In his essay On freedom (1859), John Stuart Mill emphasized the importance of freedom of expression to combat an attitude as widespread as it is pernicious: the belief in the infallibility of the world. Broadly speaking, what Mill meant was that people normally doubt their own opinions, but we have very little trouble accepting what everyone else thinks. For example, most of us wouldn't dare claim that the immigrants we know are troubled people, but we uncritically accept the message that most of them are. Therefore, Mill tells us, it's always important to question even what everyone takes for granted, because the world is not infallible.
Today, we can make the mistake of thinking that, with the widespread use of the internet and social media, it's easier to make the right to freely express opinions available to everyone, and the more people participate, the more likely it is to find critical positions and obtain more reasonable opinions. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is true. When a small group of people exchange opinions, it's inevitable that there will be someone who disagrees with the majority. But if the group grows, the discussion soon fragments and ends up forming groups with more homogeneous thinking, basically because most of us are more comfortable talking to people who agree with what we think.
The internet is this taken to the extreme. Anyone with a connected cell phone or computer can, at any time, express their opinion. But, normally, their audience will be made up of people who think more or less the same way, so they follow their account or are part of the same messaging group. Then what Mill indicated occurs: trust in the infallibility of the world. Although we may have inward doubts about what is happening around us, we tend to take the persistent opinions of the group as true, including the veracity of the video of the immigrant beating a passerby or a celebrity's sexual affair.
This persistence is not accidental. The companies behind social media know that if they offer us content we like and that confirms our beliefs, we'll spend more time on their app, thus generating more revenue. The algorithms that select content—and that make us believe we're the ones choosing it—will tend to ignore dissenting voices. The same can even be said of digital newspapers, which generate revenue by keeping readers looking at their screens. The business objective is no longer to inform, but to capture attention.
Mill defended the need to question all opinions, even those that underpin social coexistence, even though their ideological or religious nature necessarily makes them fallible. The companies that manage online content have no interest in this; they only seek to understand how we behave as consumers of whatever we choose. We may be outraged, but it's unrealistic to pretend to live with our backs to technology. What we can do is be forewarned and keep in mind that our true adversary is not the one who questions what we think, but the one who trades in the truth and enriches himself by feeding us with cheap complacency, a good dose of indignation, and a thunderous stream of lies.
