The American elections saw the rise of the “dark social” phenomenon: political lobbying left the surface of social networks to migrate to private messaging systems such as WhatsApp, explains Olivier Ertzscheid, researcher in information sciences.
Olivier Ertzscheid is a lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Nantes. He is also the author of the Affordance.info blog on which he has been analyzing current events related to our use of the web for more than 15 years, with a discerning eye and an often critical gaze towards the major platforms of the web. digital. He publishes Le monde according to Zuckerberg with C&F editions. An essay that describes how the web world has turned into a nightmare, and why platforms harm our democracy. This interview is an edited excerpt from the DNA podcast to listen to below.
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Your book can be read as a call to action. Are you worried about our passivity in the face of social networks that are criticized without ever leaving?
O. E: I often write pessimistic, but I remain optimistic. If we manage to play on these three levers: education (explaining to people how these platforms work), regulation (ensuring that the public authorities act at a good level of intervention (the GDPR for example)), and public opinion, we can find virtuous uses. We are coming to a pivotal democratic moment. Political figures like Trump and Bolsonaro are emerging and stressing the importance of platforms. In addition, Facebook and others play a fundamental role in giving rise to certain protest movements, such as that of the Yellow Vests. A whole section of the French population went to Facebook to seek a democratic and media space to which they did not have access. These platforms are ideal for generating claims, as long as they come out. If they remain in the discursive space of the platforms, these movements end up twisting, spinning in a loop, producing a feeling of resentment …
What the massive Facebook membership shows us and the difficulty getting out of it despite criticism is perhaps that there is a lack, a void that is not occupied. Facebook takes this place and uses it to satisfy its economic interests. Which is a risk for democracy. We could then think about a kind of public Facebook. Or to a digital deliberative space which is not the property of an American company, which is not financed by advertising, which is not only available upon registration and an exhaustive description of his life, his thoughts, his opinions …
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