Television used to make prominence wonderfully literal.
The important broadcaster received a low channel number. The local
news was already there when someone turned on the set. If a regulator
wanted public-service programming to remain easy to find, it could point
to an actual place on an actual menu.
Social media has no channel one.
It has a different front page for every person, rebuilt after every
swipe by systems that consider viewing history, location, subscriptions,
shares and whatever kept millions of strangers staring yesterday
afternoon. There is no single shelf where a government can place
reliable news.
Britain is considering trying anyway.
A UK government green paper proposes giving public-service
broadcasters and other trusted news providers greater prominence on
platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Meta’s services. The idea returned
to the headlines on September 7 when the US government criticized it as
government interference with online speech, according to The
Guardian.
The American complaint is politically loaded. It still points toward
a real design problem.
Making trustworthy reporting easier to find sounds sensible. Deciding
that an algorithm must favour officially recognized publishers is not
merely a technical adjustment. It is a choice about whose work gets the
digital equivalent of the best channel number—and whose gets moved
farther down the guide.
The television rule enters
the feed
The British proposal begins with a reasonable diagnosis.
Young audiences have not stopped watching video or following news;
they have moved toward platforms that traditional broadcasters do not
control. The government’s media
green paper says video-sharing and streaming services accounted for
74 percent of video time among people aged 16 to 24 in 2024–25. YouTube
is now the most-watched service among British children aged four to 15,
while more than half of adults include social media among the ways they
receive news.
Public broadcasters cannot fulfil much of a public mission when the
public no longer passes their front door.
Ofcom reached a similar conclusion in 2025, arguing that
public-service content—especially news and children’s programming—should
be prominent
and easy to find on YouTube. Britain’s Media Act already establishes
prominence rules for certain connected-TV platforms. Extending the
principle toward social video can look like updating an old obligation
for a new screen.
The difficulty is that a television menu and a recommendation feed
perform different jobs.
A menu helps viewers locate something they have chosen. A feed
predicts what they might choose next. Requiring BBC iPlayer to appear
near the top of a smart-TV home screen resembles reserving space in a
shopping centre. Requiring BBC clips to appear more often in
personalized recommendations resembles telling the shopkeeper what to
place in each customer’s basket.
That does not make it censorship in the ordinary sense. Independent
creators would not be prohibited from uploading or criticizing the
government. But attention is finite. Every recommended public-broadcast
clip occupies a position another video could have received.
Creators are therefore justified in asking whether “prominence” means
genuine access or an invisible transfer of reach toward organizations
that already possess studios, recognizable brands and public
funding.
Trusted
is a useful word until someone must define it
The proposal also inherits the messiest question in modern media: who
counts as trustworthy?
The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 operate under standards and accountability
structures that do not apply to a person broadcasting from a spare
bedroom. That distinction matters during an election, emergency or
outbreak of dangerous misinformation. Professional newsrooms can still
make serious mistakes, but they employ editors, publish corrections and
have addresses where legal letters can arrive.
Yet institutional status is not the same thing as permanent
reliability. A small independent newsroom can produce exceptional
reporting. A famous broadcaster can get a story wrong. A rule based
mainly on organizational category risks confusing a publisher’s history
with the quality of every item it publishes.
The alternative—having governments certify trustworthy stories one by
one—would be considerably worse.
This is why the most defensible version of prominence would operate
more like access than endorsement. Platforms could provide clear
public-service sections, reliable emergency information, transparent
search labels and user-selectable news modes without quietly inserting
preferred publishers into every entertainment feed. People could choose
a public-interest recommendation layer rather than having one blended
invisibly into the algorithm.
Transparency is essential. If a video appears because a legal
prominence rule boosted it, the platform should say so. Governments
should publish eligibility criteria, offer an appeals process and
include qualified digital-native and local outlets rather than
protecting only the broadcasters that existed before YouTube.
Canada should recognize the argument. The CRTC’s 2026
discoverability framework expects online services to improve the
availability, prominence and measurement of Canadian and Indigenous
programming. It uses flexible outcomes rather than one standardized
algorithmic command, partly because platforms and audiences do not all
work the same way.
That Canadian policy is aimed primarily at cultural discoverability,
not Britain’s specific trusted-news proposal. Still, both countries are
wrestling with the same underlying fact: recommendation systems have
become cultural infrastructure while remaining privately designed,
commercially optimized and largely invisible.
Leaving those systems entirely to technology companies is not
neutral. YouTube and TikTok already decide what receives prominence;
their rules simply answer to engagement, advertising and business
strategy instead of a public mandate. “Let the algorithm decide” means
letting a corporation decide through an algorithm.
The answer is not to pretend government influence is automatically
pure. It is to make both forms of power easier to see.
Public media deserves a fair route into the places where the public
now spends its time. Independent creators deserve more than the
remaining crumbs after legacy broadcasters receive reserved algorithmic
seating. Users deserve to know why something is being recommended and to
adjust the priorities themselves.
The old television guide could put a trusted broadcaster on channel
one because everyone understood where channel one was.
Before governments reserve that position in a social feed, they
should have to show us where it is.
