Infodemic infects states as well as users of social platforms

The inability, at any level, to govern complexity in the use of information traces the path to chaos even in the life of institutions and not only in that of citizens – by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by Italian Tech – La Repubblica

Meta’s retreat from fact checking on its platforms concerns, albeit in a different way, the long-term consequences of infodemics.

Initially conceived as a conceptual tool to describe the weak condition of users in the face of disinformation caused by ‘information overload’, infodemic has turned into a paternalistic justification for various forms of censorship. Initially, it used to come from high places, delegated to private subjects(companies and delatores) by laws or ‘suggested “ by the executive, and now, at least in part and at least in the USA, in the hands of an not clearly defined ‘user community’.

Behind the scenes, however, the sophisticated mechanism based on user profiling and automated content analysis continues to work, double-checked on the basis of ‘private laws’ shped by ‘terms and conditions’ or ‘community guidelines’.

Great power, without (not anymore) great responsibility

This is not the case everywhere, but if the trend that emerges from Meta’s choice is consolidated, it is highly likely that we will be faced with yet another system to legally  reduce platform service providers’ legal liability.

If, in fact, the ‘control of inappropriateness’ of a content is entrusted to the ‘community’, it goes without saying that a digital platform cannot be held responsible (but on what account, if the content is not illegal?) because some user has been ‘offended’ by a post or a powerful person has been ‘roasted’ by a criticism.

So, despite the delusions of those who think that companies answer to ‘civil society’ rather than of their shareholders and investors, after ‘privacy’, freedom of expression is now being enlisted to defend private economic interests.

Infodemics and public powers

Like many US journalistic simplifications, infodemics has become a kind of meme, spread and trivialised not only in the US but also on this side of the Atlantic.

Supinely focused on how infodemic infects individuals, the debate has not paid much attention to the public sector and how, in this sphere, infodemic is an element of a broader problem: the management of complexity and its capacity to weaken a state from within or even cause its unravelling.

The point of paralysis

The processes making the machinery of an administration work are certainly fuelled by information, but to function they also need to manage at every level the complexity involved in collecting, analysing, organising and transforming it into concrete actions.

Generally speaking, as long as the ability to control this complexity is greater than the difficulty of managing it, an organisation should (in theory) be able to carry on without too many problems.

On the contrary, if there is too much, badly organised and unreliable information, it will be difficult to use it efficiently: in this sense, therefore, the concept of infodemic can also be applied, at least in part, to public policy.

Under certain conditions, infodemic turns complexity into chaos that increases until a critical threshold is reached beyond which the system can no longer function and decision-making comes to a standstill: this is the point of paralysis.

Empirical observation suggests that, at every level, the point of paralysis is often reached through incompetence or sloppiness, confirming the validity of Peter’s Principle and Parkinson’s Law. However, strategically manipulating the fundamental elements of political governance to push it towards a management iceberg can also be an element of an overall strategy to destabilise a country,

Complexity, infodemic and political destabilisation

Overburdening government structures with contradictory or superfluous data, creating instrumental obstacles and conflicts, diminishing the government’s ability to make decisions shared by citizens by weakening leadership structures, reducing the quality of information so that decision-makers operate on the basis of unreliable or incomplete data and thus make bad choices, are just a few examples of how it might be possible to push the system towards the point of paralysis.

Once there, turning back becomes almost impossible, and all that remains is to stand helplessly as the collapse manifests itself in loss of legitimacy of institutions, economic recession, civil unrest and, in the extreme, the disintegration of a state.

From this perspective, combating infodemic in the public sector is, as they say these days, not only a necessity to improve the efficiency of the public machine but an ‘existential challenge’. A challenge, however, that the public authorities  do not recognise or from which – like the noble revelers in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – they illusorily believe they can protect themselves. But in so doing they allow the infodemic to continue to propagate everywhere until, as mentioned, it causes irreversible damage.

Conclusions

So, while parliaments and a-national entities such as the EU were concerned about protecting our ‘freedom of self-determination’ by preventing the dissemination of ‘improper’ (though not illicit) content or, to put it another way, by gagging us under the guise of putting a bib on us, they do not seem to have realised that they have long been victims of the same disease that they claim to be eradicating from their citizens, and that their obsession with deciding what is a lie and what is the truth has ended up making them lose the ability to distinguish one from the other.

It only remains to be seen how far we are from the point of paralysis and when (when, not if) we will reach it.

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