26 Ottobre 2019
Luca Sofri - WITTGENSTEIN.IT
Has been shared a lot of the video of the congressional audition of Mark Zuckerberg in the passage in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crumbles him pressing him with a series of questions on which he is clearly in difficulty, despite being the most obvious questions that could be expected and that all they have been doing for a few years. In fact the interesting part is not so much the most celebrated one that concerns her - now a format, and we understand that her goal is to replicate the lucky show of candor and ruthlessness that the public expects from her, more than anything else - but the one that concerns him, and that is the symbol of the irreparable mess in which we have put ourselves.
The background is that for many years the so-called platforms have tried to tell each other and tell us that they would be neutral and that neutrals should remain, and the majority of the world wanted to believe it: "we are not publishers!" Was their answer, while many insisted that "you are publishers!", in this human and inevitable tic we have to bring the complexities and variables of today back to figures and contexts of yesterday, "publishers". But since yesterday it was also said and stated that "the medium is the message", it was clear that we were telling this story of neutrality and it was not standing: ...
...even only the algorithms that choose what we see are already a decisive editorial intervention. But someone tried to distinguish between interventions of this kind and those on contents, despite the fact that many censorship interventions on things of sex, violence, or simply nudity were already usual and official. Then money came into play and YouTube had to agree to take action to remove videos of copyrighted content, especially music and then TV and cinema. The story of "we are not publishers, we do not intervene" continued to be passed off but its hypocrisy had become evident.
...even only the algorithms that choose what we see are already a decisive editorial intervention. But someone tried to distinguish between interventions of this kind and those on contents, despite the fact that many censorship interventions on things of sex, violence, or simply nudity were already usual and official. Then money came into play and YouTube had to agree to take action to remove videos of copyrighted content, especially music and then TV and cinema. The story of "we are not publishers, we do not intervene" continued to be passed off but its hypocrisy had become evident.
Then there was the trouble of using Facebook to misinform American voters and influence the outcome of the presidential elections, Facebook was no longer able to evade the accusations and responsibilities, and accepted and cleared through customs that certain control interventions and removal were necessary and possible. And from there the line of defense collapsed, no matter how hypocritical: the platforms can no longer be said to be neutral and unable to intervene by definition, they are "publishers" (in the meantime Google had been forced to deal with requests for removal by right to oblivion: another story, but another story of official formalization of massive editorial interventions).
So now poor Zuckerberg finds himself in the unsolvable situation of having to reassure the world that Facebook is doing something and having to reassure him that Facebook is not doing too much: if he does not check the falseness on Facebook, he is complicit in the disasters that follow, if he controls them enter the impossible terrain of censorship and discretion over what is true and what is false, what is dangerous and what is not. As a pretended spectator he became an arbiter, and the referee - everyone knows - takes insults and accusations from everyone, especially when the referee has not been legitimized and shared by nothing.
But it is not only this: it is that the game is not arbitrary, the rules do not exist, and could not exist. And here the condition of Facebook becomes worse than that of the traditional "publishers", who are nonetheless accustomed and legitimate to intervene on their own content as they see it, following editorial, political and commercial lines. In short, they can do whatever they want. The condition of monopoly and "public service" of Facebook is more like that of a public service publisher, such as (NDT: ITALIAN PUBLIC TV) Rai - and you have in mind the daily wars over Rai's information choices - but without there being recognized organizations and representatives of the public and democratic institutions that govern it and compensate for possible arbitrariness (even if they do it badly, in the case of Rai, but legitimized): and above all on a global scale and with infinite contents.
It is not solvable. Zuckerberg finds himself as one who put a thousand people on a spaceship announcing that he would take them to Mars, and after half the journey the spaceship begins to lose pieces and people die in it for the most varied but the most obvious causes. Nobody will be saved, neither going forward nor coming back. And AOC arrives, three quarters, as beautiful as the sun, and asks him: what do you plan to do, Mr. Zuckerberg?
He stutters. You can not do anything. It is useless for us to lick or "ask for rules", a ritual expression in the titles of interviews for years, to which no one is able to follow, followed by a feasible idea on "which rules". Others say that precisely for this reason it is necessary to remove oneself from one's head to intervene, and that one should never have intervened on anything. The speech has its own particular plausibility as regards paid advertising communications (the distinction between these and the contents produced by users is a part of the further complication of the reflections). Carlo Blengino gave a brilliant example a few days ago, with respect to the objection of AOC ("and if someone publishes wrong dates of the elections and promotes them on a target of potential opposing voters?") Or anyone else who is worried that with falsehoods it is possible to influence the election results: "in Italy fifty years ago the parish priest said to the mass that the Communists ate children and the people voted DC: it is true that the result was that the PCI never went to the government, but not we have forbidden it to be said for this, nor have we thought of doing so; we have worked to build an awareness that would allow us to recognize that lie as such ".
The objection neglects the quantitative change - which becomes qualitative - and the idea of the "post truth", or that something has changed in the measure of all this: how much misinformation can we grant to the functioning of democracies, why can we still call them democracies?
But the objection has a part of meaning, summarized as follows: no one neglects the problem and the dangers, but if we intervene on the contents (beyond what the law already provides: let us remember that there is defamation, the procured alarm, etc.) we make things worse and we increase them, the problems and dangers; the freely expressed falsifications are fought with the freely expressed truths, also because to decide which are the truths and the falsifications, or from which point onwards the distinction is clear and the intervention is shared and unquestionable, it is impossible. Which is why Zuckerberg stutters, when AOC asked him "where is the border?" He does not know. Nobody knows, in my opinion.
www.wittgenstein.it
translated by google translate
I am not positive this is a good translation, the red color it is me trying to point out same important parts, in my opinion...
