https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/big-tech-big-governm... In India, and in other advanced societies, governments and courts are beginning their reckoning with the extraordinary difficulties posed by presently existing centralised “social media” and the “platform” companies that, by operating these media, are changing human civilisation. These social media or platform companies surveille the daily social behaviour of billions of individuals – reading their mail, spying on their social interactions, presenting them edited news feeds and personalised advertising, keeping track of everything they read and watch. The companies have acquired a breadth and depth of social power over our impulses and behaviour patterns that exceeds any similar form of influence, private or public, in human history. This has happened in the blink of an eye on the timescale of history, barely more than a decade. For context, the first Apple iPhone was launched in 2007. The power of these “technology companies” to amplify human emotions; to generate outrage and stoke anger; to channel aggression; above all, to move goods and merchandise, leaves the more traditional powers of law and government staggering, deeply unsure how to respond. [...] The platform companies, under pressure to respect the privacy rights of their users, have integrated “end to end” encryption into services such as WhatsApp. Because the platform intermediary cannot see the content of the messages it handles, it cannot trace a message as it is forwarded, redistributed or transferred among parties. Any regulation requiring the intermediary company to render messages traceable, destroying parties’ anonymity, will inevitably also break the company’s laudable attempts to protect the confidentiality of users’ conversations. [...] Moreover, it is hardly appropriate to regard the platform companies, powerful as they are, as the sole source of the problem of social media misuse. All of the world’s largest democracies (including Brazil and the United States as well as India) have experienced unsettling transformations of political campaigning practices in the last half decade. Political parties and other actors have adopted large-scale disinformation and influence campaigns based around opaque social media messaging. A recent global report on computational propaganda, published by Oxford University researchers, shows the comparative sophistication and intensity of governments to shape and control public opinion by these means. Treating the problem of social media misuse as though it were primarily a problem of private defamation, that can be fully resolved by regulating the platform companies, ignores the much larger problems that are caused by governments, political parties and their supporters. These can only be remedied by strengthening individual rights and limiting governmental power, not by the reverse. The problems we face are as complex as the changes our technology has wrought. There are no simple answers or quick fixes. [...] ___ L'unica vera risposta, l'unica soluzione che permette di rafforzare i diritti individuali e restituire autonomie alle comunità è l'educazione storica e informatica. Non c'è alternativa. L'ignoranza è troppo pericolosa. Fintanto che un insegnante di scuola media può arrivare a minacciare 4 agli studenti che non si iscrivono a Edmodo, diffondendo ignoranza e sottomettendo gli studenti (e i genitori) culturalmente inermi ad una piattaforma di sorveglianza o all'altra, non c'è speranza che la Democrazia possa funzionare. Giacomo