Who Runs Britain's Town Square? Why the UK Needs Its Own Social Media
Dr North discusses the possibility of the UK building a social media platform free from US control.
The internet was supposed to be decentralised and put power back in the hands of the people. Two decades later, the power to control our public conversation is in the hands of private American corporations and volatile billionaires. Meta decides what you see when you log in each morning. X, under Elon Musk’s ketamine addled stewardship, has become a place where disinformation and misinformation travels faster than corrections and fact checking ever can. TikTok raises legitimate questions about data sovereignty and foreign influence. And yet, in the UK—a country with a globally recognisable and well trusted public broadcasting tradition, thriving digital sectors, and the belief (often not enforced) in accountable institutions—there is no serious stake in, or alternative to, the platforms where millions of us get our information and live a significant portion of their public and political lives.
That needs to change. And there is an organisation capable of this sitting in plain sight: the BBC.
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The Private Sector Has Not Delivered Solutions
The stakes of this debate are not abstract. During recent years, disinformation campaigns around Brexit, Covid-19, and multiple general elections spread primarily through privately-owned social platforms with no meaningful accountability to British law, British users, or British democratic norms. Whenever the government presses these companies to act, it is threatened, lobbied, or obfuscated by billionaires and their minions. When Parliament summons their executives to give evidence, the sessions became theatrical and demonstrate just how little leverage the British state has over the infrastructure that dictates much of our public debate.
The 2023 Online Safety Act was an attempt to impose some legal duties on platforms. It was also an admission of defeat. Rather than building something better, the UK chose to trust that billionaires would act better. Do you feel people are safer on the internet now than they were in 2023? That is not a strategy. It is managed decline.
Meanwhile, our data—the raw material of targeted advertising, political profiling, and behavioural manipulation—gets extracted out of the country and enriches companies that don’t pay their taxes here, employ relatively few people here, and feel no obligation to serve the British public interest.
The Answer Is a UK Platform
What would a publicly owned, UK-based social media platform actually offer? Several things that current private platforms don’t:
1. Genuine accountability. A British platform would be subject to British law in a meaningful sense, not through the clumsy reach of regulators who can fine Meta an amount that equates to pocket change, but through direct institutional accountability to Parliament, Ofcom, and ultimately us, the public.
2. Data protection with teeth. UK user data would remain under British jurisdiction, subject to the protections of domestic law rather than trusting foreign companies will act in trustworthy ways. This matters not just for privacy but for national security.
3. Editorial standards without editorial control. One of the core dilemmas of social media governance is the tension between free expression and harm prevention. A public institution would not be censoring speech; it would be applying the same editorial and regulatory principles that supposedly govern British broadcasting. It wouldn’t be perfect, but at least we’d have the power to refine our own principles, and they’d be subject to challenge and appeal.
4. Investment in British digital infrastructure. A serious UK platform would require engineering talent, data centres, content moderation teams, and product development. Those are skilled jobs, based here, contributing to the economy.
Why the BBC Model Makes Sense
Let’s be clear, the BBC is an imperfect institution. Nobody would pretend otherwise. It has been criticised from left and right, accused of bias in every direction, and periodically dragged into political controversies that have damaged its reputation. But its underlying architecture as independent of both government and commercial pressure, funded by the public, accountable through a governance structure with genuine independence is one of Britain’s most distinctive and valuable contributions to democratic life. Versions of it have been adopted across the world precisely because it works.
A publicly owned social media platform need not be run by the BBC itself. There are good arguments for a separate institution with its own charter and governance. But the principles of the BBC model apply directly: public funding, independence from day-to-day ministerial control, a statutory obligation to serve the public interest, and an Ofcom-style regulator with real powers.
Additionally, the BBC has millions of terabytes of data that is ready to be incorporated into a platform like this. Not only would it provide a public square, but a place to advertise and publicise BBC content.
This would not be a platform that tells people what to think. It would be a platform designed around what people actually need: reliable information, genuine connection, a space where public debate can happen without being algorithmically manipulated toward outrage because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives advertising revenue.
That is the fundamental problem with commercial social media. Its business model is structurally hostile to a healthy public square. Platforms make money by keeping you scrolling, and the most reliable way to do that is to make you angry or anxious. This creates a terrible user experience, which has been described as “Enshittification”.
A publicly owned platform, freed from that incentive, could be designed around entirely different goals and actually providing an excellent user experience, rather than pure profit extraction. We have already discussed the benefits of public ownership on the Rose.
The Objections, and Why They Don’t Stack Up
What are the objections? Critics might raise three objections.
1. Cost? A serious public digital platform would cost money, perhaps a billion pounds over a decade to build and sustain at scale. That is real money. It is also less than the UK government has spent on a single failed IT project, and a fraction of what we collectively hand to American tech companies each year in advertising revenue and data.
2. Would anyone use it? This misunderstands how network effects work. The BBC already has tens of millions of daily users across its digital services. A platform built on that foundation, with iPlayer-quality design and a genuine commitment to user experience, would not be starting from scratch.
3. State control? The fear that a government-owned social media platform becomes a propaganda tool. This is the most serious objection and deserves a serious answer. The answer is: institutional design. The BBC’s independence from government is not perfect, but it does exist, and it was built through decades of deliberate constitutional choices. The same choices are available here. A platform controlled by ministers would be a disaster; a platform governed by an independent public body, with statutory protections for editorial independence, would be something entirely different.
A Question of Political Will
None of this is technically difficult. It is politically difficult. The tech giants lobby hard. The ideological right is instinctively hostile to public ownership. The ideological left is sometimes more interested in punishing existing platforms rather than building better alternatives. And the current government, like its predecessors, lacks the ambition for a project of this scale.
But the question will not go away. Every election cycle, every public health emergency, every geopolitical crisis makes the case more urgent. Britain has the institutions, the expertise, and the tradition to build a digital public square worthy of its people. What it has lacked, so far, is the nerve.
It is time to find some courage.
