Social Media and the Public Interest Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age by Philip M.Napoli

Social Media and the Public Interest Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age by Philip M.Napoli

published by Columbia University Press makes the point about the fruition from million of users of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, definying the past, present and maybe future of news, and what it meant for these social medias (somewhere I read that theorically Google is the first editor of the Net) the fruition of news.

The web was invented decades ago but the real revolution started only 25 years ago and it deleted an entire world, with its appearance. Information, news were and are of course included. It was a Tsunami.

At first, the internet in its germinality wasn't necessarely too much connected with users; there were still problems of aggregation. Like in a public square, you must find a good singer, or an attraction for keeping that square crowded. 

Journalism at the same time appeared in online platforms; at first completely free; some of them pretty soon decided of moving on from the printing edition, investing and preferring to reach virtual users. This one to the author and other esponents of the field hasn't been a brilliant idea at all.

If the net was still trying to understand where to go, a young boy from Harvard had decided the destiny of the humanity: his name was Mark Zuckenberg and created Facebook the social media more loved in the world. Beautiful and friendly interface, although there were miriads of sites like that one, where you could post pictures, where you could find new friends, interacting with distant correspondents, Facebook became immediately a planetarian success.

At first it was a platform that reached million of people thanks to the idea of finding new friends, re-discovering schoolmates lost from decades, distant relatives and friends; later it became a complex social media pretty influential also politically. 

At the same time, while FB was emerging, other realities were doing the same things: YouTube, Twitter. 

Facebook, YouTube, but also other powerful social medias will always tell to people that they are not editors, but story is different, because with the time they started to self-publishing, sharing news, creating videos, spreading, I am sure, without any fault fake news in grade of ingenerating chaos in the world.

Thanks to the use of algorithms, social medias, - but also important newsmagazines as the New York Times - prepare news, things, attractions for people so that  they will stay in that virtual site much more; they know immediately what people love, what they would want to see and read.

What it is emerging with great worry reading this book to my point of view is that there is not any kind of real freedom when we are in the net. We think that we are free; we think that we want to read a certain news; that we want to see a certain content, but substantially it's all an algorithmic story where our freedom is costipated in a sort of: "She/He should like it." A limit of the net and information could be this one. 

More there is to saying about news, and what it happened during these decades; information became decadent, for using an expression of the author. Fake news can be built everywhere; also in the bedroom of a teenager and then spread in the world with the consequences that we know; people don't tend to read as much as in the past. 

The same political systems sometimes are influenced by social medias and what it is launched in the net.

The internet and information represents a big complexity as you will read.

This book is written with passion; it is interesting and informative and it's for all users.

While I was reading this book I thought that I would want that every person should know what there is written in this book. It would be helpful for them and for their internet-choices.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this bool-

Anna Maria Polidori