How to govern media in the age of global digital platforms.

Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino del Nordest 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. The first amendment of the American Constitution, introduced in 1791 to define the rights of the individual that no government could have crossed, says much of the nature of the country that has dominated the last two centuries. But it also defines the huge contradiction that the Internet has unleashed.

Nobody can limit freedom of speech and this must have been the final mistake that Twitter made and that convinced the most visionary of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, to acquire its property to radically change its functioning.

Musk’s take-over is a drifting challenge to a liberal left that seems to have accepted the possibility to “cancel” its political opponent when she becomes “politically incorrect” (Twitter did it with Trump and it is a drift that can be accentuated in times of war). But, also to the European Union which has to deal in a different context with the same problem of having to govern media that no one controls anymore.

For Twitter, Elon Musk spends $ 43 billion. A figure that can be considered massive compared to the European standards (the value is about 30 times higher than the capitalisation of the entire Mediaset). However, as the graph in the article says, Twitter seems like the poor relative of America's large global digital platforms.

Unlike Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet which in 2021 recorded sales between 100 and 250 billion dollars, Twitter managers have never found a way to “monetize” the fact that it has 350 million users concentrated, moreover, among those who are more influential.

Tesla is worth about $ 900 billion today, which is more than the entire Italian Stock Market. Nowadays, the company founded by Jack Dorsey paradoxically pays for the same contradiction in which the editors of the journalists who are Twitter’s most voracious users have been struggling for years: it is influential but it is not clear how to give economic value to this power.

Great political influence in the hands of companies looking for economic resources to survive, produces a fragility that puts democracy itself at risk. This is one of the problems of our time, of which the question of “fake news” is only the most famous symptom.

There are two ways to solve it: the one that prevails inertially in the United States is to entrust the market with the task of correcting itself; the other which is emerging in Europe is that it must be the State that sets limits to a dream of freedom that risks turning into its opposite.

Elon Musk already seems to have a plan to restore political neutrality to what he defines as the “digital square where vital issues for democracy are discussed”: to make the algorithms governing the debate transparently (with a technology that is “open source” and that is not someone’s owner); ensure that behind every account there is a person (with a user tracking proposal that closely resembles the “abolition” of anonymity that so indignant the Internet vestals some time ago) and not a robot; not to introduce any limit to the freedom of speech that is not expressly provided for by law (which in the United States cannot intervene due to the effect of the first amendment from which this article starts). It is not clear how a more reliable Twitter can produce better economic results and, however, it is possible that a platform that hosts news of higher quality and relevance could get paid for the service.

The European road is a very different one and is mainly entrusted to one of the five regulations with which the European Union is trying to govern the processes it has undergone so far.

The Digital Services Act proposed by the European Commission in December 2020 and accepted by the Council and the European Parliament a week ago, proposes an extremely complex instrumentation to limit the distribution of illegal content. This will be done through a control of published content which will use supervision by end users, as well as by independent intermediaries who have earned their trust; but also on the processes/algorithms that the platforms use upstream to allow, order, prohibit news. More than a regulation, that of the Commission resembles a method, an infrastructure that will need to be evaluated over time and which, above all, must be equipped with sufficient professional talent to be able to deal with the large concentrations of skills that platforms digital American (and Chinese) manage to aggregate.

There would actually be a third way: it provides that bans are accompanied by industrial policy actions (Macron is attempting them in France) that favour the birth of European platforms and the affirmation of an approach to the Internet that is different from the American one than the Chinese one. It should be able to restore to the network that multiplication function of well-being and democracy that it initially promised.

Francis Bacon was right, who in the Renaissance intuited that “information is power”. As Bacon wrote, it was the introduction of the press that generated a formidable reallocation of information that disintermediated who - the Church and absolute monarchies - controlled the reproduction of knowledge and led to the birth of liberal democracy. Today, with the Internet, we are facing a force of equal intensity and opposite direction: the quantity of information to which we have access explodes, but its control is concentrated in very few hands.

Western democracy can only be saved if it is able to intelligently use the inventiveness of new publishers to give everyone the opportunity to use technologies to increase knowledge.