The largest ongoing experiment on the impact of self-regulating artificial intelligence, designed to serve the interests of massive corporations, is playing out among the billions of people who build their social relationships by using some media platforms. After nearly two decades, the consequences of this experiment are becoming increasingly well-documented. The major issues include:
Personal freedom. Information about individuals is used to control and manipulate their behavior according to the platforms’ business models, with risks of addiction, depression, and deterioration in the quality of relationships.
Information. Documented research is completely mixed into a context where it is indistinguishable from opinions based on emotions, impressions, deliberate disinformation, and hate speech, posing risks to the quality of democratic debate.
Economic power concentration. The dominance of a few large corporations drains resources from innovation and worsens the competitive conditions for nearly all smaller companies. As a result, the competitive market system itself risks being sidelined by the growing BigTech’s oligopoly.
Cognitive warfare. Social platforms are also a battleground for cognitive warfare, putting at a disadvantage all states that lack access to platform mechanisms or influence over the rules they operate by. Any country with a serious defense strategy also has a strategy for developing its own digital platforms. Europe, uniquely, does not: it tries to regulate foreign platforms without building alternatives of its own.
What can be done to create better platforms? What Europe can do to develop a strategy to make its own platforms? Why should Europe bother?
A discussion at Le Grand Continent will address this issue tomorrow. An article about this has been published by Social Data Science Alliance
Reading
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Allen Lane 2024
Nicholas Carr, Superbloom. How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Norton 2025
David Colon, La guerre de l’information. Les États è la conquête de nos esprits, Taillandier 2023
Asma Mhalla, Technopolitique. Comment la technologie fait de nous des soldats, Seuil 2024
Marietje Schaake, The Tech Coup. How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, Princeton University Press 2024
Shoshana Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for the future at the new frontier of power, Faber and Faber 2019
Why Europe does not focus on making its own platforms?
What explains the reluctance of European authorities to commit to fostering the emergence of autonomous alternative European platforms?
The first explanation, the one which starts with the idea that they fail to recognize the importance of such platforms, is clearly mistaken: the European Union has, in fact, passed extensive legislation in the previous term aimed at limiting the power of existing platforms. So why the hesitation?
Another possible explanation is that the Commission sees defeating American platforms as too difficult. Competing with the American tech oligopolies—seen as extremely powerful, wealthy, and technologically advanced—might seem like a guaranteed failure. Platforms benefiting from network effects are often seen as unbeatable. However, as Bernardo Huberman demonstrated in his research on the “laws of the web,” network effects apply to specific categories of services. This means it is always possible to build platforms that offer different services from existing ones. The goal is not to replicate Google or Instagram, but to create entirely new platforms that can earn attention by offering more human-centered, meaningful alternatives to the American models.
A third, more ideological explanation could be that the Commission still holds the belief that platform-related competition should be resolved by the market—that is, by private entrepreneurs rather than by the state. After all, this is an economic activity that, on the surface, doesn't appear to suffer from market failure. Moreover, political intervention in the media world always carries the risk of undermining democratic principles or freedom of expression. But we must acknowledge that this reasoning contradicts the indisputable fact that many democratic European countries have public broadcasters that serve as public-interest media in the name of democracy, pluralism, and universal access to information. Additionally, this line of thinking may be based on a flawed assumption: the social media landscape is far from perfectly competitive and could, in fact, be considered a market failure—especially given how difficult it is for any new initiative to gain a foothold.
A fourth explanation might be more political: some politicians may be hesitant to undermine one of their most effective propaganda tools. This argument tends to apply more to extremist politicians, who benefit most from today’s social media dynamics. These are the political figures who thrive on polarization, avoid in-depth discussion, and are content to channel any form of discontent. Current platforms favor emotional messaging and devalue thoughtful, well-documented, and rational information. Yet the governing majority in Europe should have every interest in expanding the space and attention devoted to high-quality, in-depth information—far more than what currently dominates social media.
We want to discuss the impossibility for Europe to build its own platforms. And we will follow with other letters about this. We start with the discussion at Le Grand Continent tomorrow. Thanks for reading: we hope we’ll have more opportunities to gather ideas on this matter.
I’m the voice and author of: Padroni del mondo a podcast published by RAI RADIO 3: it can be found on Raiplaysound and Spotify
In previous Media Ecology:
November 5th 2024 - Alternative intelligences
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