We are far, very far from a new Arab Spring. The algorithms that decide for social network users which publications are shown to them live, and the disengagement of a good portion of these users give platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads a role that is the polar opposite of the one they played in the past.
It is the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, who notes this. During the first days of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the French politician wrote to the big bosses of Meta and X to remind them of their public role in situations of major armed conflicts like this. “Civil society has widely reported cases where misleading images or erroneous facts were circulating on your platforms in Europe, such as old re-promoted images taken from former armed conflicts or video games,” Mr. Breton summarized in this letter. . This clearly appears to be false or misleading information. »
The commissioner does not like the changes made in recent days to the usage policies of Meta and .
“I remind you that if you are found guilty of non-compliance [avec la loi européenne]penalties could be imposed,” added Thierry Breton, in what could become a trend with many governments which are increasingly starting to attack the hegemony of social networks.
Where is the revolution?
In the fall of 2011, the conclusion was clear: the revolution will not be televised. It will be detailed on X, commented on Facebook, live on YouTube. This is a clear sign of the times. We were coming out of an “Arab Spring” where relatively emerging social networks played an obvious facilitating role in popular uprisings in northern Africa and the Middle East.
Scholars quickly jumped on the nearly 3 million tweets, gigabytes of video content, and thousands of blog posts that were published during these events. Their conclusion: if they did not help launch the revolution, social media, with X in the lead, organized it, amplified it. We were delighted, for example, at that time, with the 230,000 tweets published daily in favor of regime change during the week preceding the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
“Social media has become an essential part of the tool kit for greater democracy,” claimed at the time a University of Washington researcher responsible for one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject.
Perhaps at the end of the conflict in the Gaza Strip, researchers will want to revisit this conclusion, after viewing the misleading videos which, for a week, have been accumulating views by the millions, both on X and on Facebook, Instagram , Threads and TikTok.
Replace Twitter
Many people have wondered since its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk and its name change to X whether there is a platform capable of fulfilling the political role that Twitter had during its early years. Several competing platforms have emerged: BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads… We don’t see any of them having the same influential role that X had in the last decade.
In fact, it seems that no company currently present in the market, suddenly very fragmented by social networks, wishes to take over this role. Adam Mosseri, who runs the Instagram network at Meta and is responsible for launching Threads, an app that looks amusingly like industry.
“We are not anti-news,” assured Adam Mosseri on Threads, not without a bit of irony. “The news is already clearly present on Threads. People can share news, they can follow accounts that share news. We won’t get in their way either. But we’re not going to start making them bigger either. […] Doing that would be far too risky, given the young age of our platform, the perils of wanting to do too much and the stakes. »
What are the “challenges” of being a public information platform? You have to comply with a whole host of laws, rules and codes of conduct to ensure that the content shared is verifiable, truthful and relevant. This is something that Adam Mosseri’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has always refused to do.
Elon Musk seems to be heading in the same direction: sending Internet users to external sources of content does not suit him. He has just removed hyperlinks from posts published on
However, Facebook has shown this quite clearly for several weeks in Canada: when we remove sources of information content from social platforms, it does not make these platforms more attractive. Burst advertising, irrelevant viral videos and content offered by algorithms do not have the same value. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will lose enough subscribers to change its mind.
Otherwise, if there is a revolution, it will not take place on social networks.