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Misinformation about Misinformation

14 September 2026

By David Rose

The Government’s case for regulating online misinformation rests on a review that cost taxpayers almost half a million pounds, relied on AI summaries of 228 unread papers, and ignored contradictory peer-reviewed research.

The British Government is preparing an apparatus of internet censorship without precedent in the modern era: statutory “quality signals” in content ranking, a state-linked database of “false and misleading narratives”, official “prebunking” across education and public communications, and a Green Paper proposal that social media algorithms be forced to give prominence to news sources the state deems “trustworthy”. Ofcom holds a crisis protocol in readiness for the next emergency.

The case rests on two claims: that misinformation saturates the internet and inflicts grave harm, and that platform algorithms are the engine of it. Tested against primary sources and the peer-reviewed literature, the evidential base for both fails.

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Summary of findings

The proposals come from a lobby with close ties to government

These proposals are the demands of a small, interconnected ecosystem of campaign groups, consultancies, self-appointed fact-checkers, former broadcasters and parliamentarians, whose recommendations are always more censorship. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate was co-founded by Morgan McSweeney, later Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff; after Southport it chaired an “emergency” roundtable with officials from DSIT, the Home Office, Ofcom and the Metropolitan Police. The Global Disinformation Index has been funded by the Foreign Office. When the Government commissioned a review to prove the problem was real, members of the same lobby served as its “expert” reviewers.

The Government’s evidence review is itself a case study in misinformation

The GO-Science review, commissioned to supply the “full evidence base” ministers admitted they lacked, cost taxpayers almost half a million pounds. Its authors made no attempt to establish what is true or false, relying instead on AI-generated summaries of 228 papers they had not read and on monthly questionnaires returned to the European Digital Media Observatory by fact-checkers. Its claim that platform algorithms are “exclusively profit- and engagement-driven” rests on a single citation: an AI-assisted synthesis from Universitas Muhammadiyah Buton, an Indonesian institution ranked 10,370th in the world.

Listen: Andrew Doyle: New “Misinformation” Plan by Government Advisors Is Deeply Orwellian, That’s Debatable, 5 August 2026

Accurate mainstream reporting drove more vaccine hesitancy than flagged misinformation

A 2024 study in Science found that misinformation flagged by fact-checkers attracted just 0.3% of 2.7 billion vaccine-related views on Facebook during the rollout. Unflagged “vaccine-skeptical” content containing no falsehoods had 46 times the aggregate impact on vaccination intentions, and the most influential single item was an accurate Chicago Tribune article, seen by more than 50 million people. A 2024 synthesis in Nature found exposure to misinformation far smaller than supposed: “fake news” accounts for roughly 0.15% of the average American’s daily media diet.

Algorithms do not favour extremes, and conspiracy belief is not rising

Twitter’s own researchers, studying millions of accounts, found no evidence that its algorithm favoured the far left or the far right over moderate voices. A landmark Facebook experiment found the algorithm served less untrustworthy content than a simple chronological feed. And a study of 46 conspiracist beliefs, tracked in national surveys since 1966, found no evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is rising: significant declines outnumbered increases.

Only a third of adults associate the BBC with impartiality

Ofcom’s Media Nations 2026 report found that only 33% of adults associate the BBC – the state’s exemplar of trustworthiness – with impartiality, and 45% with trustworthiness. Recent events, such as the doctoring of a Donald Trump speech by Panorama and Ofcom’s critical ruling on a Gaza documentary, suggest the public may have a point.

Why it matters

“Misinformation” is being redefined as dissent. For the CCDH, the GDI and the GO-Science review, it is “misinformation” to treat the pace and cost of decarbonisation as matters of economic and political judgement rather than physics. The Global Disinformation Index pronounced “clearly untrue” a vaccine statistic drawn from Public Health England’s own data, then set about persuading advertisers to defund the publisher; its chief executive has explained that content can be “factually accurate but still extremely harmful”. Whoever controls the label controls the debate, and Britain has seen nothing like these proposals since the Star Chamber decreed in 1637 that nothing be published unless licensed.

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