“We urgently need a European Twitter, public and independent”
Why Europe should be concerned about what is happening in Italy right now — and how a federation of European media houses could help to preserve our informational, technological, and political sovereignty: An interview with Francesca Bria by Nicklas Maak in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
NM: A scandal recently broke out at Italy’s main public broadcaster, Rai, in which you publicly took a stand against the new Italian government. What happened?
FB: Carlo Fuertes, the station’s CEO, recently resigned, and immediately replaced with a new CEO appointed by the Government. But that wasn’t a resignation. The Meloni government kicked him out. We have a situation here that is reminiscent of the Berlusconi’s era of total media control on steroids. The case is important because it deals with the question of who actually controls public media. The question is even more pressing when you look at the situation in which the media and institutions that are responsible for forming public opinion find themselves in a moment where far-right parties are on the rise across Europe, since people search for more security in a world that feel very volatile, torn apart by wars, pandemics climate disasters, inflation and increasing cost of living.
NM: How was this dismissal possible?
FB: Well, there was a reform that was pushed through by the social-democratic Renzi government at the time — that’s why there are also different views as to who is to blame for the current situation: Renzi’s government made it so that the CEO and the president of the public media are determined by the shareholders, and they are the Ministry of Finance and Economy and the Presidency of the Council. In this case, that means: Meloni determines who heads RAI.
NM: Is that compatible with European law at all?
FB: No. But a harmonised media law for Europe is only now finally in the making. The “European Media Freedom Act” adopted by the European Commission in September last year tries to outline a coordinated regulatory scenario in the field of freedom and pluralism of information considered “common goods of primary importance”. It prescribes that Public media must operate independently from government control to maintain its credibility and impartiality, and that sufficient funding is necessary to ensure high-quality journalism. It also makes it clear that the Management Board of the broadcasters must function independently of the respective government. Like an autonomous regulator, like a Central bank. The point is that public as well as private broadcasters throughout Europe remain free from political and private economic influence. Moreover, it is crucial that public media represents a wide range of perspectives, avoiding the danger of becoming a mouthpiece for any single group or ideology.
NM: A well-known journalist, Fabio Fazio, joined Discovery Channel. Are private broadcasters now the only safe haven for independent journalism?
FB: You must be careful there. We have seen it before under Berlusconi that the prime minister brought the Rai under his control and had critical journalists thrown out, but also controlled the private sector through his media company Mediaset. A kind of private public monopoly between Rai and Mediaset that risks being repeated now, with Berlusconi’s party again in power. Imagine that even Meloni’s partner- the father of her daughter- is a journalist at Mediaset.
NM: But is it really the case that the new government is also systematically bringing the cultural sector into line?
FB: The current Italian Minister of culture is a former RAI director. The physicist and best-selling author Carlo Rovelli was dismissed as Italy’s representative at the Frankfurt Book Fair in autumn this year after speaking critically at a demonstration about the new Italian Defence Minister and his close ties to the weapons manufacturer Leonardo. In July the new government-appointed chief executive, Roberto Sergio decided to cancel an anti-mafia television programme by Italy’s most well known anti-mafia investigative journalist Roberto Saviano after he criticised the country’s Minister of transport Matteo Salvini. Four episodes of Saviano’s programme, Insider, Face to Face With Crime, had already been recorded and were scheduled for broadcast in November.
NM: What does all this mean for the idea of a critical public?
FB: I think we need to deeply rethink the idea of a democratic public sphere. This includes the democratic management of public broadcasters, with an independent supervisory board, we really need citizens as shareholders and not governments, I think we must deal more with the concept of democracy as an empty space, in the spirit of the philosopher Claude Lefort, stating that in a democratic society, no single entity should have a monopoly on power. The “empty space” is an arena in which different social groups can freely interact, voice their opinions, compete, and negotiate power. It signifies a void at the center of power which various groups temporarily occupy through democratic means. Building on this theory, one can argue in favor of public media from the perspective preventing the empty open space from being occupied and monopolized, from being filled by fake news and populist conspiracy theories.
NM: Or that the rules of the game are determined by the big tech conglomerates…
FB: Exactly — Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk is an example of both: spreading fake news and making the rules of one of the largest opinion platforms in the world. Big Tech’s goal is to privatize public space and charge everyone who enters it. We have to resist both this privatization and the political over-moulding and exploitation by ultra-conservative authoritarian-leaning governments in Poland, Hungary and maybe also in Italy. I have long been concerned with possibilities for democratic participation and re-democratization of the media and public space, and I believe that right now the public broadcasters could do a lot to reflect and encourage a truly pluralistic liberal society. We need more public education, research, ways to provide people with material to help them form their own opinions. The stations are paid for by all citizens, they should not be hijacked by individual interest groups and ideologues.
NM: Exactly how is this supposed to take place, how could it be organized — now that things seem to be going in a different direction in Italy?
FB: For this we need a binding law that lays down the content and demands of the European Media Freedom Act at European level, so that things like the ones happening in Italy can no longer happen. We need this all the more in view of the current Artificial Intelligence debate, if only when we see the extent to which tech companies intervene in the governance of cities and states, and how much Large Language Models influence knowledge, public opinion, the Evaluation of all media, i.e. the communication processes of the entire world, in the hands of a few providers; right now all the available LLMs are owned by three or four tech companies with often very questionable ideologies. We have to deal with “longtermism “and “effective altruism” the ideology of the AGI- artificial general intelligence, an accelerated form of digital neoliberalism that leads us to privatize critical infrastructure and the ability to deal with real problems. The previously mentioned open, empty space of democracy is being colonized by an ideology that risks becoming a new form of totalitarianism. LLMs and AI, as programmed now, could multiply the impact, and reach of fake news, hate speech, and racists ideologies. These monopolistic and manipulative dynamics further undermine diversity and pluralism, and I have serious doubts that such a model will appreciate high-quality journalistic work that challenges the interests of the powerful and wealthy.
NM: What can public broadcasters do about it? You would then have to free artificial intelligence from the hands of these companies and design your own systems that focus on the public good. Can Europe do that at all — and what role should the broadcasters play?
FB: Rai has a lot of data on Italian citizens. This would allow you to program algorithms that are preserving civil rights, privacy, and the right to informational self-determination, which do not discourage citizens, but rather empower them to decide and act for themselves. All the public broadcasters, which are today collaborating under the umbrella of EBU (the European Broadcasting Union) have new research and innovation programs on developing algorithms for the public interest. The key is using data and AI, governed in a fair and democratic way, and deployed for democratic deliberation, not to increased clicks, polarising public opinions and monetizing users’ data. This is the opposite of the public interest. Europe needs a kind of “CERN” or “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence: A large-scale, globally cooperative effort to advance human centered AI technology under democratic control, to tackle humanity’s planetary challenges.
NM: We are talking about a “European solution” here. But in view of the geopolitical situation — here the market-liberal Western model of Big Tech pushing for the privatization of public institutions, there the Chinese model of Big State — shouldn’t a third digital space be opened up in which Europe joins forces with African and Latin American countries, to form a real alternative of a digital society oriented towards the common good?
FB: Yes, I have been advocating for a third space Big Democracy, beyond Big Tech-Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism, and Big State- Chinese digital authoritarianism. Europe should lead the democratic way, but we can’t do it alone. Africa has great technological potential, as you could see with the mobile payment system Mpesa, and Africa produces masses of data that are currently being skimmed o<ff by American or Chinese forms for their own purposes. We may not learn that much from the Chinese model but look at India: they have a strong tech industry and a digital infrastructure that makes them independent. India is further ahead when it comes to technological independence, although even there unfortunately oriented in favour of an extreme nationalism.
Europe cannot only regulate; Europe must build an alternative model for dealing with artificial intelligence. And it must be about what role AI plays for the public — and what task a public one plays Media house of the new type can play it. In the production of public opinion, they are already competing with the Big Tech platforms to produce content and algorithms.
NM: China has built its own tech giants that can compete with American platforms — but that was only possible in an authoritarian system that kept competitors out of their own market. So far, that’s not a model for Europe, is it?
FB: I don’t think we can solve this at national level. We need to do it at the level of the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union. We have to fall back on European resources as we are now doing for Europe’s digital transformation, deploying a Europe-wide digital industrial policy and investing in in supercomputing, quantum technologies, next-generation microchips development in Europe, which is key for new models of artificial intelligence. This digital policy making can only happen at European level, with long term public funding, and strong partnerships between EU industry, scaleups, research centers and universities. The European broadcasters have a key role to play here, but now they seem less focused on this crucial debate on how to reconquer our digital sovereignty and budling the technological infrastructures and ecosystem to compete against the big tech giants.
They have a good infrastructure, they have the data centers, they use the latest generation of digital broadcast technology — and they have good content creators, well trained journalists and the “information workers” we need to produce good quality content.
NM: And what should they do with this technological know-how?
FB: Europe is strong in the field of regulation to protect the democratic rights and privacy of citizens; we are a reference. But that is not enough. We need a new public space 2.0, which is made up of real public digital infrastructures and new opportunities for citizens to participate there, as we tested in Barcelona by developing the citizens’ platform decidim.org today used at EU level and globally. We need a digital public space that is resilient to new nationalist tendencies and the misuse of information channels by populist movements. We need digital media — not just television and radio. Without this alternative tech ecosystem for the public interest, the content our journalists and creatives produce will be eaten by artificial intelligence models and engines, depriving our society of the intellectual property of the culture we all create. Tech Giants are already eating all the advertising market, now we are also training the AI with our content and media…we end up owning nothing, and in the long term this is not going to be a sustainable economic model for high quality information and culture. The only alternative is boosting and reinvesting next generation digital public media.
NM: And what exactly could such a “new medium” be?
FB: I am convinced that as a start we urgently need a European alternative to Twitter, independent and public, able to manage data preserving the digital sovereignty of citizens and to create high quality content and journalism. The construction of this Euro-Twitter should be the task of the European public media broadcasters; to do this, they must be managed independently like central banks and take care to use and manage data, artificial intelligence, and algorithms in the public interest. They need to build a platform that offers an alternative to concentrating opinion-making power in a few hands. Which offers a survival space for independent media. We’ve already gotten it right with central bank autonomy. Why shouldn’t the digital knowledge society succeed in the field of information policy, opinion-forming, and citizen empowerment via democratic participation?
Niklas Maak asked the questions.
Francesca Bria is one of Europe’s leading digital experts and a board member of the Italian broadcaster RAI.
