The Guardian - Britain’s status as a cohesive, democratic society is at risk for the first time in a generation as the rise of social media platforms and disinformation fuel a “trust crisis”, the BBC’s director general has said.
In a wide-ranging address about the future of the corporation, Tim Davie said BBC News would start to make special content for platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, where disinformation can go unchecked, as he couched the broadcaster as a “precious national asset” preventing the UK from becoming a society in which there were no shared facts.
“The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels for the first time in my life at risk,” Davie said in a speech in Salford. “I don’t want to catastrophise. We have so much to be proud of in the UK: our tolerance, our innovative spirit, our creativity, our humour, our sense of fairness. But I think that unless we act, we will drift, becoming weaker, less trusting, less competitive.”
In a rapidly changing media world in which less than half of young people watch live TV each week, Davie said the days of the “old priesthood” of broadcasters deciding and controlling what information people consumed were over. However, he said that it had meant “disinformation is thriving”.
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