A slight and constant movement of the thumb on the mobile phone screen confirms how many of us public transport travelers kill time. We scroll: we slide smoothly across the screens. The scene is not exclusive to the subway or the bus: it is repeated everywhere, at all hours and among people of all ages.
There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that: there are those who read La Vanguardia, those who review a work document or those who enrich their Spotify playlist, but the applications that take up the most hours of our free time are those of the great internet giants: Instagram , Facebook, Tik Tok or X (formerly Twitter). Its infinite loop of little pills of text, photos or videos has us hooked. We dedicate a few seconds to each of them and jump to the next one.
In 2011, Nicholas Carr warned in the book What is the Internet doing to our minds? about how our attention span is fading at an alarming rate.
Obviously not everything is bad. These platforms have allowed us to interconnect in ways previously unthinkable and have driven revolutions such as the Arab Spring or social movements such as MeToo or SeAcabó. But its dark side is becoming increasingly bleak. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, installed features in its apps that it knew would turn minors into addicts and harm their mental health, according to the lawsuit filed this week by 33 US states.
The EC, for its part, is investigating whether these same platforms, along with X and Tik Tok, have been key tools for disinformation campaigns about the war between Israel and Hamas by failing to stop the spread of fake news and illicit content.
Thus, these companies may have prioritized corporate profit while being aware of the damage they were causing, perhaps even breaking the law. Faced with them, the media must and can claim the opposite: against misinformation, context, verification and rigor; in the face of superficiality and polarization, depth and analysis; in the face of cold human algorithms, criteria and selection.
And, above all, the commitment to contribute to keeping society informed with truthfulness and rigor.
