Luca Sofri
As several people have noted, the discussion as to whether Facebook and Twitter and Google should be considered ¿editori ¿. doesn’t make sense for a long time. The temptation of our heads to convert what is new to known models is normal and understandable, but it generates failures and contradictions: probably someone, when it came to regulating the traffic of the first cars, It was questioned whether they should be considered carriages or ships, before it was finally understood that they were neither carriages nor ships, and that they were also both.
"Platforms" are not publishers but they are not non-publishers either: they are very different from publishers as we are used to imagining them, but they are not neutral and intervene on the contents they host and their diffusion in many ways, just as publishers do . Censoring content for different reasons, encouraging others, and promoting with the notorious algorithms this compared to that, that is establishing in fact what we read and what we don't. The neutrality of social networks is a fake and Zuckerberg's phrase about "not being able to be arbiters of the truth" is a hypocrisy contradicted by the thousand Facebook announcements of recent years on this or that social network intervention against fake news (including enlist third-party “arbiters of truth”, chosen by Facebook, arbiter of truth arbiters).
Recognizing this power to Facebook or Twitter and its exercise in fact naturally generates a mountain of problems: of responsibility first of all, but above all of inconsistency, and weights and measures. The case of Twitter and Trump is interesting: the intervention on Trump wants to limit the spread of false information that generates a great danger for society in the course of its democratic mechanism. If we decide that Twitter doesn’t have to because it doesn’t decide what Twitter is fake, then why didn’t we protest when Twitter announced that it would report false news about the coronavirus? And if we decide that Twitter doesn’t have to because it doesn’t decide what’s dangerous on Twitter, then why don’t we protest when Twitter blocks or censors persecution and personal harassment?
I’m saying what’s right and what’s wrong in all this? Or is Twitter or Trump right? No, for one simple reason: that it is impossible to say. It has become impossible. The criteria of right and wrong, compared to the rules we were used to, have skipped, as far as the big online platforms are concerned. The simplest answer, for example, would be that Twitter and Facebook and Google are private enterprises and completely in their right ( except violations of the law, of course ( in making editorial or commercial choices: they are not a public service, we citizens do not pay taxes for a service of which we are defrauded, the choice whether to use or not to use them is free, the contractual conditions are known.
And yet.
And yet they have become an unavoidable service in fact, because they act in a monopoly regime, legal but blackmail. You can’t help it, in fact, because there are no alternatives. And, to make matters worse, they are monopolies that owe their success to their own monopoly condition. Many say that the problem would not exist if there were a hundred social networks to choose from: but there may not be a hundred social networks to choose from because the quality and effectiveness of a social network (or search engine) It is precisely because of its ability to be used by everyone and to collect the information of all: it is the nature of the social network, unlike an electricity supplier or I know that it can be competitive even only with the convenience and quality of supply. Even if I only use it.
The further nuances, the examples, the contradictions, the comparisons, can still be many, in a debate that is also compelling for the scenarios and questions that it poses, for a couple of decades. But the synthesis is only one: everything has been skipped, and these contradictions are no longer resolved with a thought and criteria of the twentieth century, and probably they are not resolved in any way, least of all with the ingenuous. No rule, precedent or comparison fits any more and they will always be all wrong and all right: and we hope that this does not extend to everything else.
