It was necessary that (compared to some who chose as Christian family not to do so) TV and newspaper websites broadcast the video of the attack on the Trescore Balneario teacher? Many have asked themselves this, even from within, in recent days, even more so knowing that the boy who carried out that insane purpose, which did not translate into murder only briefly and by chance, was filming his action with the intention of acting live to make it visible. The human answer, even before being ethical, in our opinion should have been no.
Circularity between TV, websites, online versions of paper newspapers and social networks is now a consolidated habit, and the temptation of “virality” at any cost is also a strong temptation for professional information. But at a time when we are wondering about the increase in violence among very young people, with also the need to distinguish between the actual increase and the perceived increase that could derive from media attention, the question is: if it is true that above all we “boomers” are the users of traditional information and its declination between Instagram and Facebook, where our responsibility begins and ends, as operators/users of information and as adult individuals when we decide, being able to foresee very well what it will contain, to publish or even just to open that video, to see its content and perhaps to share it with others, knowing that just opening and lingering contributes to ensuring that the algorithm helps spread it.
How many of us, even just imagining how they would have felt in the place of that teacher exposed in that way, chose not to open so as not to fuel the volume of clicks and not to trigger virality? How much did the presumable live dismay add to our information, which it would have been enough to imagine by empathizing and which among other things had, for those who published it, the evident ethical problem of improperly exposing the victim and the almost child perpetrator of that act? As adults we would also have the duty to ask ourselves to what extent diffusion could trigger an emulation effect. Responsibility would like us to at least know how to activate self-control before clicking.
The pandemic has taught us at our expense through experience that virality is a concept borrowed from medicine and the propagation of viruses in the real world: now we should all know that an epidemic gallops to exponential growth if someone who catches a virus infects at least two other people. And that the epidemic is destined to gradually die out if each person who catches the virus infects less than another.
The mathematics of online virality works in exactly the same way, but catching a virus and infecting someone is most of the time a misfortune that precautions can contain but not completely control, opening a video with violent content and transmitting it to someone else or instead deciding not to open it and not transmit, it is an individual choice to contribute to spreading it or slowing down its progress.
How can we teach young people to use the Internet responsibly if we adults are the first to use it irresponsibly and to passively submit to the dictatorship of the algorithm? It applies to individuals and it applies even more to those who by profession have the even greater responsibility of handling public words and images.
