YOU WERE GIVEN THE POWER. CAN YOU HANDLE THE RESPONSIBILITY?
From The Fall of the Roman Empire to Danny Tommo, livestreamed activism, clashes with police, viral outrage and AI-generated content, the power to influence millions has moved from institutions into individual hands. That freedom is extraordinary — but so are the consequences. Today, one creator can publish faster than editors, lawyers or regulators can react. This article asks the uncomfortable question at the heart of modern media: we were given the power — but can we handle the responsibility that comes with it?
We spent decades breaking down the gates to publishing, broadcasting and influence. We succeeded. Now almost anybody can reach millions. But did responsibility keep pace with the power?
In January 1963, Anthony Mann began shooting The Fall of the Roman Empire.
Think about what was required simply to create moving images capable of astonishing a mass audience.
On its first day of principal photography in the snow-covered Sierra de Guadarrama near Madrid, the production unit numbered around 350 people. Some battle sequences required another 2,500 background performers. The cast included Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, Christopher Plummer, James Mason and actors drawn from several countries. Principal photography ran from January until the beginning of July 1963, moving between Spain and Cinecittà in Rome. By the end, its budget was estimated at between $14 million and $16 million in 1963 money.
And that was just the filmmaking.
There were designers, carpenters, builders, sculptors, electricians, camera crews, costume makers, armourers, stunt performers, horse handlers, drivers, caterers, accountants, production managers, editors, sound technicians, musicians and laboratory staff.
There were employment contracts and established working practices. Film unions and performers’ organisations developed collective agreements covering such things as minimum rates, hours, allowances and working conditions — structures that continue in the industry today. Stars might negotiate extraordinary individual contracts, but a large professional production was nevertheless an organisation, not simply an individual with a camera.
Sophia Loren alone was reportedly paid $1 million for sixteen weeks. Kirk Douglas was reportedly offered $1.5 million and declined.
The production was American-led, the film was principally made in Spain, part of it was made in Italy, and its international cast crossed national boundaries.
Even before the audience saw a frame, an extraordinary amount of human judgement, labour and money had passed through the production.
Today?
Take your phone out of your pocket.
You have been given a camera.
An editing suite.
A sound studio.
A publishing house.
A television station.
And, potentially, a global distribution network.
And now AI is beginning to give you the researcher, illustrator, translator, voice artist, visual-effects department and even parts of the writing room as well.
The machinery disappeared. The power didn’t.
It moved into your hand.
Millions of hours became hundreds
This is the part of the technological revolution that I don’t think we have fully absorbed.
The old film industry required enormous human effort because practically everything had to be physically created.
If you needed Rome, you built Rome.
If you needed an army, you assembled people.
If you needed horses, you transported and trained horses.
If you needed snow, you travelled to snow.
Then you exposed physical film, processed it, edited it, mixed the soundtrack, created release prints, transported those prints around the world and persuaded cinemas to screen them.
Even distribution had a physical cost.
The precise total number of labour hours consumed by The Fall of the Roman Empire is impossible to reconstruct. But given the scale of construction, months of principal and second-unit photography, thousands of performers and the huge production infrastructure behind them, we are unquestionably talking about an undertaking measured in millions of human working hours, not thousands.
Today a small team can create, edit and publish something in days.
One person can sometimes do it in hours.
That does not mean a YouTube video is artistically equivalent to The Fall of the Roman Empire. That would be a pointless comparison.
It means something much more important.
The amount of effort required to acquire media power has collapsed.
The power itself has increased.
And the audience has exploded
In 1964, having made your epic, you still had to find the audience.
The film opened in London, then New York, then other cities. Its enormous running time meant that New York’s DeMille Theatre could initially accommodate only ten reserved-seat performances each week. Paramount then had to build out the release through physical cinemas.
There was scarcity everywhere.
Scarcity of cameras.
Scarcity of film.
Scarcity of studios.
Scarcity of skilled technicians.
Scarcity of cinema screens.
Scarcity of broadcasting frequencies.
And scarcity of opportunities to be heard.
Modern social media demolished much of that scarcity.
A creator can press Publish in Whitchurch, Madrid, Lagos, New York or a bedroom almost anywhere and, technically, make the work available around the planet within moments.
That is an astonishing human achievement.
It is overwhelmingly something to celebrate.
People who would never have been given access to a newspaper column, television studio or film financier can now speak for themselves.
Minority communities can communicate directly.
Victims can document events.
Specialists can teach without waiting for a television commissioner.
Small businesses can become publishers.
Musicians can find audiences without record companies.
Filmmakers can bypass distributors.
Witnesses can point a camera at something powerful people might rather was not recorded.
Campaigners can organise.
Governments and large organisations can be challenged.
The gatekeepers lost part of their monopoly.
That is an enormous gain.
But we removed something else at the same time
We removed friction.
And not all friction was bad.
A large newspaper or broadcaster may have had a reporter, producer, editor, lawyer and senior editor between an allegation and publication.
That system certainly did not guarantee truth. Large media organisations have made terrible errors, pursued agendas, behaved irresponsibly and abused their power.
Nor should independent creators try to become miniature versions of the BBC.
But there was a useful feature hidden inside the bureaucracy.
Somebody else might ask a question.
Are we sure?
Where did this come from?
Have we spoken to the person being accused?
Can we prove it?
Is this fact or opinion?
Are we invading somebody’s privacy?
Could publication prejudice a trial?
Are we showing something out of context?
What happens after we broadcast this?
Today all of those decisions may be made by the same person.
And sometimes that person isn’t asking any of them.
They are asking:
Will this get views?
Everybody gets their fifteen minutes
Andy Warhol’s famous prediction was that everybody would eventually be world-famous for fifteen minutes.
Social media went considerably further.
It created an economy in which millions of people are effectively auditioning for their fifteen minutes every day.
Views are rewarded.
Followers are rewarded.
Shares are rewarded.
Controversy is rewarded.
Being noticed is rewarded.
The creator therefore has an incentive that the old editor did not necessarily have in quite the same form:
Make this bigger.
The thumbnail becomes more shocking.
The headline becomes more absolute.
The argument becomes simpler.
The opponent becomes more villainous.
The creator becomes more certain.
Nuance is difficult to squeeze into a thumbnail.
Outrage isn’t.
This does not mean social media activists are bad or traditional journalists are good.
It means the economic incentives surrounding information have changed.
And that matters.
You don’t need to be the BBC. But the law hasn’t disappeared
There is another misconception created by this new freedom.
Because you can publish something without asking permission, it can feel as though you are allowed to publish anything.
Those are completely different propositions.
A UK television broadcaster operates within a licensing and regulatory framework. Ofcom licenses television and radio broadcasting and its Broadcasting Code imposes requirements in areas including harm, crime, accuracy and, in defined circumstances, due impartiality.
An ordinary creator uploading a video to a social platform is not simply transformed into an Ofcom-regulated BBC journalist.
That freedom is important.
But ordinary law still exists.
Take libel.
In England and Wales, the Defamation Act 2013 requires serious harm, or likelihood of serious harm, to the claimant’s reputation before a statement is defamatory for the purposes of the Act. The legislation provides defences including truth, honest opinion and publication on a matter of public interest, subject to their legal requirements.
And putting something on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or X does not somehow turn publication into a legally consequence-free conversation between friends.
The government’s own guidance makes clear that defamation law includes material published on the internet.
Nor does pressing Share necessarily solve the problem. Repeating someone else’s defamatory allegation can itself amount to republication.
There is privacy and data protection too.
Filming in a public place is often perfectly lawful. Indeed, official police guidance explicitly recognises that members of the public and media do not generally need a permit simply to photograph or film in public places.
But that does not mean that every conceivable use or publication of that footage is automatically justified.
The Information Commissioner’s journalism guidance specifically warns that although activity taking place publicly may reduce someone’s reasonable expectation of privacy, it is not automatically fair to publish personal information merely because it was obtained in a public place. Context and potential harm still matter.
Copyright still exists.
Court reporting restrictions still exist.
Contempt of court still exists.
The government warns specifically that social-media comments about active proceedings can potentially interfere with a fair trial; examples include publicly asserting that a defendant is guilty or innocent or revealing information that cannot lawfully be published.
So we have reached an unusual point in history.
You may no longer require permission from an editor to speak to a mass audience.
But you remain responsible for what you say.
That distinction is enormous.
Danny Tommo and the difference between a camera and immunity
A current example illustrates the issue precisely because people will have very different opinions about the politics behind it.
Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo, is an anti-immigration activist and founder of the Patriot Platform.
On 23 September 2026 he was arrested after footage appeared to show him damaging an inflatable dinghy in the English Channel while an emergency responder was still aboard. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary said he was arrested on suspicion of offences including criminal damage with intent to endanger life and offences relating to maritime safety. As of 24 September, these are allegations associated with an arrest, not findings of guilt.
His views on immigration are not the point here.
People can agree with them.
People can profoundly disagree with them.
That is politics.
The interesting issue for content creators is what happens when activism, performance, publication and real-world action merge into one event.
The camera can begin as a means of documenting an action.
But the presence of an audience can also become part of the motivation for the action.
Suddenly the activist is not merely doing something.
He is producing content.
There is an audience watching.
There are comments arriving.
There will be clips.
There will be shares.
There may be donations, followers, notoriety or fame.
And the temptation becomes obvious:
Go further.
That is where responsibility becomes essential.
A camera does not suspend the law.
An audience does not legitimise an action.
A strongly held political conviction does not remove personal accountability.
Nor, conversely, does the fact that somebody is politically controversial remove their legal rights.
The same principles have to operate whichever cause is involved.
Otherwise responsibility simply becomes another weapon we use against people with whom we disagree.
Influence is power
Creators like talking about influence.
“I’m an influencer.”
We even made it a job description.
But strip away the fashionable word and consider what it actually means.
To influence somebody is to affect the way they think, feel or behave.
That is power.
One hundred followers represents a little power.
A hundred thousand represents more.
Ten million represents something that previous generations would have associated with national broadcasters, major newspapers, film studios or political organisations.
Yet we still encourage creators to obsess about increasing their influence without having an equivalent conversation about increasing their responsibility.
That seems extraordinary.
Imagine somebody saying:
“I want ten times as much political power, but I don’t want ten times as much scrutiny.”
Or:
“I want a hundred million people to listen to me, but what they do as a consequence has absolutely nothing to do with me.”
We would recognise the contradiction immediately.
Yet in creator culture, growth is routinely presented as an unqualified success.
More reach. More engagement. More influence.
Perhaps another word belongs on that dashboard.
More responsibility.
Then AI arrived
And now the equation is changing again.
Social media dramatically reduced the cost of distribution.
Smartphones dramatically reduced the cost of production.
AI is dramatically reducing the cost of creation itself.
Research that might once have taken days can be accelerated.
Images that required photographers and designers can be generated.
A voice can be synthesised.
Video can be manipulated.
Languages can be translated.
Arguments can be written.
People can be convincingly represented doing or saying things they never did or said.
The creative potential is remarkable.
So is the potential for abuse.
And once again, technology is moving faster than our cultural understanding of responsibility.
It also raises an uncomfortable symmetry.
If we tell the individual creator:
You have extraordinary power, therefore you must accept responsibility for how you use it, what should we expect of the companies developing technologies that multiply that power?
That is an important public-policy question rather than one with a simple answer.
Current UK regulation such as the Online Safety Act places defined duties on providers of services within its scope, including duties concerning illegal content and protection of children.
Exactly how responsibility should be divided between corporations, directors, developers, platforms, creators and individual users will continue to be debated.
But responsibility cannot plausibly disappear simply because a technology is complicated.
Nor should accountability exist only at the bottom.
If an individual creator should consider foreseeable consequences before pressing Publish, it is reasonable for society to ask what standards of foresight and accountability should apply to organisations capable of placing enormously powerful technologies into hundreds of millions of hands.
The precise legal answer belongs to lawmakers, regulators and courts.
The moral question belongs to all of us.
Freedom is the prize
None of this should become an argument for rebuilding the old gates.
That would miss the point completely.
There was something profoundly unequal about a system where a comparatively tiny number of editors, broadcasters, studio heads and publishers decided which voices reached the public.
The modern creator revolution has given opportunities to people who would never have received them.
That should be protected.
But there is an uncomfortable truth attached to it:
Freedom survives partly because people demonstrate that they can exercise it responsibly.
If creators conclude that responsibility is somebody else’s problem, the almost inevitable response to serious abuses will be calls for platforms, governments, courts and regulators to impose more controls.
And every additional control potentially hands some of that extraordinary new power back to institutions.
Creators therefore have a self-interest in responsibility.
Not because we should all become cautious corporate broadcasters.
Not because controversy should disappear.
Not because activism should stop.
Not because creators must be impartial.
And certainly not because everyone must agree.
Quite the opposite.
A genuinely free creator should be able to be passionate, funny, angry, political, unconventional, investigative and occasionally offensive.
But freedom of expression and responsibility are not opposites.
Responsibility is part of what makes sustainable freedom possible.
Back to Rome
Which brings us back to a snowy mountain outside Madrid in January 1963.
Hundreds of people are standing around a giant motion-picture camera.
Thousands of extras are waiting.
Actors have travelled from several countries.
Sets have been constructed.
Horses have been trained.
Contracts have been negotiated.
Millions of dollars have been committed.
Months of people’s lives have already been invested.
And eventually a three-hour motion picture will emerge.
To put that film before the world will then require another enormous network of distributors and cinemas.
Everywhere you look, the power of mass communication is physically visible.
The buildings.
The people.
The money.
The equipment.
The infrastructure.
That visibility probably helped people understand instinctively that they were doing something consequential.
Sixty-three years later, almost all of it can disappear into a rectangle of glass held in one hand.
That may be why we haven’t fully noticed what happened.
The old power looked powerful.
The new power looks like a phone.
And now AI is making even the phone look increasingly unnecessary.
One person can acquire capabilities that once required organisations.
That is one of the most exciting developments in the history of human communication.
It may also be one of the most dangerous if we treat enormous power as though it were merely another app.
The answer is not to give the power back.
It is not to recreate the gatekeepers.
It is not to silence activists, campaigners, citizen journalists or independent creators.
It is to recognise what we have become.
We are no longer merely members of the audience.
We can be publishers.
Broadcasters.
Filmmakers.
Campaigners.
Investigators.
Commentators.
And increasingly, with AI assisting us, production companies of one.
The rights that accompany that change are extraordinary.
So are the obligations.
Before publishing, perhaps every serious creator should occasionally ask questions that previous generations had whole organisations to ask on their behalf:
Is it true?
Is it fair?
Do I understand what I am showing?
What could happen because I publish it?
And if that happens, am I prepared to be accountable for my decision?
Because technology has already answered the first question.
Yes. You have the power.
The only question left is ours.
