On leaving the BBC in 2021, I didn’t think we had won the war against ‘fake news’, but at least I believed we were capable of winning key battles. At last, fighting disinformation was being looked at systematically by all sides – the tech platforms, the news providers and governments.
Each was developing their own weapons that could be combined to form an armoury to combat the lies and distortions that have been doing so much damage. Critically, we were all starting to work together, pooling resources in a coalition against the common enemy.
One place that brought this coalition together was the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which I ran for two years at the BBC. It allied the world’s most trusted news providers – such as the BBC, Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Reuters – with the main tech platforms, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter.
