Wellcome to INCA’s fourth newsletter

23 January 2025 By

The recent political victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election brought about as a significant consequence a central political role for Elon Musk. The owner of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX started a sort of campaigning that mixes own private economic interests and political right interventionism such as when he enticed the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni by blaming Italian magistrates for their alleged political activism, an issue the right Italian right ruling party is particularly fond of, or when he publicly endorsed Alice Weidel’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right German political party, and “offered up his X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, so she could speak to voters ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election”1. To complete the scenario that is materializing in front of our eyes, on the 7th of January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, in an outburst of political laissez-fairism, announced the removal of the fact-checking mechanism that filtered the information that circulates on the social network. The decision was justified as a crusade to protect the right of speech. 

Taken together, these events look like epiphenomena that unveil an emerging hegemonic block in which a group of seigneurs are allowed to accumulate economic and political power by holding the monopoly on infrastructures that are essential not only for the economic activity but for the surviving of societal life as well.        

Depicted this landscape in the background, the work conducted within the INCA project seems increasingly necessary. 

In this issue of the INCA newsletter we present three articles that, we hope, will nurture critical thinking and provide information to make citizens even more aware of the dangers, and of the opportunities, that innervate the digital capitalism.

In a first article, Friso Bostoen and Inge Graef from the University of Tilburg, elicit the dimensions of the power that large platforms are endowed with and put forward some considerations regarding the regulation of such power.

In a second article, a group of researchers both of Fondazione Innovazione Urbana and of Urbasofia, two NGOs partners of the INCA project and experts in stakeholder engagement activities at the urban level, report their experience in fostering creative thinking of citizens for devising new social policies to cope with the increasing polarization of power endowments in the digital economy.

Finally, in a third article, Edoardo Mollona of the University of Bologna and Martin Molder of the University of Tartu, present the results of their study on what do European media say when they talk about large platforms. By analysing the texts of more than 90’000 articles of journals of 17 European countries over the period 2007-2022, the researchers elicit the opinions, the recurring discourses and the attitudes that European media convey regarding the role that large platforms play in the economy and in the society.

In addition, by collecting 20 554 texts from the websites of the companies themselves, the researchers offer a portrait not only of what media say when they talk about GAFAM but as well of how these latter represent themselves.

This study is important because it suggests that, rather than passively accepting a narrative on the well-entrenched ideology that maintains that there is no alternative to such pervasive role that platforms play, the European media discourse is innervated by a pervasive claim that the activity of large platforms should be tightly regulated for defending rights of citizens such as copyrights, the right to privacy, the right to be protected by hate speeches, and the right to access correct information. 

These findings are important to organize an informed resistance especially in the face of the before mentioned revival of the sort of anarcho-capitalism that the recent announcements of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg allow to be half-seen.

Rather than a indolent population of citizen-consumers, ready to be colonised by the monopolists of social infrastructures, a large share of European citizens seems sincerely concerned for the consequences that the accumulation of power of large platforms enjoy may bring about. In the end, the article explains how to use the interface that allows to directly access collected information by visiting the INCA website. Indeed, the idea that researchers have a specific duty in this historical moment to transparently and widely disseminating the results of their work is a fundamental anchor on which the INCA project is built.   

Edoardo Mollona, INCA project Coordinator (University of Bologna)

  1. When Elon met Alice: 9 weird moments from Musk’s German far-right chuckle-fest – POLITICO. Visited 10/01/2025. ↩︎