TikTok Said So

My grandmother, whenever she had some unusual piece of news to share and was met with our disbelief, would declare with absolute conviction and a great sweep of enthusiasm: "It's written in the newspaper!" So as a child, if something was printed in a newspaper, it was for me an unquestionable certainty. Other incontestable truths came from the Radio. "They said it on the Radio!" That settled it — if they said it on the Radio, it simply had to be true.
My grandmother, however, paid little attention to what was happening in America. She had no idea that back in 1938, on CBS Radio, Orson Welles and his theatre company triggered a mass hysteria by interrupting a light music concert to announce the arrival of alien spacecraft on Earth. The jarring realism of the sudden interruption, combined with the actors' skill, sent tens of thousands of listeners into a panic, convinced they were the victims of an extraterrestrial invasion. It was, in reality, a radio adaptation of the novel The War of the Worlds. From that moment on, a nagging doubt lodged itself in people's minds: perhaps not everything they say on the Radio can be trusted.
But let us return to Italy, where in the wake of the Fascist EIAR broadcasting service, television was being born. In the liberated postwar years, with the founding of RAI, if something had been said on television — that magical box, perched up high in homes and in bars, with Mike Bongiorno living inside it — it simply could not be anything but true. "The television said so!" End of discussion, nothing more to add. This valve-powered oracle was owned, in the early 1950s, by roughly 25,000 people out of a population of nearly 47 million.
In 1950, Italy had around a hundred daily newspapers, each printing its own version of "the truth." Do you know how many we have today? Still a hundred. Nearly all of them questionable, however. Let us consider why.
The number hasn't changed, but in these eighty years an awful lot has happened — never mind The War of the Worlds: first came networks and channels in the hands of "democratic" parties, then "free" commercial television and radio stations, shady new media owners with business agendas to pursue, fake live broadcasts, staged candid cameras, rigged Big Brother shows, scripted pranks, "free" internet that eventually stopped being free, apps that were free until they weren't — and then fake photos, fake videos, fake posts, fake followers, fake likes. With AI, we now live in a state of total distortion and forgery.
Are we done for? Perhaps. Before long, as happened with apps, AI too will carry a price tag. And not twenty euros a month — more likely two hundred, because what you are getting is a round-the-clock employee, available 24/7, capable of doing thousands upon thousands of things at breakneck speed, who never goes on strike and requires no social security contributions. Where else would you find a polyglot this well-informed, this efficient, this expert on any subject under the sun — for two hundred euros a month, or even five hundred?
But does this mean — one might ask — that we no longer have a reliable source we can point to with absolute conviction? No — we do still have one. At least for now, because they remain, in large part, "free": those much-maligned, ridiculed and belittled Social Media platforms.
I am not talking about the fake expert-consultants — the fake physiotherapists, fake directors, fake historians, fake doctors, fake chefs. I am not talking about barstool pundits or winking girls fishing for likes. I am referring to certain videos that manage to slip past the censors, to certain testimonies that get posted for a few hours or a day before being taken down. If the whole world now knows with certainty that a genocide has taken place — and continues — in Gaza, that the Flotilla activists were arrested in international waters, beaten and humiliated, if millions upon millions of people are pouring into the streets of every country demanding peace rather than rearmament, if many consciences have truly been awakened — we owe it all to social media posts that the major outlets simply cannot manage to suppress. Is every atrocity or triumph we see on social media real? Yes, all of it.
TikTok said so!