Liz Mair is President of Mair Strategies, a strategic communications and public affairs firm that advises FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies, as well as candidates and officeholders in the UK Conservative and American Republican parties.Â
In an recent interview with LBC, Deputy Labour Leader Lucy Powell raised the spectre of stifling political speech on social media ahead of elections, extending the ‘purdah’ that currently applies to a raft of mainstream media.
Powell said, ‘We absolutely need to strengthen regulation in the social media place… especially when it’s election time.’
‘We’ve got an elections bill going through the House of Commons at the moment,’ she added, expressing a desire ‘to strengthen that bill, so that social media comes under the same requirements during an election period that our broadcasters do.’
Powell’s comments immediately sparked debate among political reporters about how exactly she would propose to accomplish this, legislatively.
But criticism of the proposal should not focus on the merits or lack thereof of a proposed process for accomplishing this; rather, the proposal should spark an outcry in and of itself.
Not only is it, as well as purdah rules more broadly, a massive infringement on freedom of speech. Powell’s plan would constitute a doubling down on rules that already deprive voters of information relevant to their decision making ahead of elections. Rather than ensuring a ‘level playing field’ for candidates, Powell’s proposal if legislated would give flawed candidates an electoral advantage they do not deserve by sharply limiting scrutiny of their records both personal and professional.
Obviously, as someone who makes her living through compiling and pitching to the media opposition research—usually public affairs and corporate reputational, but yes, sometimes political—I have a vested interest in making this argument. I’ve seen the purdah invoked as an explanation for failures to cover massive inconsistencies between a candidate’s stance on net zero and their personal record in corporate positions concerning fossil fuels, failures to cover a candidate’s local council votes for higher taxes and positioning against military families while proposing to represent a military-heavy constituency, a candidate purporting to have experienced zero anti-Semitism in the Labour Party despite having been deeply involved in the party through Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure, and much, much more.
But before I am an opposition researcher and a communications consultant, I am also a voter. Specifically, I am a voter in the constituency represented by Sir Bernard Jenkin MP, who in the last general election held his seat largely thanks to his excellent constituent service, but also to awareness being raised via social media about his Labour opponent’s extensive ties not to the Essex coastal area, but rather lefty Islington (famously also home to Jeremy Corbyn). Thankfully, what happened in my constituency in 2024 is what also happened with some of the other topics I mentioned above—thanks to social media.
While this sort of information, germane and relevant to the contest as indeed it was, spread like wildfire on Facebook, X and elsewhere, it was given much shorter shrift by traditional, mainstream media, leaning on the purdah. In addition, it is exactly the sort of information that at least some local Conservative Party organizations were wary of explicitly, overtly pushing because of fears of baseless litigation from Labour and accusations of reprising Conservatives’ reputation as the ‘Nasty Party.’ Stupid or irrelevant though those concerns were, the reality is, the task of educating voters here—and in a bevy of other constituencies—mostly fell to social media users. It’s easy to see why Powell wants to ban social media coverage of candidates—and it’s not about protecting democracy.
The existing media landscape where political speech is concerned already mostly functions as a form of protection for lower profile incumbents and challengers, while focusing virtually all attention on high-profile members of the government at any given time plus a few other current and past party leaders who function as political celebrities (before the last general election, think Nigel Farage or Diane Abbott or, yes, Angela Rayner with her outsized profile and voluminous tax issues).
Of course, this isn’t just the fault of the purdah. It is also the result of traditional papers and their digital imprints wobbling financially, leaving small pools of reporting staff with too many good stories to chase, and too thin of budgets to allocate to defending against junk litigation that would cost money to fight, even if a story is fully fact-checked, well-founded, and newsworthy. It is also the result of excessive caution and shyness on the part of political organizations, opinion leaders, and those with a platform and relationships who either pull punches or badly-execute media pitches (I rate my own work, obviously, but I’m humble enough to admit I haven’t landed every media approach in the last twenty-some years of doing research and communications with a perfect ‘10,’ either).
It is also the fault of laws like the Online Safety Act, which we saw limit Britons’ access to information about topics that should, by right, have influenced voters’ political views like MPs’ tweets about the Grooming Gangs scandal. Overall, the country has become very restrictive when it comes to speech and the free flow of information. This has an effect on politics because a principal effect of it is to deprive voters of potential sources of information. That’s bad for civil liberties, and it’s bad for democracy.
The Powells of the world will push back on this by saying that the current environment is positively littered with misinformation and even disinformation that leads voters astray and undermines democracy in other ways.
Sure, there is too much misinformation and indeed disinformation all over. But as we’ve seen in both the UK and even more so in my other country, the US, a ton of this comes from outside our borders, meaning individuals and entities that are not subject to British (or American) law and could not give a monkeys about abiding by it. Unless the government is serious about banning VPNs, which it absolutely, positively should not do as a matter of both cybersecurity and copycatting the world’s most restrictive authoritarian regimes, an extended purdah is not going to stop Britons from believing fake news spewed forth by some Macedonian or Russian troll factory or AI-generated ‘news hub.’
The only way to counter misinformation and disinformation and objectionable speech is with more high quality, accurate, illuminating information and good, useful speech. But the people most minded to produce the latter are ironically those most likely to fret the effects of a purdah and self-censor, as we have seen repeatedly with global media less well-funded than the Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or a handful of other titles, that have hesitated to report out stories on, say, Harvey Weinstein or Russian oligarchs or, yes, Donald Trump for fear of litigation. Does Labour really want limits on Dan Neidle’s ability to tweet about various politicians’ tax affairs if he uncovers something interesting in the middle of a general election? Given the specific identities of those he’s taken down, I seriously doubt it. Likewise, we should not want Ross Kempsell, or Alex Deane, or David Gauke, or my ability to air Labour politicians’ dirty laundry minimized.
A better proposal would be to roll back existing purdah rules, the Online Safety Act, and other anti-free speech legislation, encourage more— not less— scrutiny of would-be public officials, and frankly pass legislation protecting Britons’ right to free speech, and platforms’ right to carry whatever speech they see fit to whichever users they see fit, subject to some fairly minimal limits (e.g., child pornography and sex abuse material, revenge porn, and speech that actually incites violence or other major crimes). In reality, platforms will ban far more than this (as they should be allowed to do; no one should be forced to associate with content or speech they find abhorrent or even commercially unhelpful).
But the government should not be in the business of censorship, no matter how good its intentions are. And to be clear, the overwhelming majority of politicians who want to impose or tighten speech codes are mostly interested in protecting their own incumbency and status, not aiding the electorate or broader populace.
