The Worshipful Company of Communicators has just launched its Essay Competition, inviting 16- to 21-year-olds to grapple with disinformation, social media and the voting age. I put my hand up to join the committee behind it as soon as I heard about it, and it has had me thinking hard about the state of the profession I have spent my career in, and how far the ground has shifted under our feet.
Communicators exist, at heart, to help people understand things clearly and honestly. That has always been the job, whether in PR, public affairs, journalism or corporate communications. So there is something particularly bitter about watching the very language of truth and falsehood get hijacked by the people it was designed to hold to account.
Take "fake news" itself. The phrase started life describing something specific and real: fabricated stories, built for profit or propaganda, designed to deceive. Then, from around the end of 2016, it began to be turned on its head. Donald Trump took a term meant to expose dishonesty and repurposed it as a blanket insult for any reporting he did not like. Researchers have since called it a "floating signifier", a phrase now claimed by opposing political camps to mean whatever suits them at the time. The most prolific users of disinformation have become the loudest accusers of it. That is not a small irony. It strikes at the credibility of language itself, and language is the only tool we have.
The second problem sits quietly underneath the first. Even when people are genuinely trying to find the truth, the platforms they use are not built to help them. Social media algorithms are not designed to inform. They are designed to hold attention, and the most reliable way to hold someone's attention is to keep showing them more of what they already believe. The research on this has grown steadily clearer. Recommendation systems reward engagement over accuracy, and the result is well documented: echo chambers, filter bubbles and audiences who become more confident and more entrenched the longer they stay online.
What is striking is that this pull towards homogeneity is not purely a technical problem either. When the platform Bluesky launched without an algorithmic feed, specifically to escape the polarisation of X, it seemed to work for a while. Within a year, users were describing it as its own kind of echo chamber, just a different shade of one. Take away the algorithm and people will still sort themselves into like-minded groups. The technology does not create the instinct. It amplifies it, at scale, and at speed.
That is exactly why the antidote to homogeneity cannot just be a better algorithm. It has to include who gets to do the communicating in the first place. If sameness breeds echo chambers, then a profession full of similar voices, similar backgrounds, similar assumptions will always be more vulnerable to producing them. It is part of why I am also supporting the Company's Careers Fair this November, which exists to bring underrepresented young people into communications. More diversity of voice and thinking in this profession is not a nice-to-have alongside the fight against disinformation. It is part of the fight.
So where does that leave communicators? I think it leaves us with a job that matters more than it has in a long time. If the language of honesty can be stolen, and if the systems carrying information are built to reinforce rather than challenge, then clarity and accuracy stop being nice-to-haves. They become the entire point of the profession. Plain, factual, well-sourced communication is not old-fashioned. It is the antidote.
That is why I find the WCoC's Essay Competition so encouraging. It is putting these exact questions in front of young people who have never known an information environment that was not shaped by algorithms and who will inherit the job of fixing this, one way or another. Young people should have the space to think this through properly, rather than absorbing it as background noise. That feels like exactly the right use of our profession's energy.
I do not think there is a single fix. But I do think the starting point is refusing to let the vocabulary of truth get emptied out, and refusing to mistake an engaging algorithm for an informative one. Both take deliberate effort. Both are, in the end, a communicator's job.
Find out more about the Worshipful Company of Communicators' Essay Competition at communicatoressay.co.uk.
Madeleine Weightman is Co-Founder and COO at The Work Crowd, working with businesses to find flexible solutions and helping consultants build rewarding portfolio careers.
Whether you need interim, fractional or freelance expertise for a project, to plug a gap or upskill your team, or you are exploring new opportunities as an independent consultant, The Work Crowd can help you connect.