by Gerardo Giovagnoli
As I often read the in-depth pieces that Insider, to its great credit, publishes, I came across the latest contribution by Michele Muratori. Focused on unheard cries for help and new forms of deviance among young people, it raises many valid points, but on one in particular I would like to respectfully disagree: the idea that banning social networks for minors amounts to prohibitionism.
The subject, however, prompts me to reflect on the value of freedom, which I will develop further on.
Let me begin by explaining why there is no threat to individual liberties in imposing the ban just mentioned: minors are already prohibited from consuming alcohol, driving cars, carrying firearms, and so on.
The criterion, in the case of minors, is whether the use of a given tool could cause harm to oneself or to others, given their presumed immaturity or the need for proper training.
The point I want to stress is that the world of social media falls squarely into that category: its use requires judgement, and therefore a suitable age and a period of learning.
This is because the tool itself is particularly deceptive, and therefore dangerous. Holding a phone, looking at it and typing on it, does not appear to be a source of problems at all — unlike every other tool, which has a specific, limited function that makes the risk to oneself and others obvious. Alcohol harms the body, a gun serves only one purpose, a car can clearly cause damage or kill; a phone does none of these things overtly. It has a myriad of functions, and so do social platforms, and it is genuinely difficult to distinguish between the good and bad effects of its use, whether passive or active.
Every time technology makes available a device that did not previously exist, it also creates a new possibility — an additional freedom that did not exist before — and along with it, the freedom to turn that same tool against someone else.
This is why, in my view, without a doubt, regulation is needed.
A lawsuit concluded on 26 August in the United States, brought by a bipartisan group of states, accused Meta of designing apps such as Instagram and Facebook to create compulsive addiction among the very young, while misleading the public about their safety. To avoid a likely conviction, Zuckerberg’s company agreed to an out-of-court settlement worth close to $17 billion, to be paid out over ten years and earmarked for funding mental health initiatives and online safety programmes for young people. Part of the settlement funds are also tied to the adoption of similar rules by rival platforms.
Clearly, if in the United States — the birthplace of social media, whose administration staunchly defends the absence of regulation, and would even prefer that Europe refrain from regulating too — a substantial settlement of this kind can occur, I expect a wave of lawsuits to follow around the world.
In short, the issue is very much on the table.
This is also because, again unlike the examples of dangerous tools mentioned earlier, social media are not a passive product, and they do not simply follow the will of the user: they study us, they steer us, they show us content we consume without always deciding to do so consciously. Indeed, the criteria behind the sequence of content we see depend on commercial and emotional calculations, with the clear goal of keeping us on the platform for as long as possible.
This is even truer of artificial intelligence, which creates a new kind of freedom: the freedom not to write what one publishes oneself, not to study, not to think, not to seek information — and thus to have much more free time, because tasks once carried out by the living, sentient being are now performed by the immortal calculator.
I have already written an article for this publication about the risks AI poses to democracy, through the alliance between the oligarchy of its few owners and political power. Here, however, the issue at stake is AI replacing human experience.
Without doubt, AI can be usefully consulted to improve one’s own skills, gather more information, and make more informed decisions — but fundamentally one must first have learned the ability to discern, to judge, to verify things independently, to reason.
If instead we leave the next generation free to depend on AI, that freedom becomes a form of servitude, not liberation.
The same is true of digital social networks: if minors are allowed to spend significant amounts of time in front of the electronic pacifier — undeniably convenient for parents — the result can be that they are trained, without ever learning, to become consumers, to turn into the object of an algorithm whose sole purpose is to satisfy its owners, which is the exact opposite of the exercise of freedom. AI has every characteristic needed to be defined as that artificial, non-human tool which knows us better than we know it. Nothing like this was possible before, not even remotely.
Once it was governments or monarchs who found themselves in the position of deciding what freedom (for others) meant. Charles I Stuart, afflicted by absolutism, defined freedom in these terms: “For the people, I truly desire their liberty and freedom as much as anyone whatsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government, in those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government; that is nothing appertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”
The English, quite rightly, cut off his head in 1649 (just as they did with Cromwell, who had pushed for his execution).
What use of freedom, today
Now, fortunately, no European head of government or monarch would dream of equating freedom with subjection. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where, without proper education, we risk mistaking freedom for obedience to the algorithm, with the added complication that this algorithm does not even have a head to lose, and does not, for now, reside in Europe at all — it sits on the other side of the world and answers to no one but its programmers, and sometimes not even to them.
In short, the real issue is being prepared to use freedom — not as an end in itself, but in the pursuit of one’s own happiness and that of others, or at the very least to avoid denying it to them.
As well as learning to think before writing, that is, engaging the brain before emotions take over and turn into judgement — often a condemnation of someone else.
My generation, teenagers in the 1980s, was the last to need to study instruction manuals in order to use the technological devices of the time: from the video recorder to the car, from the television to the computer, we had to make the effort to approach technology, rather than the other way around. Computers even required knowledge of a programming language to function — DOS or BASIC being the best-known examples. Then came the concept of “user-friendly.” Today, we hold in our hands a device that brings together dozens upon dozens of functions, and there is not a single page of manual to read — everything is designed to be intuitive.
What remains far from intuitive, however, is control over our emotions, an understanding of human behaviour — including that of the person next to us — the productive use of the time available to us, and, more generally, the impact of our behaviour on the human world around us, assuming, and it is by no means guaranteed, that we even understand its impact on ourselves.
The immediacy of interacting with a phone, the total disintermediation between impulse and the sharing of what we feel, and the compulsive speed of the process, make it far more likely than before that even a simple action of ours will have a negative effect, such as writing a comment or viewing violent or obscene content, often without any specific intent behind it.
Marshall McLuhan grasped the problem ahead of his time: “the medium IS the message,” he wrote in 1964.
In other words, the tool you use to communicate shapes the way you think far more than the words or images you convey. What matters is not only what we say (the news, the story, the idea), but through which technological medium (television or radio, at the time), because that medium shapes both our minds and society. He understood that every new medium changes our habits, our sense of time and our behaviour, regardless of what we actually watch or listen to.
And this was said at a time when it was not yet possible for everyone to communicate with everyone else. Communication back then was necessarily one-directional, from transmitter to receiver — with the exception of the telephone, though even that was only ever two-way.
