Six years ago, in the midst of a pandemic, I was witnessing a very rapid transformation in the power of social media and their ability to shape real social life. It was a time when these platforms had almost entirely replaced human communication, owing to those extraordinary circumstances. What had become increasingly clear, through the accelerated transformation of the way people communicate, was that while there had previously been a general perception that social networks reflected real life, it was precisely then that their near-monopoly over our communication turned them into forces shaping reality itself. In a single phrase: the echo became the sound, and society became the mirror of online interaction.
Today, looking back at the developments of the intervening years, one can see that what we witnessed back then was merely the foundation for what was to follow. Online interaction in 2026 is very different from what it was in 2020. The algorithms behind these platforms have played their part in this transformation.
Say What You’re Supposed to Hear
The “revolution” brought about by the so-called, and largely illusory, “democratization” of the internet, which took shape mainly in the mid-2000s, did not last long. The ability of an individual user to create, with remarkable ease, a space for expressing ideas that was literally accessible from anywhere on the planet was quickly overshadowed by the ability of corporate giants to maintain platforms that concentrated all this discussion within their own framework, their own structure and infrastructure, naturally imposing their own forms of expression as well.
It took only a few years for social networks to evolve from simple algorithms that brought together a multitude of voices (not in terms of the diversity of their content, but in the sheer number of people speaking) into the exclusive channels for circulating news, thoughts, opinions and political positions. In those early years of this transformation, we stopped seeing on our timelines the comments of our friends, our acquaintances, the people we know in real life and with whom, for whatever reason, we wish to stay in touch, even when thousands of kilometres separate us. With the press of a button, entering an application where we no longer search for the content we want to see, but where third parties (and their algorithms) decide what will appear before us, we began once again to encounter the same media outlets that had dominated before the internet existed, this time through a different mechanism for promoting their content. Yet even that situation now feels like a distant past.
Today, in 2026, we open the same application and read the “thoughts” of people we have never met, never wished to meet, and whose existence we will have forgotten within seconds. What we will remember (perhaps) is the position they took, the thought they expressed in content we never chose to have placed before us. With the possibility of creating easily consumable audiovisual material, people sitting in their cars, walking down the street, holding ladles and spatulas with miniature microphones, in settings that are thoroughly, and often deliberately, amateurish, inform us of their opinions. Underneath, comments from other strangers whom we never had any need to know either, and whose existence we will continue to ignore.
And the result? The mass dissemination of anti-scientific views, control over public debate, the resurgence of fascist and racist ideas, and the establishment of an army of “content creators” carrying on their shoulders everything the mainstream media used to tell us (or could not openly tell us) a few years earlier. It is clearly much easier for Babis to inform us about the “benefits given to migrants” than for Kathimerini to publish such a lie in one of its articles – even if the columns of the major media outlets have increasingly come to resemble “Babis”, while the reverse has never happened.
And the more extreme the voice of “Babis” becomes, the greater the chances that he will appear before us, the more he provokes us into responding. Whether we express our anger or keep it to ourselves, we end up constantly confronting his extremism, losing not only our composure but also our sense of reality – because the application through which we open a window onto the world is full of such “Babis” figures and their opinions, creating the illusion that these voices represent a society we do not actually know.
And while different generations, each favouring different forms of content distribution, find ways to communicate through different applications and “channels”, the result remains the same: strangers become the transmitters of everything we are supposed to hear, conveying through thousands of different voices what the very same system that has always controlled the dominant propaganda wants to tell us.
We Are Not Just the Commodity, We Are Also Its Target
And so we have reached a point where major political campaigns, in countries at the centre of imperialist rivalries (see Brazil), are conducted through instructions on how to use social networks, through tactics dictated by the “rules of the game”, namely the way algorithms operate. When a candidate’s political campaign tells people “don’t react to your opponents’ posts, don’t block them, just ignore them”, in order to “play” the algorithm rather than engage in the discussion itself, one begins to understand that the instrumentalization of public expression has reached a point where every use of these tools carries its own dangers. When the democratization of the internet has reached a stage where communicating and expressing an opinion can be more dangerous than ignoring whatever content appears before us and remaining silent, it becomes clear that the dominance of these platforms has led to what has always been the objective of every dominant system: to silence everyone!
Every time we speak, every time we express ourselves, whether through a comment or the press of a button indicating approval or rejection, we provide information to a system which, supposedly with our consent (buried somewhere in enormous documents of terms and conditions), collects data about our behaviour in order to keep us attached to each platform, offering solutions that may no longer even be technically explainable in human language. What the owners of these platforms and of the infrastructure of online communication sell is not ideological tools or advice on propaganda – it is possession of the tools that can work towards the objectives of whoever needs to use them. And the way this service is purchased is not usually with money, but through an avowed commitment and a guarantee to serve the economic and political objectives of the owners of these platforms, who are now among the richest people in the world.
For this reason, they place at our disposal an array of tools that make it much easier for us to become the transmitters of their own opinions. Artificial intelligence is not being used to solve the most difficult mathematical problems, but to polish the appearance of every “Babis”, providing the necessary aesthetic refinement to conceal the intellectual poverty of the creator and allow his opinion to travel far beyond the table of his local café, which he can no longer even approach in his actual life. Through the relentless and rapid production of “lightweight” material, the sound that is supposed to be heard throughout society takes shape even faster than it did during the pandemic years – including all the noise of a supposedly open confrontation, in which the “voices” that provoke outrage always occupy the greatest space.
What Are We to Do?
Today, now that we are no longer living through a pandemic, the obvious solution is to speak with people of flesh and blood, without fearing that we might once again find ourselves inside our “social bubble” – which, after all, is not necessarily a problem in itself, especially as that bubble grows. But simply returning to previous conditions is not enough. We need solutions capable of meeting the needs that have emerged in the present.
The greatest need to have emerged, a collateral consequence of the processes described above, is the need to escape this online social noise produced by all these “Babis” figures. The very system that creates this need, knowing that it is losing consumers in the process, has no problem with it, because in most cases what it achieves is the intellectual disarmament of those who withdraw into the “online margins”. Yet we cannot pretend today that social interaction does not also take place online, just as it did five and ten years ago.
Today, however, with the experience we have gained, we can maintain our own online social conversations on our own terms. It is very easy to set up whatever infrastructure is necessary and equally easy for it to function as a channel of communication, on one condition: that it reflects real life rather than aspiring to replace it. With a clear understanding that when we open an application, we are not “hearing thousands of voices”, but the voice of the application itself and its algorithm. Another television channel, radio station or newspaper, simply carrying thousands of different bylines beneath its content. Just as we once turned off the television to open our blogs, we can today keep our social networks for nothing more than their search bars.
Today we can read something written by a friend, a colleague, someone we will speak to again, someone we can answer and who can answer us, someone with whom we can continue our conversation in real life, in flesh and blood. Because we are not invisible to one another. The people in our lives are speaking everywhere, and through them we can come into contact with thousands, even millions of others, who have something to tell us and always room to listen to something in return. And in all this, we are certainly not data and information in anyone else’s hands – until they shut down the internet on us!
