The government’s Watch this Space media green paper has crystallised a tension that can no longer be postponed. On one side stands a legitimate fear that the state is preparing to decide which voices deserve prominence online. On the other lies the accumulating evidence that the current information environment is failing basic tests of resilience, trust and social cohesion. Between these poles lies the harder, more interesting work: designing forms of stewardship that protect liberal freedoms while recognising social responsibilities.
The Free Speech Union has articulated the first concern with characteristic clarity. Forcing platforms to elevate “trustworthy” public service broadcasters and selected publishers, they argue, risks turning the government into an unofficial editor of the digital public square. It creates the possibility of official orthodoxy, demotes independent and dissenting outlets, and may even function as a back-door incentive for publishers to accept greater regulation. In a liberal democracy, these are not trivial objections. The principle that the state should not pick winners in the marketplace of ideas remains foundational. Any regime that appears to do so will—and should—face robust scrutiny.
The Government has commissioned a dystopian instruction manual which takes the war on misinformation to the next level.
The 136-page report classifies “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” as one of several types of “false and misleading information” said to be circulating in Britain. Other… pic.twitter.com/3nMqe8sqi6
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 24, 2026
Yet, the counter-evidence cannot be dismissed as mere special pleading. Algorithmic systems optimised for engagement have demonstrably amplified misleading narratives during moments of crisis, contributed to real-world disorder, eroded shared factual baselines, and left large parts of the population, especially younger cohorts, navigating news primarily through platforms that have no public-service obligations. Trust in news has fallen. Exposure to misinformation and deepfakes is widespread. Foreign influence operations and domestic polarisation both exploit the same structural features. Public service media, for all their imperfections, remain among the few institutions still bound by enforceable standards of accuracy and impartiality. Their declining reach is not a neutral market outcome; it is a civic problem.
Take part in a Media Exchange online discussion https://luma.com/user/decenteredmedia
The question, therefore, is not whether we need some form of collective response, but what kind of response is compatible with an open society. Mandatory prominence for a state-defined list of sources is one answer. It is not the only one, and it may not be the best.
A more promising direction is the idea of an updated civic compact for the new media environment—one that prioritises stewardship rather than command. Stewardship implies ongoing responsibility without ownership of the conversation. It asks platforms, publishers, regulators and citizens to treat the information environment as a shared public good that requires maintenance, not as a pure private commodity or a pure state instrument.
What might such stewardship look like in practice?
It could mean diversification of supply within non-mandatory networks: ensuring that a wide range of national, local, commercial and independent sources remain visible and discoverable without any official hierarchy of “trustworthiness.” It could mean transparent, contestable signals of journalistic practice—corrections policies, ownership disclosure, fact-checking track records—that platforms may choose to surface, rather than government lists they are compelled to elevate. It could mean stronger user controls, genuine media-literacy partnerships, and rapid, independent mechanisms for responding to coordinated harm during crises, all without creating permanent privileged status for any particular set of institutions.
Crucially, a civic compact would need to balance two commitments that are often presented as opposites. Liberal freedoms—freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to experiment with new forms of journalism and distribution—must remain non-negotiable. At the same time, the social responsibilities that arise from concentrated private power over attention and from the public consequences of systemic misinformation cannot be wished away. The old compact, built around regulated public service broadcasting and a relatively stable print and linear television environment, no longer maps cleanly onto a world of algorithmic feeds, generative AI and global platforms. An updated version must be negotiated, not imposed.
This is precisely the territory where open, plural discussion is most needed. The Media Exchange sessions exist for exactly this purpose: to test ideas against practical experience, to surface disagreements without collapsing into caricature, and to explore institutional designs that neither the pure free-speech maximalists nor the pure regulatory maximalists have yet fully articulated.
The green paper has opened the conversation. The Free Speech Union has sharpened one essential side of it. The evidence of harm sharpens the other. Between them lies the possibility of a more sophisticated civic settlement—one that treats the information environment as something we hold in common, steward carefully, and keep open. That conversation is worth having carefully, publicly, and soon.