A few days ago one of the most devastating meteorological phenomena in the history of our country occurred. DANA devastated the resources, jobs, memories, dreams and lives of many Valencians.
Like every Tuesday, the plenary session is held in the Congress of Deputies, with legislative debates that usually end around nine at night, and sometimes even later. During the plenary session, information about DANA was scarce, especially in the national media. At the end of the session, I clearly remember seeing endless tweets talking about floating bodies, heartbreaking videos of people climbing into their cars or directly drowning. The first thing I did, with a lot of anguish and uncertainty, was dial my twin brother’s phone number to find out if this was true, if he was okay and if our family had been affected.
My entire childhood is linked to the Valencian Country, to family and friends with whom I went to high school, university and my first jobs. That day, no one could sleep a wink; Helplessness ran through all the parliamentary groups, with deputies from the Valencian Country who could not even return home.
The next day, while the big networks pivoted between Mazón’s story and the central government looking for who was right, the international brother-in-law Digital reactionaries deployed their arsenal of heavy artillery of lies on the physical and digital terrain. Social networks were flooded with hoaxes, manipulated videos, pseudo-journalists and expert influencers and even Instagram templates with demonstrations called by ultras, who hid their organizations in small print. At that moment, misinformation became a destabilizing element of the rule of law.
During DANA I tried to explain the issue of regional powers without getting beaten in the attempt, but I realized that what people on my Instagram needed was to be heard. The people who followed me needed to vent their frustration and see that I was getting involved in helping them tell their stories in the first person. At that moment, like many others, my account became an office of complaints and requests. It may have been the only thing a Nobel congresswoman could do in those moments and I would like to think that it was comforting for many people.
Minister Óscar Puente followed the same strategy on Twitter, going from being a “boomer agitator” to becoming the minister who solves problems and does it quickly. Puente has been able to take charge of the situation from a space that, as has been seen, people needed. And that is what all politicians must do, especially to explain the work of institutions: communicating political work in a simple way is protecting the legitimacy of institutions.
In the following days, numerous institutions have also been forced to begin their press conferences denying hoaxes: the army, the National Police, the Government, the Royal Family, the Red Cross… At that time, the propagators of hoaxes had already won the story and thus capitalized on the pain of the victims, even legitimizing physical violence against the President of the Government.
In recent years, I have spent a lot of time programming algorithms: sometimes to analyze regulatory capital metrics in banking and other times for human rights, such as creating bots to amplify the voice of the Sahrawi people and defend human rights in Twitter. However, since 2016, when I published Bare your soul in 140 in 140 charactersTwitter and social networks have changed.
In 2016 I had full access to the Twitter API; That is, I could access the guts of the tweets and analyze the speeches, their location, whether they were hate messages or not, and the sentiment of the citizens. But since the purchase of the platform in 2022 by tycoon Elon Musk everything changed. The first actions taken by the new owner of X were to fire the main managers and opponents, manipulate the algorithms and, of course, limit developers’ access to the Twitter database. If you don’t have access to the guts of an algorithm, you are blind as a developer.
Many talk about the plummeting value of Twitter since its purchase by Musk, a drop that has exceeded 72%. Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion, and its market price is now estimated to be 4 billion. But does Musk care about that? Is it perhaps the magnate’s priority to generate a safe discursive space? Does Musk care about hoaxes and democracy? The answer is NO. Musk is the richest man on Earth; He can allow himself the whim of literally burning 40 billion to impose his ideology. Furthermore, Musk declared war on progressivism for a long time and has openly aligned himself with the now-elected Donald Trump.
Today, not only has a racist and sexual offender won, who will again be president of the United States; Today Elon Musk, the owner of one of the most powerful digital printing presses in the world, also won. Stop talking about people not knowing what they are voting for, that Latinos vote against their interests or that people’s refrigerators need to be stocked. I’m sorry to tell you that, now, what we have to do is conquer cyberspace.
Citizens are saturated with information; She is bewildered, overwhelmed and no longer knows who to believe, she is simply in a state of shock. We have seen this during the DANA or the genocide in Palestine. Artificial intelligence is a tool in the hands of a few elites who talk about individual freedom and social networks as guarantors of that freedom. In this contested digital space, the progressive international is not present; She is afraid of exposing herself and seems more concerned with competing for two minutes on a news show than with making a story on Instagram telling what is happening.
I am not naive and I know that the owner of the “printing press,” Musk, has the power to make progressive ideas, pedagogical videos, and silence feminist speeches invisible. We oppressed peoples know this well, and that is why I believe it is essential that, within the already existing regulatory environment, we demand algorithmic transparency. We must legislate with a deep knowledge of the ins and outs of algorithms, conquer all cyberspaces – including Twitter – so that they do not become ultra-conservative echo chambers, and fight for public and decentralized networks, in which users have access to the algorithm to avoid bias from third parties. Data must be considered a common good to guarantee the sovereignty of the State. Because when in the dispute of ideas there is someone behind favoring some to the detriment of others, we are lost. Let’s conquer cyberspace from the institutions!
#Conquer #cyberspace #conquer #institutions
