A few days ago, one of the most devastating weather events in our country’s history occurred. DANA destroyed the resources, jobs, memories, dreams and lives of many Valencians.
Like every Tuesday, the plenary session is held at the Congress of Deputies, with legislative debates which generally end around nine o’clock in the evening, and sometimes even later. During the plenary session, information on DANA was scarce, especially in the national media. At the end of the session, I vividly remember seeing endless tweets talking about floaters, heartbreaking videos of people getting into their cars or directly drowning. The first thing I did, with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, was to dial my twin brother’s phone number to find out if it was true, if he was okay and if our family had been affected.
My entire childhood is linked to the Valencian Country, to the family and friends with whom I did my secondary education, university and my first jobs. That day, no one could sleep a wink; Impotence invaded all the parliamentary groups, with deputies from the Valencian Country who could not even return home.
The next day, while the major networks oscillated between Mazón’s story and the central government in search of who was right, the international community brother-in-law The digital reactionaries have deployed their heavy artillery arsenal of lies on the physical and digital terrain. Social media was flooded with hoaxes, manipulated videos, pseudo-journalists and expert influencers and even Instagram models with protests called by ultras, who hid their organizations in the fine print. At that point, disinformation became a destabilizing element of the rule of law.
During DANA, I tried to explain the issue of regional powers without getting beaten, but I realized that what people on my Instagram needed was to be heard. The people who followed me needed to express their frustration and see that I was involved in helping them tell their story in the first person. At that point, like many others, my account became an office for complaints and requests. It was perhaps the only thing a Nobel MP could do in those moments and I would like to think that it comforted many people.
Minister Óscar Puente followed the same strategy on Twitter, moving from being a “baby boom agitator” to being a minister who solves problems and does it quickly. Puente was able to take charge of the situation from a space that, as we saw, people needed. And this is what all politicians must do, particularly to explain the work of institutions: communicating political work in a simple way means protecting the legitimacy of institutions.
In the days that followed, many institutions were also forced to begin their press conferences denying the hoaxes: the army, the National Police, the Government, the Royal Family, the Red Cross… At that time, the hoax spreaders had already won. history 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 measures in banking and other times for human rights, such as creating robots to amplify the voice of the Sahrawi people and defending human rights on Twitter. However, since 2016 when I published Bare your soul in 140 in 140 charactersTwitter and social media have changed.
In 2016, I had full access to the Twitter API; In other words, I could access the insides of the tweets and analyze the speeches, their location, whether they were hateful messages or not, and the sentiment of the citizens. But since the purchase of the platform in 2022 by the tycoon Elon Musk, everything has changed. The first steps taken by X’s new owner were to fire key leaders and opponents, manipulate algorithms, and of course, limit developer access to the Twitter database. If you don’t have access to the innards of an algorithm, you are blind as a developer.
Many talk about the fall in the value of Twitter since its acquisition by Musk, a drop that exceeded 72%. Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion, and its market price is now estimated at 4 billion. But does Musk care? Is it perhaps the mogul’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 the planet; He can afford the whim of literally burning 40 billion to impose his ideology. Additionally, Musk has long declared war on progressivism and openly aligned himself with the now-elect Donald Trump.
Today, not only did a racist and sex offender win, who will once again be President of the United States; Today, Elon Musk, owner of one of the most powerful digital printing presses in the world, also won. Stop saying people don’t know what they’re voting for, that Latinos are voting against their interests, or that people’s refrigerators need to be stocked. I’m sorry to tell you that now what we need to do is conquer cyberspace.
Citizens are saturated with information; She is disoriented, overwhelmed and no longer knows who to believe, she is simply in a state of shock. We saw it during DANA or the genocide in Palestine. Artificial intelligence is a tool in the hands of a few elites who speak of individual freedom and social networks as guarantors of this freedom. In this contested digital space, the progressive international is not present; She’s afraid of exposing herself and seems more concerned with competing for two minutes on a news show than creating an Instagram story telling what’s going on.
I am not naive and I know that the owner of the “printing company”, Musk, has the power to make progressive ideas, educational videos invisible and to silence feminist speeches. We, the oppressed people, know this well, and that is why I think it is essential that, within the already existing regulatory environment, we demand algorithmic transparency. We must legislate with in-depth 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 third party bias. Data must be considered a common good to guarantee state sovereignty. Because when, in the conflict of ideas, there is someone behind who favors one to the detriment of the other, we are lost. Let’s conquer the cyberspace of institutions!
