Britain is quietly assembling what its critics describe as the most far-reaching machinery for controlling public speech in peacetime since the seventeenth century. There will be no Ministry of Truth, no official list of banned opinions, no sudden disappearance of dissenting voices. Instead, the government is weaving together a vast and flexible framework of BBC and Ofcom powers, online safety regulation, new legislation, and behind-the-scenes agreements with some of the world’s biggest technology companies. The entire apparatus is built around two deceptively elastic words: “misinformation” and “disinformation.” On the surface, nobody would object to protecting the public from lies. But the definitions are so broad that they can absorb not only hoaxes and fabricated stories, but also legitimate political argument, uncomfortable science, and dissent from official narratives. The communications regulator, Ofcom, has turned an innocuous statutory duty to promote “media literacy” into an extraordinary operation called Making Sense of Media. It works through a fast-growing network of technology firms, broadcasters, universities, charities, local authorities, employers, football clubs, and community organisations. Ofcom openly declares that media literacy should become “everyone’s business,” embedded in bodies with “deep reach” into British society. Google, Roblox, Pinterest, TikTok, and Lego are among the companies signed up to Ofcom’s Best Practice Principles for Media Literacy. Meta and X have been pulled into working groups about intervening on their platforms. Ofcom researches labels, overlays, and pop-ups designed to shape how users react to information. On the face of it, teaching people to think critically is admirable. But this is not neutral education. It is a system for moving judgments about truth from regulators and their partners directly into the services millions of people use every day to search, read, argue, and share news. And the central target, more and more, is what officials choose to call disinformation.
Ofcom defines misinformation as false information spread unintentionally, and disinformation as false information spread deliberately to deceive. That sounds clear enough, until you notice the regulator’s own admission that “misinformation is a subjective term.” A forged photograph or invented quotation is provably false. A fabricated statistic can be exposed. Journalism has always done that, often very well. But once “misinformation” steps beyond provable falsehood and begins to include legitimate political disagreement, something far more dangerous is happening. How does a government distinguish between a citizen who has been misled by a malicious lie and a citizen who has weighed the same evidence differently and reached a different conclusion? Believing that those who disagree with them are confused, deceived, or deluded, governments and regulators can marginalise arguments based on a different prioritising of available information. The article gives a telling example: climate change. Following a 2018 memo from its director of news, the BBC decided that scepticism about climate change as primarily man-made should be downplayed and, if aired at all, aggressively critiqued — in a way that was not required when presenting claims of a global emergency. Whether intentional or not, the BBC took an editorial position so broad that it denied a fair hearing not only to “climate deniers,” but also to researchers whose work qualified or tempered the unyielding certainty of the official narrative. The case was treated as closed. Any qualification, or any criticism of government-directed remedies, was dismissed as born of ignorance or deceit. This distinction is critical. A voter can accept that human activity affects the climate while opposing heat pumps, questioning electric car mandates, disputing cost projections, or believing that British Net Zero policy is economically destructive. Those are political arguments. But once they are bundled into “denial,” and then into “misinformation” or “disinformation,” their status changes. First comes political denunciation, then classification, then intervention. And that is precisely where Making Sense of Media becomes a genuinely sinister threat. Ofcom already has the research, training networks, community connections, and relationships with Google, TikTok, and other platforms through which people can be taught to disbelieve information from a “distrusted” source. The platforms themselves already use the very devices Ofcom studies — labels, warnings, prompts — to nudge users’ behaviour.
Now the government is moving to lock another restriction on free speech into place. In June, it published a 94-page green paper called “Watch This Space,” proposing legislation by next year that would require social media platforms to make news from supposedly “trustworthy” providers easily discoverable. Ministers insist this is “crucial for countering misinformation.” The paper itself acknowledges that online news has allowed a much wider range of independent commentators to reach audiences previously dominated by established broadcasters and newspapers. But it worries that trusted providers are losing their capacity to shape public debate. Think about what that actually means. The government is contemplating using law to affect the hierarchy of news online. Some sources would receive preferential prominence on no greater objective grounds than that they satisfy an official definition of trustworthiness, while an increasingly elaborate regulatory structure simultaneously decides how misinformation should be identified and countered. David Rose, research director of the Free Speech Union, has described the programme as the most far-reaching machinery for controlling public speech Britain has seen in peacetime since the seventeenth century. He has also challenged the quality of the research being used to justify the supposed misinformation emergency. Days after his article appeared, Andy Burnham told the UN General Assembly that he had tasked security chiefs with developing a National Centre for Information Defence to detect and disrupt hostile state information attacks. Russian operations involving forged articles, fake websites, and impersonation of British institutions are certainly a legitimate security concern, and there are already agencies and initiatives working to counter them. But the Prime Minister went further. He accused foreign actors of promoting a “negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain” and said that narrative had been allowed too much ground. The proposed centre’s stated remit is hostile state activity, not domestic opinion. Still, when a prime minister describes an unwelcome account of national life in the same breath as foreign information warfare, the test for separating deception from dissent becomes all the more important.
The BBC is central to this new architecture. Its current royal charter expires at the end of 2027, and Burnham’s government is now deciding what will replace it. The Charter Review green paper, published in December 2025, describes the corporation as “uniquely placed to support a balanced and trusted news environment,” while presenting misinformation and disinformation as threats to democratic cohesion. These are not yet binding charter obligations, but they are the government’s declared direction of travel. And the green paper admits that trust in BBC News has fallen by fifteen percentage points since 2018, and that serious editorial failures have damaged confidence in the corporation. For twenty-seven years, the monitoring unit News-watch has documented a BBC complaints system in which the corporation is effectively its own judge and jury. From the start of the present charter in 2017 to the end of 2025, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit upheld or partly upheld only thirty-eight cases about due impartiality. In the same period, Ofcom — supposedly the independent external safeguard — has found the BBC in breach of its impartiality rules only once. That is a system almost perfectly insulated against challenge. BBC Verify, set up to tackle disinformation and accuracy, takes the process another step. The corporation increasingly casts itself not merely as a reporter of events, but as an arbiter of what is true, misleading, or deprived of context. Such judgments may be legitimate when they affect a television bulletin. They acquire a wholly different significance when the BBC is simultaneously elevating itself to a pillar of an officially “trusted” news structure intended to combat misinformation across the wider public debate. In an interview broadcast on 27 September, the director-general Matt Brittin made the BBC’s ambition explicit. He said BBC news content should appear on Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram, as part of what he called “disinfecting misinformation.” “It’s our job to be everywhere,” he said. Distribution across those services is one thing; treating the BBC’s own journalism as the disinfectant for the entire information environment is another. Combined with the green paper’s proposal to favour officially “trustworthy” news, it would extend the reach of a corporation whose impartiality record is so poorly tested by independent scrutiny.
Other organisations helping to define this territory are not politically neutral. On 11 September, the government confirmed that the leftist Centre for Countering Digital Hate had participated in official-level DCMS roundtables on online-harms policy in both 2024 and 2026. The group campaigns actively for stronger measures against material and platforms it regards as harmful. Meanwhile, News-watch has hit a brick wall in trying to establish the full scale of Ofcom’s operation. A Freedom of Information request sought basic facts: the organisations participating in Making Sense of Media, the membership of its advisory, steering, and expert groups, grants and contracts since January 2023, governance documents, and a stakeholder map or organisational chart. Ofcom disclosed that around seven hundred individuals were signed up to the network, but refused to identify them. It did not provide the requested list of participating organisations, said it held no stakeholder map or organisational chart, and supplied only a partial picture of the programme’s governance. It did provide a spreadsheet of thirty-two contracts worth more than three million pounds, but the response still left News-watch unable to establish the financial scale, reach, and relationships of the operation. A request for fuller disclosure is currently being considered by Ofcom. This resistance to scrutiny adds hugely to concerns about the project. Ofcom has spent seven years building an enormous infrastructure under the innocuous label of “media literacy” without real parliamentary debate. Now legislation, BBC charter reform, and Ofcom’s post-Online Safety Act powers are on the edge of consolidating it. The danger is that this becomes hard-wired into delegated, unaccountable power. Parliament may approve broad words such as safety, trust, and media literacy. But the decisions that make those words bite can be taken elsewhere — in Ofcom codes, advisory committees, BBC editorial procedures, research programmes, agreements with technology companies, and the algorithms and interventions governing online platforms. The people making those decisions are not elected, and most of their work is not even visible to the public.
George Orwell’s great insight in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that political control does not begin only with banning ideas. It begins with controlling the language through which ideas can be expressed and understood. Words like “denier,” “harm,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “trusted” can become the vocabulary through which that process operates. Outright censorship becomes almost unnecessary. An argument can remain perfectly legal while being attacked, discredited, labelled, downgraded, deprived of reach, and eventually dropped down an oubliette where only the determined will find it. Ofcom has built much of the infrastructure, and Google, TikTok, and other giants give it extraordinary reach. The BBC is being prepared for a larger role as guarantor of “trusted” information. Andy Burnham’s government is now processing the legislative framework that could lock the pieces together. None of this is inevitable. The authorities are not proposing to march anyone to prison for wrongthink. But the slow, incremental construction of a system for policing what counts as acceptable opinion is something citizens should watch with the greatest unease. The real question is not whether foreign disinformation is a threat — it is. The question is whether a democratic society can fight that threat without turning its own regulators, broadcasters, and platforms into censors of legitimate dissent. The machinery described in this article is already half-built. It is powered by good intentions, funded by public money, and wrapped in the language of safety, trust, and literacy. But its foundation is the belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted to navigate a complex information environment without official guidance about what to believe. That is not media literacy. It is a quiet transformation of public life, and it deserves far more attention than it has so far received.