ALGORITHM AND FAKE NEWS​

The events of the last few days show how urgent it is to reform the information and advertising system that controls financial income. We are witnessing a growing crisis in the publishing and media sector generated by the absence of regulations in line with our times in the journalistic field, but at the same time by a few determined rules regarding advertising on social networks.

Advertising, in particular, which has stolen hundreds of millions of euros from traditional media in recent years. We discussed it on the occasion of the last National Council of Figec Cisal, the Italian Federation of Journalism, Publishing and Communication, highlighting that on the one hand we ask for transparency, professional ethics, training and updating, on the other we are witnessing a jungle. One made up of fake news spread on various platforms and advertisements – often hidden – that sometimes involve minors.

At this point, in light of what is happening, we realize that the lack of rules combined with the deregulation of algorithms has generated an uncontrollable system in which we no longer understand where reality and truth are.

Pope Francis in the letter “Artificial Intelligence and Peace”, the European Union with the guidelines of the AI Law (whose implementation with regulation, in case everything goes well, will not be before a couple of years) and at the Security Summit in London indicated the need to implement interventions also by the institutions of each country.

Journalism remains a safeguard of democracy, but it is constantly threatened by the crisis generated by the lack of a regulatory update in the information sector (the rules are more than sixty years old) and the current lack of rules in the collection of online advertising and social networks. All this has generated over the years multiple business crises, requests for public intervention for early retirements and technological investments that, it should be emphasized, should not replace but help the work of journalists.

It is a truly complex moment in which Figec Cisal expects the Italian Government and Parliament to involve the actors of the information and communication system because there is a real risk of not understanding with certainty what is the society in which we live, because our lived experience runs the risk of being overwhelmed by the algorithm of the virtual.

Andrea Bulgarelli is national counselor of Figec Casal and general counselor of Inpgi.

This article was originally published in Italian, on the website Giornalistitalia, with whose permission we reproduce it here. You can read it in its original version at this link.