A project by Simone Pellegrino
At the end of January 2020, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and University of Oxford commissioned research to YouGov, that submitted an online questionnaire to an average of 2000 people in each of 40 different economies. The survey dealt with the questions of news consumption, news accessibility, low trust and misinformation, that have represented “a backdrop against which journalists, […] and public health officials have been battling to reach ordinary people with key messages over the last few months” (Newman et al., 2021) of the Covid-19 pandemic and other impactful global events (e.g., US elections, vaccine inoculation, etc.).
On one hand, the role that traditional media outlets played in explaining the health crisis and social media platforms in letting people connect in trying times was deemed essential. On the other, trust in news reportedly continued to fall globally. According to research, more than half of total 80,000 samples (54%) remained “concerned about what is real and fake on the internet when it comes to news” (ibid). In particular, concern tended to be “highest in parts of the Global South such as Brazil (84%), Kenya (76%), and South Africa (72%) where social media use is high and traditional institutions are often weaker” (ibid), whereas lowest levels of concern showed a tendency to be found in less polarised countries, like the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.
Among the diverse channels of misinformation that people see, “it is perhaps no surprise” (ibid) that social media well emerged (40%), also given its perfect ecosystem to spread it. The network is open, yet only a few gatekeepers have the keys to the gates through which information passes. OTT services (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) have accumulated an enormous concentrated economic power, in a world where network effects and scale economies lead to oligopolistic markets (Moazed, Johnson, 2016). However, if some of these gatekeepers leave their gates open to the publication of unfounded information, the effects are dire, also due to the introduction of the filter bubble, that quintessentially embodies the beginning of the age of personalisation (Pariser, 2011). Users get locked inside a chamber in which they are enclosed by their tastes and prejudices that, if shared without being fact-checked, might reach millions of other users and even jeopardise the heartbeat of a nation.
For instance, The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) focused on more than 812,000 Facebook and Twitter vaccine-related posts and identified that 65% of anti-vaccine posts came from the so-called “disinformation dozen” that, according to the report published by the CCDH, reach more than 59 million followers on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Therefore, if the filter bubble plays a crucial role in the spread of misinformation, a bubble democracy may symbolise the present and the future of many markets, that is to say – even though mainly due to factors that not necessarily have something to do with the Internet – the phenomenon of fragmentation, polarisation, radicalisation of politics and the centrifugal force of each post (Palano, 2020).
This website aims at being an artwork with a variety of parallel meanings. Firstly, the choice of the format highlights the feasibility of this project: the openness of the internet and its relatively cheap accessibility. It was written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS languages and uploaded on a domain I later bought for less than a euro. Moreover, the font I used was downloaded for free from www.1001fonts.com. Secondly, the decision of colours (red and black) comes from Robert Plutchik’s emotion classification to transmit anger and outrage. Thirdly and most importantly, the caption and the counter display the extent of the threat with an increasing unit per second. The single number was the approximate result I worked out starting from the amount of Jan. 2020 social media users (estimated by Statista/HootSuite and related to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) of each of the 40 countries surveyed by Reuters Institute. Afterwards, I zeroed in on the 40% that felt concerned about misinformation and reduced the monthly data of 996,698,480 users to a unit per second of 372.1245818.
In conclusion, misinformation is a real threat and a form of policing is pivotal. Once outlined, the Internet laws should answer the question of enforceability, otherwise "not only [would] they fail to deal with the mischief which [they seek] to remedy, but the knowledge that they are unenforceable [would weaken] the normative force of other laws" (Reed, 2012, p.291). So far, any attempt of regulation has revealed itself to be quite feeble. Merely extending existing legal concepts may not be the most appropriate cure, also due to the contradictory effect that this might cause to the original values of the digital environment. However, in order to preserve free speech, it is indispensable that the masses get educated “to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest” (Mill in Pellegrino, 2020, p.9). Preventive solutions are needed, “which will require working within the mainstream to remind people what the core values of democracy are” (Miller-Idriss in Pellegrino, 2020, p.9) through educational means that raise awareness on the issue. Otherwise, the positive objectives of open media could get misunderstood forever.
Click here to download the full report.