Last May, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a motion for the recognition of Palestine, with 143 votes in favor, 25 abstentions (including Italy), and 9 against (including the United States). While the vote did not have tangible effects, it was significant in highlighting the international isolation of Western countries and stirring consciousness. Academic communities in Western countries have shown sensitivity to the issue, partly due to student pressures, with students being the first to show solidarity for the ongoing monstrous massacre. However, little institutional progress has been made. In Italy, the Academic Senate of the University for Foreigners in Siena unanimously approved a document on the events in Gaza, condemning “the excessive retaliation carried out by the State of Israel in Gaza in response to the heinous and unjustifiable massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.” More recently, the Academic Senate of the University of Siena, with a unanimously approved motion, addressed the Parliament and government to have “Italy join the many countries worldwide that officially recognize the State of Palestine.” Given the importance of the document, the website Roars.it, dedicated to university and research politics and run by a team of university professors of which I am a part, published and shared the document on Facebook, which, however, refused its publication. This situation calls for a reflection on freedom of expression, which, from a constitutional right, transforms into arbitrary concessions by platform owners. This is not an isolated case but a systematic policy of suppressing any critical voices toward Israel.

Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented removals and other suppressions of Instagram and Facebook content on the topic of Palestine, including human rights violations. Meta has a well-documented history of overly broad repression of Palestine-related content. In this context, HRW found that Meta’s behavior does not adhere to its human rights responsibilities and should start revising its policy on dangerous organizations and individuals to align with international human rights standards. However, it seems that little has changed, and the conflict over social media censorship is becoming more overt. On July 12, 2024, Elon Musk, owner and CEO of X/Twitter (which did not censor our site’s content), stated in a tweet that the European Commission “offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored free speech without telling anyone, they wouldn’t try to issue daily fines related to X’s blue checkmark verification system, which could amount to 6% of the company’s annual revenue. Other platforms accepted the deal. X didn’t.” Musk’s post came after European Commissioner Thierry Breton announced preliminary results indicating that before Musk, blue checkmarks “indicated reliable sources of information,” but now violate the Digital Services Act because today, “anyone can subscribe to gain that verified status, thus the Commission can ‘impose fines and demand significant changes’.” Shortly after his post on the secret deal, Musk stated his intent to take the Commission to court if their preliminary results are confirmed and if the Commission pursues coercive action against X.

In his latest book, “Technofeudalism” (La nave di Teseo, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis emphasizes that digital platforms like Facebook and Amazon are no longer operating as oligopolistic enterprises but rather as fiefs or private properties. In this way, web factories are constructing a new social and capitalist production model completely outside the laws of individual countries, raising more than one question about the democratic control of the technologies we use daily. In the battle for control of social media, private interests and political influences too often find common ground to the detriment of citizens’ rights.

(Published in Il Fatto Quotidiano)