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The information system is one of the most complex and delicate elements of a democracy. The only real remedy for disinformation is education to the critical spirit and the re-thinking of the media system. A comment by Guido Scorza
The European elections are near and Facebook, the giant of social networks, the defendant par excellence in every disinformation trial in recent years – although it is hardly the only player involved in the global dissemination of true and false information – announces the activation of an authentic war room to ensure the proper conduct of the European elections by trying – the only technologically and humanly possible thing to do – to keep them safe from mass disinformation phenomena.
Someone – first of all the European governments that, for years, have promoted an authentic witch hunt against fake news, promoting and, in some cases, implementing liberticide legislative initiatives against a disease of today's society that represents, like dozens of others, simply the flip side of the set of tools that give us liberties that humanity has never so universally enjoyed before – certainly celebrates having put a US corporation in the corner and forced it to take on the problem. In fact, this is a dramatic error of perspective.
There are two options: either we are myopic and do not realise it or, perhaps worse, we look at the present and the future like Pilate, washing our hands of an issue that we are not able to face because of its extraordinary complexity and because short-term solutions are no use.
Because – let's face it, for once, without rhetoric and euphemisms – the only real remedy for disinformation is educational and cultural: it means promoting and developing in users and readers a critical spirit in the use of all kinds of content.
It is a process that takes years, does not allow anyone to pin a medal on their own chest for having eradicated the scourge of so-called fake news and, in fact, bears the risk of a political backlash against the system that so far, cyclically and with different intensity, has fed on the viewer sitting on the sofa in "brain off" mode and ready to swallow all sorts of misinformed trash.
Therefore, actually fighting misinformation takes the courage to question the whole media system, including the – so to speak – institutional one, mass producer of what we now call with contempt fake news, as if they were any different from the mass manipulation processes by which, for decades, traditional media have forged society in the likeness of the ruler of the moment.
But to have Facebook – and certainly not just Facebook – stand as a "blue helmet" of online information, promising to monitor the proper conduct of the European elections, which should represent a country's democratic apotheosis is simply a defeat, one of the most burning and scorching for our democracies since their origins.
The task of identifying suspicious content, condemning it to oblivion or, on the contrary, letting it circulate undisturbed in a society that aims to define itself as democratic only and exclusively affects the State, its judges, and its authorities. No matter how far the goal is, how difficult it is to reach it, how expensive or technologically unattainable it appears.
It is about administering justice in one of the most complex, delicate, neuralgic areas of a democracy: its information system.
If the state abdicates its role or, worse, pushes private actors to take charge of it and celebrates when this happens, it is the beginning of the end. It is exactly like applauding a foreign army that under the slogan of "exporting democracy" invades our territory and obliterates ours.
We are all losing and, what is worse, most seem to think that we are winning.
*Guido Scorza is a lawyer, a professor of new technology law, and a journalist. Since 2016 he has been in charge of national and European regulatory affairs for the Digital Transformation Team of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
This publication has been produced within the project ESVEI, supported in part by a grant from the Foundation Open Society Institute in cooperation with the OSIFE of the Open Society Foundations. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa.
