Something can be factually accurate but presented without context. The information may be disputed, politically inconvenient or based on evidence that later proves stronger than first thought. It might challenge an accepted interpretation, with one group calling it misleading while another sees it as necessary context.
Somebody still has to decide when disputed information becomes misleading, whether the danger lies in the claim or the reaction to it, and when the evidence is settled enough to justify intervention.
What happens when government departments, academics, journalists, independent researchers and the public don’t agree?
These aren’t minor questions.
They’re the whole bloody issue.
Then the green paper changes the nature of the argument
The first two documents can still be defended as education and research.
The green paper goes further.
It discusses the prominence of public service media and other trusted providers on digital platforms.
That’s a different kind of intervention.
Teaching people how to assess information is one thing.
Removing illegal content or obvious fraud is another.
Actively making certain sources easier to find because they’ve been judged more trustworthy is something else entirely.
Once a government begins influencing which sources should appear more prominently, it’s no longer simply helping people navigate information.
It’s shaping the information environment.
Some voices rise.
Others fall.
Videos can remain available, articles can stay online and speakers can continue talking while their chances of reaching anyone quietly shrink.
The government can then say, quite accurately, that nobody has been censored (yet).
Technically, the person is still free to speak.
Practically, fewer people may hear them.
Censorship doesn’t have to look like censorship
Most people still picture censorship in dramatic terms.
Books being burned. Newspapers being banned. Websites being blocked. Police knocking on doors.
Those things still happen in parts of the world, but information control can now be quieter.
It can happen through rankings, recommendations, labels, warnings, search placement, ‘fact checking’ notices, algorithmic preference and deliberate friction.
A video can remain available but disappear from recommendations.
An article can still exist but sit beneath a row of approved sources.
A platform can host a range of views while making some significantly easier to encounter than others.
Ranking content is unavoidable, and most ranking decisions have nothing to do with censorship. Platforms have to sort content somehow. Search engines can’t show everything at once. Recommendation systems make choices constantly.
But when government starts directing or pressuring those systems towards favoured categories of information, the question changes.
Who is making the decision?
Why are they making it?
And whose interests are being served?
Visibility and free speech aren’t quite the same issue, although controlling what gets seen can leave someone technically free to speak with almost nobody able to hear them.
“Trusted sources” should never become a permanent status
The phrase “trusted source” sounds reassuring until you think about it for more than a few seconds.
Trust should be earned claim by claim.
It should never be handed out permanently because an organisation has the right badge, funding model or institutional history.
The BBC has been right about many things.
But we all know the BBC has also been wrong – sometimes intentionally.
Government departments have been right about many things.
They too have been wrong.
Experts, academics, newspapers, campaign groups, independent journalists and members of the public all have records containing both.
That’s normal.
People and institutions make mistakes.
The problem comes when trust is treated as a category rather than a judgement.
What makes a source trustworthy?
Past accuracy?
Regulation?
Public funding?
Institutional status?
Government recognition?
Political acceptability?
And what happens when the approved source gets something badly wrong?
That still leaves the problem of who reassesses a trusted source, removes its privileged status when necessary and makes sure any correction travels as widely as the original claim.
If a source is genuinely trustworthy, it should withstand scrutiny.
It shouldn’t need artificial prominence to protect it from competition.
The problem goes beyond lies
There’s another term that appears in these debates:
malinformation.
That usually refers to information that’s true but may cause harm because of how, why or when it’s shared.
Treating truthful information as a threat raises a much more serious problem.
The argument is no longer simply about truth versus lies. It becomes truth versus a preferred social outcome.
A fact may be accurate but embarrassing. It may damage confidence in an institution, inflame public anger, expose hypocrisy or weaken support for a policy. It may even have been shared maliciously, but none of that makes it false.
If truthful information can be restricted, demoted or discouraged because somebody believes the consequences may be harmful, then we’re no longer being protected from deception.
We’re being protected from facts.
Or, more precisely, protected from reacting to facts in a way somebody else would prefer us not to.
That’s an extraordinary amount of power to place in the hands of any institution.
Government can’t be both player and referee
Governments produce information.
They also decide what to publish, when to release it and how to present it. They respond to criticism, seek public support and want to remain in office.
Government information isn’t automatically propaganda, but governments still have policies to defend, reputations to protect and elections to win. They’re part of the debate, not neutral observers standing outside it.
A government can’t sensibly appoint itself referee, define what counts as harmful information, decide which sources are trusted and then claim the process is politically neutral.
There’s an obvious conflict of interest.
The same concern applies when institutions funded, appointed or recognised by government are given privileged status.
Even if everybody involved acts in good faith, the structure is still flawed.
Good intentions don’t remove conflicts of interest.
They merely make people more comfortable ignoring them.
What happens when the approved version is wrong?
This is the question that should sit at the centre of every proposal like this.
Any system for promoting approved information will look reasonable when the approved information is correct.
The real test comes when it isn’t.
An official position may be incomplete, a minority view may later prove accurate, or an independent journalist may uncover something established institutions missed.
In those circumstances, dissent still needs to remain visible, competing evidence must be accessible and critics should be treated as legitimate, even when they’re inconvenient.
Somebody should also be accountable when people who turned out to be right had their reach deliberately reduced.
History is full of accepted positions that changed.
It’s full of institutions speaking with confidence and later correcting themselves.
Expertise remains valuable, but experts and institutions can still be wrong.
A system that gives privileged visibility to approved voices may protect people from some false claims.
It may also protect institutions from justified scrutiny.
Those two outcomes can look remarkably similar from inside the system.
There are real problems to deal with
Governments still need to deal with organised deception.
Scams are real.
Foreign influence operations are real.
Deepfakes are becoming more convincing.
People are impersonated, defrauded and manipulated online every day.
Doing nothing isn’t a serious answer.
Those harms are genuine, but each proposed response still needs to be judged on its own risks and consequences.
False information plainly exists. The difficult part is deciding how much influence the state should have over what people encounter, especially when the information is lawful, politically sensitive or genuinely disputed.
That line will never be perfectly clean.
But difficulty isn’t an excuse to hand government more power and hope everybody involved remains sensible forever.
Policies survive longer than ministers.
Systems created for one purpose are often expanded for another.
Tools introduced to deal with obvious fraud can later be applied to criticism, controversy and inconvenient truth.
Power doesn’t become harmless because it arrived in a document full of calm language and bullet points.
Back to the man without a tongue
The tongue in the quotation is metaphorical, but its warning still fits the way speech can be limited without being formally banned.
Making one source easier to find doesn’t prove another claim false, any more than placing a public broadcaster above an independent journalist proves the journalist unreliable.
Artificial prominence won’t rebuild trust in institutions people already question, and democracy gains nothing from quietly steering the public away from competing arguments.
The government may genuinely believe that these measures protect people, defend truth and strengthen society.
Governments usually describe increased control in reassuring terms.
The rest of us still need to ask what that control allows them to do.
Media literacy should teach people how to question information.
All information.
That includes claims from anonymous accounts, conspiracy websites and people chasing attention.
It also includes information from broadcasters, experts, regulators and government departments.
Media literacy should help people scrutinise every source. When it mainly teaches suspicion of unofficial voices and confidence in approved ones, it begins to resemble obedience training dressed in more respectable language.
And once a government starts deciding which voices should be easier to hear, it shouldn’t be surprised when people begin wondering why it’s so worried about the others.
Trust, Prominence and the Green Paper: Your Questions Answered
What is the Watch This Space green paper?
Watch This Space: A New Strategic Direction for UK Media is a government consultation that proposes making public service and other “trustworthy” news sources more prominent on platforms like YouTube and social media. It covers digital prominence, public service media reform and how audiences find trusted content online.
Is making some sources more prominent a form of censorship?
Not in the traditional sense of banning or removing content. But boosting some sources while others stay buried in rankings can shrink an audience without ever formally silencing anyone. Technically nobody is censored, but practically fewer people may ever encounter them.
What’s the difference between misinformation, disinformation and malinformation?
Misinformation is false information shared without intent to deceive. Disinformation is false information shared deliberately to mislead. Malinformation is true information shared in a way that’s judged to cause harm, which raises the separate question of whether truthful content should ever be restricted.
Can a “trusted source” get something wrong?
Yes. Institutions like the BBC or government departments have accurate track records overall but have also been wrong before, sometimes significantly. Treating trust as a permanent status rather than something earned claim by claim risks protecting institutions from scrutiny rather than protecting the public from false information.
Why does it matter who decides what counts as misleading?
Because “misleading” is far less clear cut than “false”. Information can be accurate but lack context, be disputed, or be politically inconvenient without being untrue. Whoever gets to make that call, whether government, regulator or platform, holds significant influence over what the public sees.