Speeches by Hinds.

“For what it is worth, I am very much in favour of this provision in the Green Paper. I think that it is a fundamental change that we need to make in the algorithmic serving up of content. But when you come up to reality, the difficulty is knowing exactly how you do it. Whether you or not agree with their definition, ha…”

“Do you have one platform for the world, and TV companies just produce and provide bits of content? Or do we somehow regain brand loyalty, and everybody has their own following? Or is there one public service platform that is distinguished from American and other entirely commercial offerings?”

“I think 1695 was when we last had licensing of the press to define a “news source”, so it is a very difficult question. Magnus or Martin, can either of you take up the challenge of defining what should make the cut? To keep life a little simpler, let’s just talk about news for the moment, rather than content in general…”

“I do not want to try our Chair’s patience too much, but another thing in the Green Paper is the possibility that PSB and PSM providers might have some enhanced duty to promote media literacy. What would that look like in practice?”

“Let us just take it as read that it is hard. The Green Paper has only just come out, so it is not unreasonable to say, “We do not know yet.” In case there is a different answer to that, Martin or Magnus, is there anything you could do if you had that duty on media literacy?”

“Do you not think that a line must be drawn? They are going to do it for the public service broadcasters—that is now a given—so the question is whether what we used to call the print media, and other news sources, are in or out alongside them. If they are out, that does not seem like a particularly fair competition for …”

“We all knew that!”

“This House ended the licensing of the press on 3 May 1695, when it declined to renew the relevant legislation. That makes the definition of news sources difficult. Perhaps that is why the Green Paper talks about prominence for public service media and “potentially” for local and national news sources. Does the Secretar…”

“Like everyone who has spoken, I support the principle of the lifelong learning entitlement. I welcomed it in Sir Philip Augar’s review, which reported while I was at the Department for Education. I was pleased that it was brought in by my erstwhile right hon. Friends for Chichester and Harlow. It is true that higher ed…”

“Yes, but I was specifically not talking about the things at that end of the spectrum. However, I am done. Thank you”

“I think this may call for a short reprise.”

“To be fair, they also were not what I asked about. I don’t think people would put religious programming in the same bracket as lifestyle programming, or gameshows or quizzes.”

“That leads to another question. Why don’t we let the punter make their own choice in advance and say, ”Thank you very much, BBC or whoever you are, for deciding what would be good for me. I think this would be good for me”? And probably when you do that in a cool setting, rather like with social media, if you ask peopl…”

“I guess you have a sliding grey-scale thing where on the one hand you have perfectly personalised algorithms and on the other hand you have BBC One. In the middle, the more you have more channels, the closer you get to something that is personalised to this individual. You have seven different Absolute Radio channels. …”

“During this inquiry, we keep hearing the new phrase, “public service algorithm.” It also appears in this morning’s hot-off-the-press publication, in which the Government say that they are “supportive of PSM providers developing algorithms in line with public service values, that strike the right balance between offerin…”

“We are going to talk about prominence later in the session. I am trying to assess, from your compadres in the academic world and the people you all mix with, are people thinking about the owned platforms as we know them today, or is it something more ambitious?”

“The BBC can put an algorithm on the iPlayer—that is easy to manage. Notwithstanding the great stats for the iPlayer, most people are not on it for a large part of their day. They are on commercial social media platforms.”

“Finally from me in this little segment, when people talk about a public service algorithm, do they just mean on iPlayer or on ITVX, or is the ambition a little bit deeper? Let us take Instagram, as it is the more extreme version because YouTube is fundamentally about videos, even though they are often quite short. If y…”

“Yes, but I was specifically not talking about the things at that end of the spectrum. However, I am done. Thank you”

“Are you at liberty to give your own thoughts on what the end state looks like?”