Students from hundreds of universities in the Western world are demanding one thing: an end to the massacre in Gaza. The images coming from Palestine face difficulties in traditional media but overflow on social media platforms accessible worldwide in real-time. The vector of this dissemination is the smartphone. As Juan Carlos De Martin explains in his insightful book “Against the Smartphone – Towards a more democratic technology” (ADD Publisher), never before has a technological innovation reached such a vast scale so rapidly, becoming indispensable for daily activities.
Today, it is estimated that at least half of the world’s population, 4 billion people, spend an average of 4 to 5 hours a day using smartphones. Three-quarters of that time is dedicated to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and WhatsApp. Particularly, younger generations, having almost entirely abandoned print media and television talk shows, acquire the majority of their information from social media. The smartphone is thus playing a role analogous to that of television in the post-war era, and this phenomenon is now happening on a global scale.
While theoretically anyone can post whatever they desire on social media, in practice, the interaction with content and other users is mediated by algorithms of a few apps that curate the timeline and may limit or remove deemed inappropriate content. In particular, both Facebook and Instagram, both owned by the US-based Meta, are increasingly making it more difficult to disseminate political content. They introduce unlikely fact-checkers to verify news, limit certain types of content, obscure others, and ban certain users from accessing their platforms. During the pandemic, political authorities in the US and the EU exerted strong pressure on Big Tech to eliminate or hinder undesirable content. The same has occurred with the conflicts between Russia-Ukraine and now Israel-Palestine.
TikTok, a video-sharing platform, stands out as the only application in the West that is owned by a Chinese company. The United States is considering banning it nationwide, citing concerns over the potentially non-transparent management of user data. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently provided a more compelling explanation: the ban on TikTok is sought because within this social media environment, “context, history, and facts are lost while emotion and the impact of images dominate, posing a challenge to the narrative of events,” meaning the narrative produced by traditional media. This is why TikTok has come under scrutiny from US legislators and, subsequently, European ones.
The emotional impact conveyed by the terrifying images arriving in real-time from the Gaza Strip, available to users worldwide in real-time, is rapidly forming a movement expressing deep discomfort and broad involvement. The list of US universities mobilizing against the massacre in Palestine is growing day by day, including prestigious Ivy League campuses as well as smaller, lesser-known universities. The protest is spreading rapidly and now includes universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Sorbonne, and many others throughout Europe, including cities like Turin, Bologna, Rome, and Naples in Italy. University students may be a minority, but the role of the university is precisely to foster the exchange of ideas, the development of critical thinking, and the formation of innovative thought that can permeate society. Comparing it to the student movement of the ’60s and the Vietnam War is inappropriate due to the absence of mandatory conscription today. However, the horror at civilian massacres remains a powerful mobilizing force.
The repressive turn in Western countries towards students and freedom of speech is clear evidence that the pro-Israel political consensus is waning. Perhaps the leaders of the “ordered garden” occasionally forget this, but in the rest of the world, where 90% of the planet’s population lives, people observe what happens here, in real-time and thanks to social media, and remain, to use an understatement, perplexed about the state of liberal democracies.
Francesco Sylos Labini 