Listening to the praises (or complaints) of the so-called experts on the latest Zuckerberg's strategic shift about “free speech” makes me wrinkle my nose. Today, people are raising the alarm about democracy just because yet another social media mogul has decided to “get political” with his platform by openly supporting a head of government. But that is not where the real problem lies. To understand the roots of this mess, we would have to go back quite a bit. But let me just point out one thing to show you the sheer hypocrisy and ignorance displayed by so many belated commentators.
It was 2021 and a private entrepreneur used his platform to aggressively intervene in an ongoing political debate. No, it wasn't Elon Musk and it wasn't Twitter (or X). It was the CEO of Facebook , which he had just a sitting US president banned , Donald Trump .
I fully understand the personal and political hostility towards Trump, but that was the time to raise the alarm. Because quello was the precedent. If the private owner of a platform can censor anyone, including public figures, and shut down free debate (and, by extension, collaborative fact-checking), then anything becomes possible. Even deploying an army of fact-checker selected from media outlets with clear conflicts of interest, who were given the power to overshadow or suppress competitors. Or algorithms that they censor harmless jokes simply because they contain a “banned word”. Or, the complete automation of a digital Orwellian thought control system and, therefore, control of the speech. But then it was okay, right? People said: “Zuckerberg is a private entrepreneur, he can do whatever he wants.”
As long as he played for the “right side” – which he did, given the pressure that Meta CEO had to face in Congress – people applauded.
And, of course, we pretend that it does. Cambridge Analytica scandal it never happened.
So let's not kid ourselves. Even Zuckerberg's "sudden awakening" (like the recent, strategic changes by Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook) is not an attack on democracy, it is just one of many consequences of a system built on contradictions. One of the many consequences of a system that merges the worst intrusiveness of the public and private sectors, projecting us into a future of digital neo-feudalism . The solutions, now as before (when the "private entrepreneur" was more likeable and people applauded censorship), remain the same: ethics and law .
We need of anti-monopoly regulations for social media platforms and of individual responsibility for the contents.
A possible solution? Blockchain-based social networks . Decentralized platforms would offer both freedom of word is security , ensuring that users are no longer treated as products. They could enable fairer moderation of content and prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few.
Maybe this is what the so-called “experts” should be discussing.
