Owen, all that is needed is a constitutional requirement that all political and media communications be "fair, clear, and not misleading" - copied verbatim from UK financial services law about advertising. Just google "fca handbook advertising rules" and you will see.
As you say, there is a problem, and the government's proposal is the wrong solution. My solution protects our rights, puts paid to disinformation, and makes the social media outfits liable for accuracy.
This is typical of the present UK government, and I’ve no doubt would be approved of by the tory, reform, and restore parties. They appear to be the political parties pushed by the establishment, elite,and epstein class. All of them want to be able to lie more easily, by controlling journalism. They do not like the fact that people know already that they control mainstream media, and also don’t like the fact that therefore many of the population now get their news via independent journalists. This is their answer; to curtail personal choice in the way that they are already limiting our rights to free speech, juries in courts, and to protest. As you say, this is extremely dangerous. We all see police brutality against pro-Palestinians. Most people are able to tell right from wrong, and know absolutely that genocide is wrong. Despite that the government persists in its abominable choice to support two terrorist pariahs - the usa and israel. Anyone sane knows that this decision is both unacceptable, and insupportable. No doubt this idea was proposed by them. I will be most surprised too if it is rejected by burnham. The UK is being moved towards authoritarianism; this must be stopped.
Jacques Rancière, Owen Jones, and the Politics of Visibility
At first glance, Owen Jones's concern appears to be one of censorship. Yet what is at stake is arguably something both subtler and more fundamental than the suppression of speech itself.
Jacques Rancière's distinction between the police and politics provides a useful framework. His "police" does not refer principally to the uniformed constabulary or to criminal law. Rather, it denotes the entire social and institutional order that determines what may legitimately appear within public life. The police order allocates places, identities and competences. It determines who is recognised as a credible speaker, whose words count as knowledge, and whose utterances are dismissed as noise.
This ordering of visibility is what Rancière famously calls the distribution of the sensible: the historically contingent arrangement through which society decides what can be seen, heard, thought and regarded as politically meaningful.
The proposed reforms outlined in the Government's Green Paper may therefore be understood not primarily as a question of censorship but as a possible reconfiguration of that distribution. They do not propose to prohibit Owen Jones from publishing videos, nor do they contemplate deleting independent channels. Rather, they envisage giving recognised "trusted" news organisations preferential algorithmic visibility within search, recommendation systems and social media feeds.
The distinction is crucial. Speech may remain formally free while becoming progressively less visible. In the digital public sphere, algorithmic prominence increasingly functions as the condition of effective publicity. One need not silence a voice if one can ensure that comparatively few people ever encounter it.
Jones therefore fears not juridical prohibition but algorithmic marginalisation. His language of "disappearing" should be understood in this relative rather than literal sense. Independent journalists may continue to speak while finding themselves increasingly displaced by institutions accorded privileged discoverability.
From a Rancièrian perspective, this is indeed a political question, for politics concerns precisely those moments when the established distribution of visibility is interrupted.
Yet Rancière also complicates Jones' narrative. The contemporary police order is not constituted by the state alone. Long before the publication of the Green Paper, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and Google had already become immensely powerful distributors of the sensible. Their proprietary algorithms continually determine which voices acquire audiences, which disappear into obscurity, and which forms of discourse become culturally salient. The existing order is therefore already algorithmically policed, albeit by private corporations rather than by public institutions.
The Green Paper thus represents not the creation of algorithmic ordering but a proposal to alter its governing principles. The resulting conflict is less a simple opposition between freedom and censorship than a contest between different authorities claiming legitimacy over the architecture of public visibility.
This observation also helps reconcile two positions adopted by Owen Jones that might otherwise appear contradictory.
Writing after his violent assault in 2020, Jones argued that the physical attack upon him represented only the visible endpoint of a much larger infrastructure of far-right radicalisation. The individual assailants, he maintained, were the manifestation of broader political, media and online ecosystems that normalised hatred and mobilised violence. Society, he argued, had both the right and the obligation to dismantle those infrastructures.
His present objection is directed not against the existence of regulation as such, but against the possibility that regulatory powers intended to counter extremist mobilisation may evolve into instruments that privilege established institutions over independent dissent. There is therefore no necessary inconsistency. The distinction he attempts to maintain is between disrupting organised campaigns of racist mobilisation and granting governments the authority to determine which political voices deserve enhanced visibility.
Whether that distinction can be maintained institutionally remains the difficult question.
The historical circumstances in which the Green Paper emerged are themselves significant. The British Government was responding to genuine episodes of digitally amplified disorder, including the far-right riots that followed the Southport murders. Few would deny that online recommendation systems can accelerate misinformation, panic and coordinated mobilisation. The problem identified by the Government is therefore real.
The unresolved question concerns the remedy.
Who should determine what constitutes a trustworthy publisher? By what criteria? Subject to whose oversight? And what safeguards remain should future governments inherit the same regulatory machinery?
These are not merely technical questions of media policy. They concern the constitutional distribution of political visibility itself.
For Rancière, democracy is not the peaceful administration of consensus. It is the recurring appearance of dissensus: those moments when individuals or groups excluded from the established order make themselves visible as political subjects and thereby contest the existing distribution of the sensible.
Independent journalism often performs precisely this function. It introduces voices, experiences and interpretations that established institutions have neglected, marginalised or rendered inaudible. In Jones' own understanding of his work, this includes Palestinians, anti-war Israelis, dissident Iranians, critical economists and others who occupy little space within conventional British political journalism.
Whether one agrees with Jones' conclusions is ultimately secondary. The deeper constitutional issue is whether a democratic polity should permit its architecture of public visibility to become increasingly dependent upon classifications of officially recognised trustworthiness. Every political community must distinguish between journalism and fabrication, between criticism and incitement. Yet every attempt to stabilise those distinctions also risks narrowing the space within which genuine dissensus can emerge.
The danger is therefore neither that every critic will be silenced nor that every regulator acts in bad faith. It is that the mechanisms designed to protect democratic discourse may gradually become part of the very police order whose legitimacy democratic politics periodically exists to contest.
Owen, all that is needed is a constitutional requirement that all political and media communications be "fair, clear, and not misleading" - copied verbatim from UK financial services law about advertising. Just google "fca handbook advertising rules" and you will see.
As you say, there is a problem, and the government's proposal is the wrong solution. My solution protects our rights, puts paid to disinformation, and makes the social media outfits liable for accuracy.
This is typical of the present UK government, and I’ve no doubt would be approved of by the tory, reform, and restore parties. They appear to be the political parties pushed by the establishment, elite,and epstein class. All of them want to be able to lie more easily, by controlling journalism. They do not like the fact that people know already that they control mainstream media, and also don’t like the fact that therefore many of the population now get their news via independent journalists. This is their answer; to curtail personal choice in the way that they are already limiting our rights to free speech, juries in courts, and to protest. As you say, this is extremely dangerous. We all see police brutality against pro-Palestinians. Most people are able to tell right from wrong, and know absolutely that genocide is wrong. Despite that the government persists in its abominable choice to support two terrorist pariahs - the usa and israel. Anyone sane knows that this decision is both unacceptable, and insupportable. No doubt this idea was proposed by them. I will be most surprised too if it is rejected by burnham. The UK is being moved towards authoritarianism; this must be stopped.
Jacques Rancière, Owen Jones, and the Politics of Visibility
At first glance, Owen Jones's concern appears to be one of censorship. Yet what is at stake is arguably something both subtler and more fundamental than the suppression of speech itself.
Jacques Rancière's distinction between the police and politics provides a useful framework. His "police" does not refer principally to the uniformed constabulary or to criminal law. Rather, it denotes the entire social and institutional order that determines what may legitimately appear within public life. The police order allocates places, identities and competences. It determines who is recognised as a credible speaker, whose words count as knowledge, and whose utterances are dismissed as noise.
This ordering of visibility is what Rancière famously calls the distribution of the sensible: the historically contingent arrangement through which society decides what can be seen, heard, thought and regarded as politically meaningful.
The proposed reforms outlined in the Government's Green Paper may therefore be understood not primarily as a question of censorship but as a possible reconfiguration of that distribution. They do not propose to prohibit Owen Jones from publishing videos, nor do they contemplate deleting independent channels. Rather, they envisage giving recognised "trusted" news organisations preferential algorithmic visibility within search, recommendation systems and social media feeds.
The distinction is crucial. Speech may remain formally free while becoming progressively less visible. In the digital public sphere, algorithmic prominence increasingly functions as the condition of effective publicity. One need not silence a voice if one can ensure that comparatively few people ever encounter it.
Jones therefore fears not juridical prohibition but algorithmic marginalisation. His language of "disappearing" should be understood in this relative rather than literal sense. Independent journalists may continue to speak while finding themselves increasingly displaced by institutions accorded privileged discoverability.
From a Rancièrian perspective, this is indeed a political question, for politics concerns precisely those moments when the established distribution of visibility is interrupted.
Yet Rancière also complicates Jones' narrative. The contemporary police order is not constituted by the state alone. Long before the publication of the Green Paper, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and Google had already become immensely powerful distributors of the sensible. Their proprietary algorithms continually determine which voices acquire audiences, which disappear into obscurity, and which forms of discourse become culturally salient. The existing order is therefore already algorithmically policed, albeit by private corporations rather than by public institutions.
The Green Paper thus represents not the creation of algorithmic ordering but a proposal to alter its governing principles. The resulting conflict is less a simple opposition between freedom and censorship than a contest between different authorities claiming legitimacy over the architecture of public visibility.
This observation also helps reconcile two positions adopted by Owen Jones that might otherwise appear contradictory.
Writing after his violent assault in 2020, Jones argued that the physical attack upon him represented only the visible endpoint of a much larger infrastructure of far-right radicalisation. The individual assailants, he maintained, were the manifestation of broader political, media and online ecosystems that normalised hatred and mobilised violence. Society, he argued, had both the right and the obligation to dismantle those infrastructures.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/what-my-attackers-conviction-taught-me-about-far-right
His present objection is directed not against the existence of regulation as such, but against the possibility that regulatory powers intended to counter extremist mobilisation may evolve into instruments that privilege established institutions over independent dissent. There is therefore no necessary inconsistency. The distinction he attempts to maintain is between disrupting organised campaigns of racist mobilisation and granting governments the authority to determine which political voices deserve enhanced visibility.
Whether that distinction can be maintained institutionally remains the difficult question.
The historical circumstances in which the Green Paper emerged are themselves significant. The British Government was responding to genuine episodes of digitally amplified disorder, including the far-right riots that followed the Southport murders. Few would deny that online recommendation systems can accelerate misinformation, panic and coordinated mobilisation. The problem identified by the Government is therefore real.
The unresolved question concerns the remedy.
Who should determine what constitutes a trustworthy publisher? By what criteria? Subject to whose oversight? And what safeguards remain should future governments inherit the same regulatory machinery?
These are not merely technical questions of media policy. They concern the constitutional distribution of political visibility itself.
For Rancière, democracy is not the peaceful administration of consensus. It is the recurring appearance of dissensus: those moments when individuals or groups excluded from the established order make themselves visible as political subjects and thereby contest the existing distribution of the sensible.
Independent journalism often performs precisely this function. It introduces voices, experiences and interpretations that established institutions have neglected, marginalised or rendered inaudible. In Jones' own understanding of his work, this includes Palestinians, anti-war Israelis, dissident Iranians, critical economists and others who occupy little space within conventional British political journalism.
Whether one agrees with Jones' conclusions is ultimately secondary. The deeper constitutional issue is whether a democratic polity should permit its architecture of public visibility to become increasingly dependent upon classifications of officially recognised trustworthiness. Every political community must distinguish between journalism and fabrication, between criticism and incitement. Yet every attempt to stabilise those distinctions also risks narrowing the space within which genuine dissensus can emerge.
The danger is therefore neither that every critic will be silenced nor that every regulator acts in bad faith. It is that the mechanisms designed to protect democratic discourse may gradually become part of the very police order whose legitimacy democratic politics periodically exists to contest.