A major societal issue is unfolding before our eyes as the tech giants play bullies from the back of the schoolyard by threatening to stop broadcasting journalistic work if the Canadian government demands royalties from them. However, the threat to our democracies is, in my view, poorly defined.
The thought that comes to mind whenever the subject is raised is: “But who, at the base, seriously believes that it is a good idea to consume most of their information on social networks? The phenomenon of echo chambers no longer needs to be explained, the platforms belonging to the Web giants (also called GAFAM) essentially constitute only a pretext to generate traffic and thus collect personal data on their users, all this in order to better target the advertising with which they will be bombarded. On this topic, there is much to be gained from reading The age of surveillance capitalismby Shoshana Zuboff at Zulma.
I hope I don’t tell you anything here, but, in this light, would it be reasonable to think that such a business model does not quite fit the ideals of an informed, educated and free democratic society? That consuming exclusively its news in this way is a risky bet? Doesn’t the problem lie upstream, in the dependence that we, as individuals, companies and institutions, have developed on these private media, which it has become unthinkable to do without if we seek to exist in society.
Rather than position ourselves as victims of the abuse of Meta and Google, let’s take this opportunity to engage in a real social reflection on the usefulness of teaching people that social networks, by their self-interested nature, are not all adapted to the dissemination of information worthy of the name, that is to say diversified and free. The citizen therefore has a duty to find the information where it is disseminated and unfiltered, by diversifying its sources. Learn actively rather than passively, directly on mainstream media platforms. Awareness work must be undertaken in this direction.
Meta and Google, far from pushing us against the wall by threatening to remove links to the news media, offer us a golden opportunity to rethink our relationship to journalistic work and eliminate this intermediary that arises between it and the citizen, intermediary who contributes to the polarization of thought and to extremism. Let us support the growing boycott of the various governmental and private authorities which are joining forces to counter this bullying business, and learn to go to the information that is struggling so much to make its way to us from this economic and social tidal wave that constitutes the GAFAM.