#max thompson

By: Max Thompson

Published: Jul 23, 2026

"Let's hope that Andy Burnham's degree in English literature will help him to see that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of fiction, not a how-to manual." So writes Lord Young of Acton, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, in his latest Spectator column, exploring the dangers of the Government's growing appetite for policing so-called misinformation.

Lord Young makes this intervention in response to the Government's recently published Evidence Review of the Impacts of Misinformation, commissioned by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser in response to former Communities Secretary Steve Reed's social cohesion action plan. The headline finding will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the trajectory of this debate: "anti-LGBTQ+ narratives" — among them, claiming that state schools and public authorities have been captured by gender ideology, or questioning whether biological men should compete in women's sport — are cited as examples of misleading or false information capable of causing harm. This means that anyone who observes, for example, that the Olympic gold medallist boxer Imane Khelif is male has, on the Government's own evidence review, committed an act of anti-democratic extremism deserving of suppression. Naturally, the opportunity to blame X's algorithms has not been missed either.

The 136-page report classifies "anti-LGBTQ+ narratives" as one of several types of "false and misleading information" said to be circulating in Britain. Other categories identified alongside it include "electoral fraud claims" and attempts at the "institutional delegitimisation" of the European Union, while a further category on immigration covers "false claims about migrant entitlements, misrepresentation of the demographic composition of migrant arrivals, and the misattribution of criminal acts to migrant communities." The report's authors go on to encourage the Government to increase its monitoring of misleading information and to prioritise tackling the "harms" caused by certain claims, rather than focusing too much on the "intent" behind them — a shift that, as Lord Young notes, would allow the state to police the effect of a statement without any need to establish that its author meant to deceive.

The report itself is curious. It was authored by six academics from the University of Sheffield and one from the University of Edinburgh, who argue that new "statutory frameworks" are required because a "growing body of empirical research" provides "robust causal evidence" that exposure to misinformation drives "increases in hate crimes," "shifts in politically relevant beliefs" — wrongthink, in other words — and adverse public health outcomes. The authors present this as the synthesis of 228 academic papers, yet concede in the small print that "not all full texts were reviewed in their entirety due to time constraints." AI chatbots, it transpires, were also used to help produce the summaries — a striking admission from a report whose own conclusions warn that the information ecosystem has been corrupted by artificial intelligence.

By way of reassurance, eleven "experts" were invited to review the report's findings before publication. Unsurprisingly, all eleven shared broadly the same alarmist assumptions about the dangers of misinformation. None appears to have raised any objection to the report's reliance on research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organisation founded by Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, whose leaked internal strategy documents from 2024 listed "kill Musk's Twitter" among the group's top priorities.

It is this pattern of selective concern that Lord Young singles out as most damning. As he puts it in his Spectator column:

In case you think accusations of political bias are unfair, consider the following. Despite the 136-page report claiming to address the dangers of misinformation to Britain's social cohesion, there is nary a mention of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have been in wide circulation since the slaughter of 1,200 Jews by Hamas on 7 October 2023. There are three references to 'gendered disinformation' and three to 'health-related false and misleading information,' but only one to anti-Semitism. Claiming that the massacre in southern Israel was a false flag operation orchestrated by Mossad on the orders of Benjamin Netanyahu is apparently not as harmful as saying trans women aren't women.

The response from the Official Opposition has been equally pointed. The Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Alex Burghart MP, has denounced the report, accusing the Labour Government of ushering in an Orwellian thought police under the guise of tackling misinformation.

The report also arrives at the same time as Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary and a close ally of the Prime Minister, has unveiled a green paper, Watch This Space, which proposes to force social media platforms to prioritise the promotion of "trustworthy" public broadcasters, among them the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4. Ms Nandy is the same Secretary of State who, in July, removed both herself and her department from X, citing the platform's spread of misinformation and disinformation as her reason for leaving, rather than remaining on the platform to challenge it directly.

This document is part of an all too familiar pattern: a report commissioned in the name of scientific rigour, built on partial reading of the evidence, reviewed by a panel selected for its agreement rather than its independence, and citing a campaign group with its own well-documented agenda against a rival platform — all while the one form of misinformation that demonstrably fuels real-world hatred, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about 7 October, receives a single passing mention.

The Free Speech Union will continue to scrutinise the Government's approach to "misinformation" and to make the case, as Lord Young does, that the cure being proposed is very often more dangerous than the disease.

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"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four