The truth about fake
Power likes that it is hard to know how things are - Media Ecology Newsletter #31
In this issue of Media Ecology we talk about the real censorship operated by popular social media platforms. And we discuss about the idea that disinformation is a means of power to stay alive.
In fact, we start from the latter. We hope to help show that it is necessary to build new platforms to enrich the media ecosystem, increase infodifersity, and work for a healthier media environment.
In the meantime, on my blog we talk (in Italian) about artificial intelligence, cities of the future, digital rights.
“Fake” can be an instrument of power
The strategy of power could be to fight the idea that:
You can fool a few for a long time
You can fool many for a short time
You can't fool many for a long time
The problem of power could be to overcome the last "you can't".
There could be a strategy to make this happen. Divide et impera is a well known one. Could be that the social media platforms are tools for power? These media could help dividing the people (fragmenting, parceling, separating, polarizing, distancing, radicalizing): if people are separated in small groups they can more easily be fooled for a long time. If such groups are many, you could fool many for a long time.
It seems that Nicolò Machiavelli has said that “power is make believe”. But we are not talking about political power only. There are many forms of power that come with fake. Examples:
Fake startup - New York Times: The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley
Fake science in China and not only there - Financial Times: China’s fake science industry: how ‘paper mills’ threaten progress
Fake war news - AlJazeera: Western media and the war on truth in Ukraine; and Cnn: How the Ukraine war exposed Western media bias
It is not about the Truth in absolute, of course, but it is about how people believe something. And it is about the critical relationship between documented, verified information and what is thought to be truth.
The topic is far more important than the already anyway relevant false and propagandistic claims of this or that politician. At stake are the information foundations on which people organize themselves to work in innovation, accept knowledge that presents itself as scientific, think about the future, and make choices based on what they think will happen. Maybe the most popular social media platforms have a responsibility in making power more powerful?
Motive: to get power, wealth, popularity
Means: platforms, algorithms, triggers, interface, etc
Opportunity: if critical barriers are being eroded, opportunities increase
The real censorship operated by popular social media platforms
Speaking of reforms that could affect TikTok, ChatGPT, or even Facebook and Twitter, some fear censorship. Any restriction of freedom of expression is considered censorship. Two politicians as radical in their own way as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Matteo Salvini in Italy have hinted at this. And perhaps they have a point. But on the other hand, platforms in turn operate a more subtle form of censorship.
While the consequences of generative artificial intelligences are still being debated, we now know very well what social media based on advertising, recommendation algorithms, and the goal of keeping users glued to technology generate: they have exacerbated the divisions of already divided and conflicted societies; they have parceled out opposition to the dominant system, even dispersing it into side discussions on the most diverse sensibilities; and they have radicalized the most radical opinions.
What is less noticeable is that they have effectively censored serious research work; they have silenced moderate people and victims of violence; they have fed the error of evaluating news not by the method by which it is gathered but by the characteristics of those who tell it, confusing every fact into an opinion. They have multiplied trolls who oppose others' ideas just to seek traffic. They have fed the confusion between people and characters. They have thrown the value of authenticity into the computer trash.
The most popular digital media, because of their interfaces, because of their business models, because of the values they have propagated, have generated a hypertrophy of hasty and violent banality, which has actually reduced the space of an essential part of culture: that of those who really study, of those who are committed to the common good and seek agreement on what can be done. And all of this with only one purpose, not political but financial: to build economic giants who at this point actually bear enormous political responsibility.
Defending these media is mandatory, shutting them down is ridiculous, but limiting the enormous power of digital companies shouldn’t be thought as inevitable?
Please take a look at Reimagine Europa. A Media Ecology Research Network is being build in Bruxelles and it grows every day. I will be informing on that more in the next issues. Reimagine Europa.
In previous Media Ecology:
February 9th – Epistemology of AI
March 16th – The method is the message
March 31th – Artificial intelligencija
April 7th – CheatGPT
Posts in Oecd’s Forum
February 8th – Knowledge ecology of the new search engines
February 21th – A Tsunami of Illusions: An artificially intelligent trompe l’oeil
March 17th – GPT4: the hallucinations continue
Podcasts in Italian, by me
L’altra metà del verso. Rai Radio 3
Media Ecology. Intesa Sanpaolo on air
Eppur s’innova. Luiss University Press
Ecology of screens
On the occasion of the International Conference Vivre par(mi) les écrans: entre passé et avenir, which was held in Lyon at the end of May, the newsletter of the International Research Group Vivre par(mi) les écrans and the Media Ecology newsletter agreed to signal, each to its recipients, the importance to them of the other's content, inviting them to subscribe to receive it and disseminate it among their contacts. So please visit Vivre par(mi) les écrans and subscribe to the newsletter. This choice of collaboration stems from the common project of promoting, developing and sharing highly qualified knowledge aimed at creating tools for guidance, critique and intervention in the field of media ecology and our current and future living between(mite) screens, as well as fostering the social dissemination of the aforementioned knowledge and tools.