Trustworthy sources are the wrong medicine

A proposal by the UK government to label particular sources as trustworthy and have them boosted up the algo is wrongheaded and foolish

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 16:11, 10 September 2026

In an act of almost charming naivete, the government of Britain is considering measures to coerce platforms to give greater prominence to sources considered "trustworthy". Recently, the News Media Association of the UK issued its response to these proposals, as set out earlier this year, with the consultation period having just ended, pointing out that platforms, not sources, are a rather more burdensome and pressing issue for the health of the country's commercial media market.

To be fair to the NMA, they were quite restrained in their response, with CEO Theo Bamber saying: "We support the Government’s ambition to make sure more people consume more high-quality journalism - and that news publishers can produce more of it. Any regime making publishers' visibility dependent on a government-backed definition of trustworthiness raises questions about press freedom and editorial independence.

"Instead of bringing forward narrow solutions that fail to address the root causes of the problem, the Government should tackle large platforms' market power - whether it be in search, social media, video, or AI."

The NMA went on to recommend to the government the work of the UK's Digital Markets Unit, a fairly tenacious outfit that sits within the Competition and Markets Authority, and its mission in addressing market dominance by platforms. "Here is your problem", they are saying, while pointing firmly at the tree the government isn't barking up. Possibly while pointing pretty wildly by this point.

Them we have the US government. A little less restrained than the NMA, it issued a response to the proposals for increasing the prominence of "trustworthy" Public Service Media by raising a number of serious concerns around free speech, the effects on US businesses and individuals and also wider economic issues. American intervention is in itself polarising in the current political landscape, though in this case I feel they have a point, to say the least. 

Like many democracies presently, the UK is becoming increasingly polarised in the political sphere. There are many reasons for this, but the thinking of our government - and indeed many worthy people not in government - is that social media is a cause of this polarisation, rather than a symptom of it. With the state-funded behemoth that is the BBC rapidly shedding audience across many sectors, partly as a result of losing control of its own distribution channels to Big Tech, there is a feeling that the nation's central narrative is being lost. Again, this is seen as a cause of disunity, rather than a symptom of it. 

Yet this proposed solution, of compelling platforms to place "trusted" sources at the top of people's feed is wrong-headed, and shows such willful ignorance of how people use their devices that it at least gives me comfort that the people behind such proposals are foolish and not malign. I would suggest to the authors of the Green Paper, that they exchange phones with each other for a week, giving access and leaving all their various platform feeds as they are. Then they might understand. There is no uniformity of media content experience upon which to force uniformity any more, or at least, the parameters are much wider and more fickle.

And here we are in the UK with a vast plurality of commercial media content producers, the kind of publishers and creators who can make a powerful contribution to our economy and cultural life, they don't need to be told they are "trustworthy" and nor are they likely to be given the government's direction of thought, but they are the ones who need unshackling because they are the ones who make the good things. None of this helps them.

If we allow that such an idea to label sources as "trustworthy" is coming from good intentions, as opposed to some more authoritarian possibilities, then it is reasonable to ask who is to decide upon that labelling and what would be the process for their selection. To this there is no satisfactory answer that can be given that won't smell of some kind of state control. That then becomes its own problem - as any errors or omissions in the content produced by this trusted media will be seen as evidence of state censorship, even if it isn't. 

It's also simply true that such an idea has some other second and third order consequences, ones that I do not feel have been properly addressed. If you create a basket of "trustworthy" sources, then by default you are declaring everyone else as not trustworthy. You're either one thing or the other, in this binary world. That doesn't reflect the truth of any media worthy of the name, and indeed may simply create a badge of dishonour for those not in the blessed trust circle, a badge they and their followers won't be necessarily be unhappy to wear. Dissent has its own appeal.