Democratic Institutions: Threats

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for procuring this important debate. I will focus my comments on the acceleration of the dissemination of disinformation which we are seeing in our media. I believe that is having an effect on public trust, and I would like to think about what can be done about it.

This week, I read with great interest the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, which looked at news consumption in 45 markets globally. All the markets showed a huge increase in consumption of news from social media and AI chatbots and, with it, a massive increase in distrust about news from these sources, caused by myths, disinformation and deepfakes. The search found that the US, which has seen the biggest increase in social media news consumption, has only 25% of audiences saying they trust news from all sources.

What I found interesting was what is happening in Germany, France and the UK, where there is high trust in news from public service broadcasters. In the UK, while the trust in social media was low, trust in the PSBs and the Financial Times was at nearly 60%, although I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, that there are large groups who do not trust the BBC and our other public service media.

It is therefore not surprising that a study by the European Broadcasting Union found that AI news summaries misrepresented the news 45% of the time, stating opinion as fact and producing what the tech bros call “hallucinations”, and what I imagine noble Lords would call lies.

Inevitably, AI is used increasingly by all news services, including our own public service broadcasters such as the BBC. However, unlike commercial AI, which is driven by profit and engagement, the BBC has a set of AI principles that are driven by editorial values, upholding trust, respect and inclusivity, and, most importantly, its AI output is checked by a human before it is published.

As other noble Lords have said, this is happening in the midst of a propaganda war fought by many bad actors, but the main players are Russia and China, which are estimated to spend up £8 billion annually on public disinformation, which is fed into social media and video-sharing platforms.

The best way of fighting back is not just for users to be educated in how to treat disinformation critically but to explain how the disinformation is generated. It is important not only that the BBC and other trusted news sources correct stories which are misinformation but that they show users how to spot this misinformation. For instance, the Southport riots last year were instigated in large part by a huge uptick in social media falsely claiming that the attacker was an asylum seeker. As part of the BBC’s Bitesize series, “Other Side of the Story” explained where the false posts had come from and how they had been amplified by the manosphere’s Andrew Tate. By linking in search the keywords “Southport”, “Muslim” and “asylum”, these posts were given emotional charge and a much higher online engagement.

These explainers are generated by the BBC’s unique Verify service of 60 digital journalists who use forensic digital technology to build audience trust by fact checking, verifying images and countering disinformation using advanced data analysis such as tracing the source of an image and looking at similarities in an account’s store of images. They are also looking for tiny inconsistencies. I was shown the image of an AI-generated man; if you looked carefully, you could see that he had six fingers—some clue there. They can also spot digital AI signifiers, which are invisible to the naked eye. Ofcom found Verify to be the most used fact checker in the country. These Bitesize videos were originally aimed at young digital users but are now a crucial weapon for combating disinformation.

The BBC has made a valiant attempt to counter disinformation, but more resources and political drive need to be made available to both it and other public service media to support these efforts. That is why I welcome the Government’s new policy paper Watch this Space, which recognises the role played by the BBC in providing a healthy information environment. It is encouraging to read in the paper that audiences are more likely to engage with media literacy programmes delivered by organisations they trust. Can the Minister confirm that she agrees with the suggestion in the paper of a duty which requires public service media to set out their plans for media literacy strategy, and can she say whether she supports the public service media taking the lead in this literacy campaign?

At the same time, the BBC is putting forward its response to the charter review Green Paper on whether media literacy across the country should become one of its public purposes. This, combined with the media literacy action plan, is crucial if digital users are going effectively to confront the new world of disinformation online.

At the same time, the Online Safety Act could be revisited to bring it more in line with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to conduct a risk assessment of how their services affect civic discourse. The OSA asks, “Is this piece of content harmful to this user?”, whereas the DSA has a much further reach, asking the platform, “Is your system design generating societal-level harms regardless of any individual post?”

Unfortunately, the DSA has left too much responsibility up to the platforms. They are allowed to carry out their own audit of their own systemic risk assessment and often conclude their systems are fine. If Parliament looks again at the Online Safety Act, it will have to assess the societal threats posed by many platforms. Ofcom needs to set the parameters of the risk assessments and audit their compliance. I believe that is what Parliament intended when the OSA was discussed in this Chamber in 2023.

The fight against disinformation is so important to maintaining our democracy and our way of life, but I believe that, with determined government action, it is a battle we can fight, and fight successfully.