Britain’s government has decided that a functioning adult with thumbs and a phone cannot be trusted to pick your own news. So it has drawn up a plan to pick it for you.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a paper on June 23 proposing that social media platforms and video sharing sites be forced to push a hand-picked list of broadcasters to the top of your feed.
The list runs BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C and Channel 5. The government files them under “public service media.” You might file them under the channels people have spent two decades scrolling away from.
Now the argument has crossed the Atlantic. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy a letter on July 14 warning that the plan “would serve as a major threat to online speech and expression and infringe on the rights of American companies and their users.” He wants a briefing by 10 a.m. Washington time on July 28.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The platforms being ordered around are American. Their users are everywhere. A British minister rewriting how YouTube ranks video reaches straight into feeds in Ohio and Osaka.
The DCMS says the goal is to help people “discover trusted news sources” and to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
Translated, the state has chosen your news and would rather you stopped wandering off. Who gets to decide what counts as “trusted”? The same government running the scheme, of course.
The paper leans on real numbers. Ofcom found that social media is now the main news source for 51 percent of adults and 75 percent of people aged 16 to 24. People left. The government’s response is not to ask why they left. It is to guarantee the approved broadcasters a spot at the top while everyone else scraps for whatever attention is left over.
The trick lies in the technology. On television, “prominence” is old furniture. You can legally park BBC One near the top of the channel guide, and the Media Act 2024 dragged that habit onto smart-TV home screens. A recommendation feed works nothing like a channel list. It sorts content in real time by what you personally watch, click and share. Forcing “prominence” onto that means reaching into the ranking and hoisting chosen publishers above where your own behavior left them. Less a nudge, more a shove.
Hellbound and Down 