I know what this looks like, the government wants to make sure you read its narrative on everything first.

And I'm sure it will be abused for that.

But there is actually another, more genuine, reason for wanting it. We have a huge problem with misinformation in the UK. Much of it coming from Russia, and the far right, and grifters. It's actually quite lucrative, and devastatingly effective.

It's 10 years since the Brexit vote today. The amount of misinformation is hard to comprehend. Even today, people still believe those lies. Even back then, we were decades into debunking some of them. One of the biggest liars, Boris Johnson, transitioned from publishing lies in newspapers to telling lies as Prime Minister. Misinformation became the most effective political strategy.

This probably isn't the right way to go about it, but I also find it hard to believe that e.g. Facebook can't label Russia trolls easily enough. Whenever information leaks from those sites, the fake Russian accounts are very easy to spot. Twitter had to remove their public location information because as soon as they enabled it everyone noticed that many of the top accounts were Russian, pretending to be European or American.

Tinkering with social media is not a good idea. Current social media business models should be completely banned, for everyone.

A social media platform should be forced to operate as follows:

1. On the main timeline, it must only show content from people or groups that the user explicitly follows. The only way you should be shown content you don't follow is if you explicitly search for it.

2. Content must be shown in reverse-chronological order, so when you see something you've seen before, you know you've also seen everything after it.

3. Advertising and sponsored posts should be prohibited.

4. The only acceptable way to raise revenue should be subscription fees. Facebook makes around $3 to $5/month per user; that would be an appropriate range of subscription fees. This would make bot armies economically infeasible.

Regulating social media in this way would eliminate 95% of the harmful aspects. It's a simple matter of product safety regulation.

we should just keep the status quo and let social media companies pit everyone against each other with fake news.

I think we live in an age where you can't really trust any "Trusted" news media. Bigger and older doesn't make it trusted. It just means the state and the media are holding hands together while they screw you.

I fully understand what they are going for. And I also think it would be a great idea. The issue I see is, who decides what is "trusted". The US is showing that it takes 1 asshole to get power to completely upend everything. When UK Trump gets elected and decides the only "trusted" news sites are the ones that report nice things about him, how do you stop that? At this point, everything has to consider what happens if a bad actor gets power because we can see how bad it can be.

The solution is not censorship.

Free speech is too important to do this. The correct response to bad speech is good speech.

The power of the state to silence its critics--even in part--is just too great a temptation.

You're in good hands cuz the BBC doesnt have any bias and always gets the story right. So whats the harm? /s

In practice, if the government is in control, only news favorable to the government will be allowed

I'm basically forced to pay the bbc each month because opting out requires a lot of diligence and harassment. Technically even just visiting a news website might accidentally expose you to a "live tv" feed.