Public sector communications, decentralised platforms and local journalism

That this House believes that no member of the public should be required to hold an account with a single commercial platform in order to receive public information; notes that government departments, public services and other parts of the public estate continue to rely heavily on X, Facebook, and similar platforms whose conduct and content moderation many users find toxic; calls on the Government to ensure that all public sector social media content is published on open, decentralised and federated platforms, including those based on the ActivityPub and AT protocols, as well as on the established United States platforms, so that citizens may follow official communications without being compelled to use services they find harmful; further notes the high levels of government advertising expenditure placed on YouTube and other platforms whose business models depend on the intrusive tracking and profiling of users which is fuelling online harms; observes that, over the same period, advertising revenue for national and regional newspapers has continued to decline, weakening the local journalism on which democratic accountability depends; and further calls on the Government to divert its digital advertising spend away from such platforms and towards advertising placed and managed directly on local and national newspaper websites, thereby avoiding the tracking and profiling of citizens by Google and Meta, as well as reducing their unfair extraction of advertising revenues as dominant advertising intermediaries, and supporting the sustainability of independent local and national journalism.