“Technology is neither good nor bad, but neither is it neutral” (Melvin Kranzberg).
The phenomenon of fake news is driven by several interests. The first is the commercial one.
Private Internet platforms-for example, social media-are interested in multiplying content views because with each view they can potentially associate an advertising message and thus result in revenue from the platform itself.
The phenomenon of hoaxes or fake news has been fostered by those who run the platform, because it is natural and obvious that purely invented, imaginary news designed to create sensation has much more potential to spread than true news.
Here, then, is where the mechanism of suggesting the news itself and propagating it is favored: a big “shootout” immediately has relevant feedback from users, creates attention, and thus is enhanced in the mechanism of propagation and dissemination, distribution, and rotation of information within the social media platform.
The fake sphere has expanded enormously with generative AI and with models capable of producing content of the “deep fake” kind, including images resembling photographs or videos with a high realistic effect but completely fake.
This phenomenon is devastating, however, because it results in a primacy of the false over the true, a primacy of hype over factual reporting. This takes on added relevance in some contexts, for example, that of election and political propaganda campaigns.
“The Internet has entailed many positive things, but fake news is one of the negatives. All of us who love democracy and believe in freedom should think that separating the fake from the true is the basis of freedom.” (Tim Cook, Apple CEO)
Evidently what has been achieved over centuries and decades in the area of political and electoral communication rules-for example, what is called “par condicio” in the mass media in Italy-is totally disregarded by social media. Par condicio stipulates that within the mass media the different political parties should have an equal opportunity or at least a tendency to have an equal opportunity to communicate their programs and ideas so that an overwhelming dominance of one political force over the other is not created.
Another worrying phenomenon regarding the circulation of fake news is the spread of scientifically unfounded beliefs, even on sensitive topics such as vaccines, drugs, alien species (e.g., Xylella), and climate.
The mechanism of fake news as we said is itself overwhelming in that fake news, a “hoax,” has a much higher potential for propagation than true news.
Here, then, are election campaigns, opinion campaigns, public debates, in the absence of control mechanisms, being greatly distorted by some social media.
To ensure the network’s reputation as a reliable environment as to the veracity of its content, systems should be favored to identify fake news and possibly filter it out; current mechanisms, on the contrary, tend to favor and propagate it.
This phenomenon results in a strong distortion of truth and reality within Social Media. It is necessary to denounce the risks of this widespread delegation to those who manage social media today, to promote the critical capacity of users, and to build structured forms of content curation that also recover and restore the necessary credibility to social media, through authoritative sources and quality content.
Italiano