Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

In terms of plurality, one of the things we see is that whole social media feeds - not individual posts but the whole feed - can start to be regarded as a media type in its own right. The reason we have historically had quite a lot of regulation of broadcasters is that broadcasting was the most influential media for influencing how people thought. A social media feed is not the same as a broadcast. The role of the platform is not the same. They are not the editor in the way that a broadcaster is, but they have a big role in selecting what is in the feed. For example, under the European Media Freedom Act, there is something called media privilege. Broadcasters or journalists who are regulated by an organisation like the Press Council have a privilege where, if it is intended to take down any of their content, they have to be given advance notice so they can challenge that in a way that ordinary people are not.

One thing that might be done would be to extend that privilege so that the content that those trusted journalists post should be given prominence in people's feeds. At the moment, we get this phenomenon that the feeds are optimised for engagement. People talk about rage bait, so there is this echo chamber effect where people get a monolithic-----