RXTTEN PORTAL

My take on: is social media a safe source of information? 

No. 
But let's introduce the topic first: I'm attending the group preparations for the upcoming Treno della Memoria project, in which, very generally, we are going to visit cities and places (such as death camps and concentration camps) related to the holocaust. Unrelated to my political thoughts about this, today's training left me with a big BRUH: the question was the one above, "is social media a safe source of information?" and in the fashion of a quick placement game we had to position ourselves either left or right, depending on if we had agreed or not with the assumption or question. And of course I was on the NO side. 

Why social media isn't a safe source of information? (the debate)

Upon having to explain ourselves, I stepped in first and "kindly" tried to explain the following: social media is made, created and carefully elaborated for feeding us content, and only that, which will get us hooked and therefore generate profit. It generates profit off of male gaze, with women needing validation and quick closure, and about quick closure social media benefits off of the increasingly great loneliness epidemic, our inability to interact with other humans without a consistent and digital barrier, benefits off of our growing detachment from reality, mostly caused by social media itself. 
The thing is (and I am not making this up myself): social media, and more specifically the companies behind it, show us content depending on country, sex, age, religion and interests. That means that my feed, here in Italy, is surely different from the one of a teenager the same age as me from London, from Tokyo, from Singapore and so on. Not only that, and that is very much already common knowledge, but social media iterates only on what we seem to be enjoying generally or at the present moment. And you literally do this every day: say, if you pressed like or watched for a long while a reel about ICE in the USA, your feed (only for a while) is going to be only that. That means that a teenager with limited knowledge, a man with limited knowledge and awareness is never going to see and therefore be able to step out from, content that is different from his own ideas. And that means reinforcing wrong information, and enforcing planned propaganda. 
PROPAGANDA! the only right word for this. 

The reply from a guy that was standing in the middle

"I think that none of this makes sense at all. If that was so, or if that was the point, even television and the News are politically sided. I think that social media gives the chance to everyone to speak and it is our duty to figure out what is right and what is wrong". 

Well fuckass

Despite the fact that News are indeed political sided and that's what the fuck I'm talking about.Social media had started as something revolutionary, as revolutionary as Wikipedia was: a conglomerate of free information, open to everyone and free of modification from anyone. Amazing right? Except that Wikipedia keeps on being a nonprofit kind of project, while social media with its influence and power of course had to monetize something. While this is something said very often, "it monetizes off our time", I would like to bring it to the actual scale it lands on to, while stating my thesis again: 
Social media could be and would be (as it was initially) a safe source of information if it was led by someone who is not at the top (while much of the users are "us", at the bottom) and that had no economical interest to gain from it. And if history has taught us something: economic interest means political interest. And that is how we get to see excruciating reels ridiculing the wrath and absurdity of Gaza, because mutilated men or children raise views and screen time. They increase engagement. Instagram is not showing any of that in countries, or at times, in which this kind of content would have not been that much worthwhile in money terms. This is inhumane. 
And while of course we can say that palestinian people (in this example) now have the chance to share such reels, we must be aware that all of which we are seeing is controlled, filtered, edited, hidden, changed according to political interests. And that is undeniable. Have you seen reels about people in Sudan? No. Because it is not money generating. And if social media was a safe place for information, you should and could be able to see it all: what's going on in Italy and this crazy pseudo-fascist shit, what's going in Ukraine (that everyone has forgot), what's going on in the U.S.A, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and all of that. But we are not only numb, but very much blindfolded. And blindfoled by what you may ask? By the consumerism illusion of owning everything, the idea (which is a lie) that we do have access to everything. And lastly, we are blindfolded by the absurd contrast of what we are promised, of what we thing should be right, of our reality which is still, stuck, faint, normal, and the paradox that we cannot seem to realize that all of this is real. 

If I could, I would've told him to read 1984. It's getting scary. 

un abbraccio (in quei pochi attimi di lucidità che mi sono concessi), cadou. 23/1/2026