Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon has delivered an impassioned call for urgent joint industry action and new regulation to ensure young people can find verified, independent news easily on social media.
It follows the publication of new research that reveals the scale of the challenges facing Gen Z in an era where platforms have “publicly announced a wanton abandonment of the pursuit of truth”.
Mahon was speaking at a joint Channel 4 and Royal Television Society event in London, where she revealed the findings of Channel 4’s latest landmark study into 13-27-year-olds.
Mahon said that the UK is better positioned than most other countries – with “spectacular advantages” given the world-leading regulatory structure that underpins Public Service Media – but stressed that urgent action is required to ensure this “brilliant, vibrant, creative” generation has “a Britain they can trust in”.
She called for wider regulatory action because “global platforms are dominant” and have no legal requirement to take responsibility for what they publish; and “defenders of truth are always on the back foot” because “lying is more exciting and fiction travels faster than fact”.
“We must start thinking about objective truth and validated news as a public good,” Mahon said. “We need to ensure they are present on new platforms, rather than see them as compensating for a market failure that we regulate for on the old platforms.”
Mahon offered three major solutions to counter false information online; a trustmark as an indicator of factual, trusted accuracy for content that emerges from professionally produced, regulated media; regulation for PSM content to be prominent on social media platforms, like the prominence given to PSBs on Smart TVs; and regulation that supports PSM to shape AI.
Mahon also highlighted four ways that the change in consumption by platform impacts what is consumed: short form means less detail; speed means less context; the algorithms move the salacious faster to the top of feeds; solo viewing reduces socialisation of points of view, therefore reducing the likelihood that radical or socially destructive perspectives will be questioned.
