The viral trap

When blogs triumphed, we repeated it a lot: "Freedom of the press for those who have a press."

We believed that the ability to publish and distribute without political, economic or technical obstacles would have to democratize the construction of reality, multiplying its sources and freeing it from commercial servitudes.

This week, Elon Musk began removing journalists who work for major US news outlets from Twitter covering news about Elon Musk.

If an article is published in a newspaper and it is not shared, amplified, debated and refuted on Twitter, has it really been published?

He has also dissolved the council that advised moderation and hate speech.

Moderation doesn't matter: we've been distracted for years with fact-checking projects and debates about who can be kicked out or ignored by recommendation algorithms, when the problem is the wicked incentive system that was put in place when Facebook invented the “like” and Twitter the retweet.

Originally designed to encourage user interaction, they have become a machine for viralizing outrageous, scandalous or outright false content.

And it has created the perfect ph for only four minority and anti-democratic elements to prosper: the extreme right, the extreme left, the disinformation agencies and the

.

One of the main characteristics of institutions is that they impose processes that stop virality.

Health forces anti-vaxxers to study medicine before offering medical care, the academy imposes many years of exams on demagogues before teaching others.

The Army requires years of training before leading others to save the homeland.

In order to judge, one must study Law, pass the open opposition contest and take the corresponding course at the Judicial School.

They are imperfect systems with significant class biases, but which seek to redirect passions and correct biases through the exercise of discipline, doubt, competence, and experience over time.

In interface design this element is called "friction".

When a system eliminates friction and optimizes what goes viral, we end up discussing bills and denouncing reforms to the Penal Code with messianic abandon, with no desire for consensus and with no more knowledge or understanding of the laws than the interpretation of content that comes to us by Telegram or a thread from @Afr0d1ta1984 that had many retweets.

Newspapers and parties are important institutions.

However, they have abandoned many of the brakes on virality, to the detriment of the values ​​that give us our reason for being.

In the process, we have taught readers and citizens to judge us by the number of

and retweets because that is what we do.

We have to recover the ability to believe that the truth matters, even if it does not have any likes and cannot be retweeted.

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