The government wants to control what you see in your social media feed. Have your say.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has recently published a green paper detailing major changes they want to make to the way we consume content in the UK.

If you watch YouTube or use any social media, you're going to care about what's in it.

The top line is that the government is proposing new laws that would make social media platforms promote specific types of content above others. 

That content would come from what’s known as "PSMs", or public service media. In practice, that means increased exposure for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and a couple of others. 

They would get prominence on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. So instead of your feed being curated for you based on what you might actually want to watch, certain content would instead get pushed to the front of the algorithm for everyone.

Why is this happening now?

The main reason is that traditional broadcasters are losing market share. The government reckons that viewers now spend 51 minutes a day on video-sharing platforms and 40 minutes on streaming services, compared to 25 minutes on broadcast-on-demand. 

Fewer eyeballs means less money, which in turn means that revenue from TV ads and licensing has fallen significantly in real terms since around 2015.

What kind of content will be prioritised?

The changes are framed as supporting a "healthy information environment", and the focus of the green paper is mostly news. 

The claim is that social media elevates sensationalism and false information, while traditional platforms have standards and rigour, meaning their content is more suitable to be promoted above everyone else's. 

But from reading the paper, it's pretty clear that "prominence" for news might be just the beginning.

The consultation at the back of the report is where the public and the industry get to feed back on all this.

Question 23b asks which types of public service media content should be easier to find on video platforms, and gives you fourteen genres to tick – only one of which is news and current affairs. 

And they also say towards the end of the report:

“Whilst certain genres like news are a priority, we need to consider whether all PSM content should be covered so that a wider range of high-quality, UK relevant content is made more discoverable.”

And that's one of the things I find most troubling about all this. They start with news, but where does it stop?

Maybe you're looking for finance content and instead of my content, all you get is Martin Lewis. That might not be a bad thing. Maybe you're searching for content on setting up a business and instead of Alex Hormozi it's just old episodes of Dragon's Den. Researching side hustle options? Bargain Hunt. Dating advice? Naked Attraction.

I'm being flippant here, but hopefully you get the point.

Why the government thinks this is necessary

The main argument is that social media algorithms exist to keep you on the platform and maximise ad revenue, so they reward sensational content that grabs attention and holds it. 

I won't deny there's some merit in that.

I do think social media has driven polarisation and pushed more extreme views into the mainstream. But I also watch a lot of content that isn't sensational, and I'd certainly never want to be seen as sensational myself.

And let's face it, it’s not like this is a social media-only problem – Rupert Murdoch built a career on attention-grabbing headlines designed to sell papers and ads long before online platforms existed.

The paper's example of when prominence would be useful is the Southport stabbings and the riots that followed, where misinformation spread on social media and things escalated quickly. In other words, moments when getting the truth across quickly matters.

Except the public consultation questions don't commit solely to that. They ask directly whether prominence should be permanent or only active during periods of crisis, which means a 24/7 option for these brands is very much on the table.

And the paper goes into more detail on the sorts of moments it has in mind, and it isn't only public safety. It also lists "democratic events".

I think giving certain media organisations prominence around politics is full of risk – are we genuinely saying that some or all of these organisations don't have inherent political biases?

The other case they make is economic – that public service broadcasters bring spending and jobs into the UK, so pulling their audience away weakens that. The paper states that this drew £4.8 billion of inward investment in 2024 alone. 

I don't dismiss this either. The UK punches well above its weight in media and culture, and the BBC and other traditional broadcasters are a big part of that legacy. The ripple effects through the economy must be significant. What I would want to know, though, is whether that £4.8bn figure accounts for the BBC licence fee, because that is effectively a tax on the UK public to support the organisation.

For comparison, the YouTube creator ecosystem in the UK supports around 45,000 jobs and contributes roughly £2bn to the economy. Smaller, yes, but it doesn’t come with a licence fee, and it got there in just a few years with no government support whatsoever.

Our creator industry is the biggest of its kind in Europe, and it's growing considerably faster than the legacy brands it's being asked to make room for. These changes risk severely handicapping that growth. 

Who decides what's "trustworthy"?

The paper mentions that prominence could be extended beyond PSMs to what it calls "trustworthy news providers".

But they also admit that they haven't worked out what that means yet, and say they want to develop the criteria through this consultation. 

The starting point it suggests is the "recognised news publisher" definition in section 56 of the Online Safety Act 2023, which covers broadcasters plus UK entities whose primary purpose is publishing news-related material created by different people, subject to editorial control, a standards code and a complaints process.

Based on that, I don't think I’d qualify with my channel (Damien Talks Money on YouTube), and nor would anyone else on YouTube.

But that's not really the point.

My problem is with the government having the power to decide who counts as "trustworthy" at all, along with the assumption that legacy broadcasters have that question sorted. 

These are organisations that have had serious failures of trust and judgement play out in public over the last decade, some of them criminal.

Whatever the answer to trustworthy news is, I don't think it's a list drawn up by the state.

But a bigger question I have is: can the government actually do this?

Because on the face of it, telling private companies which content to push in front of people feels like something the state shouldn't be able to do. If this passed and it damaged my business – or the business of anyone reading this – would we have any grounds to complain?

Now, I'm of course not a solicitor and I have very little understanding of the complexities of UK law, so treat this as a curious layman reading around rather than legal analysis.

Additionally, none of these changes are confirmed.

The green paper is only the start of a long process of forming ideas which could eventually become a bill, be passed through Parliament, and become law, which would be enforced in practice by regulators like Ofcom.

But Parliamentary sovereignty means Parliament is the supreme legal authority, and UK courts can't strike down an act it creates. So if a law were passed ordering platforms to boost certain content, temporarily or permanently, that law would be valid and enforceable, and there would be very little anyone could do about it.

What it might do is test the Human Rights Act 1998 Article 10 – the right to freedom of expression: 

"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers".

Article 10 has caveats, including for public safety, so I can see how a temporary measure during something like Southport – where the state wants a message out in the national interest – could sit within those. 

But I find it much harder to see how permanent, always-on prominence for programming with no public safety dimension doesn't at least test it.

Please have your say

You can answer the consultation questions here, and the Welsh and easy-read versions of the documents are available here.

The deadline for feedback is 31st August, so there isn't much time. 

It runs to 30 questions across several sections, and if you only have time for part of it, sections 2 and 6 are the most relevant.

You might think, so what if a bit of BBC content turns up in my feed? I'll scroll past it.

But YouTube is a zero sum game. There are 500 hours of content uploaded every minute of every day, on top of the billions of hours already there. Elevate one channel and you don't just add it to someone's feed, you take someone else out of it. You deny a creator the click that could change their life.

Every creator with an audience on the platform, big or small, has competed in the most brutal media landscape ever built and somehow broken through. Artificially elevate certain brands above others and you rob someone else of that chance.

I started my channel in lockdown in 2020 with an iPhone and a piece of blue paper hung up behind me. I did it because I wanted to watch the kind of personal finance content that didn't exist anywhere – on YouTube or in traditional media.

If I'd walked into the BBC and said “Hi, I'm Damien, I have no media training whatsoever, will you give me a show teaching people how to invest”, what do you think they'd have said? Pick any creator you love and ask whether traditional media would have given them a shot.

I will say plainly that I have more skin in the game here than most people reading this.

I watch an unholy amount of YouTube and I love the platform, but I also make my living on it, so any change to the algorithm affects me, my business and the people I employ. I've still tried to be balanced throughout this, as I do with everything I make. 

But I believe we should all care about this because a country that starts sorting media into what should be seen and what shouldn't has changed something quite fundamental about how that country works, whatever the intention behind it.

I really hope that you can take the time to have your say – whether you agree with me or otherwise.

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