The recent findings from the Ipsos UK survey for the Commission for Countering Extremism offer a timely and sobering insight into how people across England and Wales perceive their freedom of expression. The results indicate a growing concern that public discourse is becoming more polarised, less open, and increasingly shaped by the fear of causing offence, facing social consequences, or being misunderstood. While these findings rightly prompt reflection on the balance between free speech and social cohesion, they also present an opportunity—a necessary opening—to reconsider how we support meaningful, inclusive, and accountable forms of communication.
At Decentered Media, we believe that the response to these challenges must go beyond conventional frameworks based on surveillance, regulation, or centralised control. Instead, we advocate for a renewed conversation with the Commission to explore the potential of community, DIY, and civic media as trusted, participatory alternatives to dominant global media systems.
The perception that mainstream platforms fuel extremism is well-founded. Algorithmic amplification, echo chambers, and decontextualised outrage cycles all contribute to a loss of trust and a distortion of public dialogue. But the solution is not to double down on top-down monitoring and punitive regulation. Rather, the way forward lies in building trust-based civic infrastructures of communication—ones rooted in local experience, democratic participation, and mutual accountability.
Across the breadth of our work, it is clear that community media must be recognised as a vital counterbalance to industrialised, globalised, and commercially driven models of communication. Where social media platforms are designed to scale engagement through attention-grabbing content, local and civic media can foster deliberative, relational, and situated forms of dialogue. Where corporate media monetises emotion and division, DIY media projects empower individuals and communities to shape their own narratives, using tools that are accessible, accountable, and inclusive.
But this vision cannot be realised without strategic support. Community media in the UK has long been underfunded, undervalued, and often misunderstood. Despite decades of work demonstrating its social value, many community-based projects operate on minimal resources and short-term funding, with little infrastructure to support long-term development.
To effectively counterbalance the corrosive effects of corporate media models, we need to invest in community media as a core component of our civic infrastructure. This means:
- Developing participatory media literacies that equip people with the tools to produce, interpret, and verify content in accountable and democratic ways.
- Supporting training, mentoring, and DIY toolkits that enable local media makers to tell their own stories and respond directly to community concerns.
- Ensuring that media practices are independent of state policing and security agendas, and instead embedded in the principles of civic participation, inclusion, and mutual care.
- Recognising that local trust-building and inclusive storytelling are not soft interventions, but essential mechanisms for building democratic resilience in the face of extremist narratives.
The Commission’s report highlights a gap between what people believe should be permissible to say, and what they feel safe or confident saying in practice. This gap will not be bridged by simply reaffirming the right to free speech in the abstract. It will be bridged by cultivating new spaces for civic dialogue, where trust is earned through shared purpose, mutual understanding, and community accountability.
At Decentered Media, we are calling for a structured dialogue with the Commission for Countering Extremism, civil society organisations, and community media practitioners. This dialogue should focus on building a civic-society framework for media development—one that rejects the dominance of punitive or securitised approaches in favour of locally driven, democratically governed, and socially responsive media ecosystems.
If we are serious about defending freedom of expression and countering extremism, then we must start by asking: who gets to speak, in what context, with what support, and with what purpose? Community and civic media offer a practical, ethical, and sustainable way to answer that question.
It is time to give them the recognition—and the resources—they deserve.