In 2018 Facebook tried to make its feed healthier by rewarding “meaningful social interactions” between friends and family, and three years later its internal documents revealed that it had achieved the opposite: a feed that gave a louder voice to the angriest. Anyone who designs software gets this story instantly, because in my line of work there’s a saying that sums it up in one line: “when you optimise for a metric, it loses its value”.

In the previous instalments I told you that they knew, that those who tried to stop them had little success, and that today the job of surviving falls to the people who use them. In this instalment I’ll try to describe what a healthy social network would look like, what features it would have and, above all, which ones it wouldn’t have, and why. It’s the idea for a piece of software, dreamt up by someone who designs software for a living, and how such a network would keep itself afloat and who would control it is a problem big enough to fill the final instalment on its own.

In the first two instalments I explained that they knew, and that those who tried to stop them didn’t get very far: the odd jury, yes, laws hardly ever. Meanwhile, as the courts take their course and parliaments debate, social media stay exactly what they are, and they sit in the pockets of parents and children, tonight just like last night.

This is the most practical instalment of the series. I gathered what paediatricians, psychologists and health authorities recommend, and for each piece of advice I went looking for evidence that it actually works, because there’s plenty of common sense going around and a lot less data. Some things work, if only a little, and all the work is left to the people who use them and to families, which is, in my view, the most serious part of the whole business.

A few days ago I watched a video about Calla Walsh, a twenty-two-year-old American woman who in six years went from Democratic Party election campaigns to the stages of Iranian state television. The video came from an Italian channel about communication, and at one point its author stops to state his method: this isn’t a geopolitics video, he says, he deals with communication, and his aim is to give us the tools to form our own opinion. It’s a purpose I respect, and that is exactly why it annoyed me to watch it betrayed minute after minute. It starts with the title, keywords in capitals, about the child prodigy who now celebrates dead Americans. It carries on through the almost sole source of the story, a profile published by The Free Press that he himself calls “beautiful”. And it ends with an inaccuracy that whoever made the video could have checked in five minutes, even written in an on-screen caption (Walsh was born in 2004, not 2005).

Having an opinion is normal, and I have one too. But if you present yourself as the one who analyses communication without taking sides, word choice is exactly where impartiality stands or falls, and there it fell. I told him so in a comment, and while writing it I realised the interesting part of this story was a question the video barely touched at the end, when it talked about institutions that can no longer pick up the anxiety of an entire generation. What happens to a person when they talk, and talk, and talk, and nobody listens?

On 25 March 2026, in Los Angeles, twelve ordinary people locked in a room did what years of Congressional hearings had failed to do: they took a good hard look at Instagram and YouTube and decided, ten votes to two, that they had been negligently designed, that the companies had warned nobody of the risks, and that the design had been a substantial factor in the harm suffered by someone who is now around twenty. Six million dollars, and one of the first real cracks in a wall that looked like reinforced concrete.

Last week I told you that they knew. This time I want to tell you about the people who tried to stop them, because they deserve it: governments, judges, parliaments, regulators, and a handful of people who refused to give up. Spoiler: in front of a jury, when they get that far, the platforms always lose, and in front of a law they almost never do.

On 1 October the Pew Research Center published a survey, carried out in 37 countries and territories, of more than 45,000 people. The headline says that around the world a growing number of people are convinced social media is harming democracy.

I’ve been convinced of it for ages, and not just where democracy is concerned. I think social media, as it’s built today, is an addictive product, sold by companies that know it full well and that have done what they learnt from those who came before them, namely the cigarette makers and the oil companies: deny and stall, and meanwhile rake in loads of money at the expense of ordinary people. I’m saying it straight away so it’s clear which side I’m on. This is the first of five instalments, one a week, in which I try to prove it with facts, as I usually like to do. The maybe in the title comes at the end, so stick with me until then.

I’m a techie with a passion, the sort who likes to keep informed and to read. Maybe I suffer from information bulimia, but I’ll admit I don’t forget what I take in when it interests me, when it lights up that inner LED, the warning light that says “oh, oh, there’s something tasty!” (Yes, my little inner voice, like Hacker News, Lobsters and the other channels I follow, is bri’ish.) Either way, reading this much, keeping this informed, keeping up with the topics I care about doesn’t bother me in the slightest, bulimia or not.

The news reached me via lobste.rs (and then straight onto Hacker News, fairly typical, the two communities overlap quite a bit) and I have to say it was doing a pretty good impression of Terminator 2. I’m not joking: a researcher resigns from Anthropic saying that the people building artificial intelligence genuinely believe it could kill us all (him included) and that neither of the two leading labs, his own included, is behaving responsibly. As you’d expect, given the quality of the world’s press when it comes to technology, still witchcraft to most people, and in particular of the Italian press, which on top of seeing it as witchcraft needs sensationalist pieces to stay afloat, on 10 September it all came out at once over here: Tgcom24 with the systems that could destroy humanity, QuiBrescia with the AI that could exterminate it, and Red Hot Cyber winning hands down by opening the piece with the Terminator 2 epigraph, Skynet becoming self-aware at 2:14 on 29 August (as a nerd I’d have preferred 3:14, but you can’t ask that of the normies), only to then reassure everyone (otherwise it would be causing public alarm, and they haven’t got the money for the lawsuits): the company is doing its best. Shame. Imagine never having to pay the mortgage again. Then again, I’ve always said “please” and “thank you” to machines, so maybe they’ll spare me. Who knows.

“I’ve got nothing to hide”: I’ve heard it so many times that it took me a while to realise it isn’t a position. It’s a symptom.

It’s what tired people say. People who have stopped asking whether power is behaving itself, who follow the basic rules, feel they fit in, and have already raised the white flag on everything else: do what you like, I’m fine anyway. It’s the sentence that comes out when tiredness finally speaks. This post tries to say what lies underneath it, and why that sentence, besides being wrong, is dangerous precisely for the person who says it convinced they’ve taken shelter.

If an Italian association wanted to seriously challenge the OFAC designation it has just had slapped on it, who would it turn to? The short answer is: nobody. Not because it’s hard, but because the court where you’d go doesn’t exist.

Today I’m talking about something that made me spit out my coffee.

On 26 August the United States government put a Tuscan volunteer association on the same list as al-Qaeda’s financiers. The association is called Autistici/Inventati, it has existed since 2001, and its criminal activity consists of giving email inboxes and web space to people who don’t want to hand their correspondence over to Google.

This isn’t satire. It’s the US Treasury’s SDN List, the real one.

In Italian