Opinione | L’ascesa dello smartphone e la caduta della democrazia occidentale

“It’s simply not possible to walk back from social media or do anything beyond banning phones in schools,” Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in an email.

I, mean, really??? He just gave up on education and common sense. Only idiot would be believe this bs.

The fall of western democracies is caused by the housing crisis, cost of living crisis and failure of the mass migration model. And all of this was caused in the first time by an inverted pyramid population in which the old hold too much power and are willing to sacrifice the young to get their yearly pension wage increase.

Trying to blame the smartphones and try to impose North Korea style censorship in the EU is not going to make things better.

Western democracies are failing to the young, and it is understandable that they are loosing trust in it. Nobody likes a system that makes them miserable.

Paywall

Yes, because social media is forcing our politicians to be corrupt and refuse court orders for transparency to run away from press conferences, to cut funds for already underfunded education and make the poor poorer meanwhile politicians can’t cut away their special pensions. Social media isn’t the main thing at fault. Can we start blaming the main roots of “the fall of democracy”? And declaring that democracy should be enforced doesn’t sound democratic at all. Also, what’s democratic about censoring “legal yet harmful” content and pushing for Chinese-style surveillance laws (chat control and age verifications to make us lose our privacy and anonymity the same ways authoritarian regimes did).

[](https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-b-edsall)By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

At a recent conference in Spain on polarization, Avila Kilmurray, a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process, reminded the gathering that the [Good Friday Agreement](https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/role-policies/northern-ireland/about-the-good-friday-agreement/) received more than 71 percent support in a 1998 referendum. But, she said, “if the vote were held today, with the presence of social media, I don’t think it would pass.”

Kilmurray’s comment goes to the heart of the political, cultural and educational problems prompted not just by social media but also by the growing presence of all kinds of new technologies in our lives, especially artificial intelligence.

Is it even possible to weigh the costs of social media against its benefits?

Was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024 one of the costs of social media? Is the rise in right-wing populism in the United States and Europe — accompanied by democratic backsliding in country after country — another cost?

On another front of equal importance, has a generation of young men and women, especially [young liberal women](https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/why-depression-rates-are-higher-among-liberals), suffered heightened levels of depression and anxiety because of social media?

Are new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, weakening the ability of students to think and reason at length and in depth? Do they help explain declining reading scores?

The reality is that an accurate accounting of the first question — can the costs of social media be weighed against the benefits? — is an impossible task and may have little relevance, since there is no going back from a world with A.I., TikTok, Facebook, the internet, smartphones and Instagram, not to mention the technologies we don’t yet know.

“It’s simply not possible to walk back from social media or do anything beyond banning phones in schools,” Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in an email. “This whole world is changing very dramatically with the integration of A.I. into the way the platforms operate and how individuals interact with them.”

What can be done, however, is to attempt to assess the costs with an eye to minimizing harm.

Generally, micromanaging is never an answer.

However most of public servents and politicians would not know that as they never worked in environment where being competitive is important and hence would realize micromanaging leads to no good.

Banning people from posting will NOT ban people from THINKING. And if you ban and control people posting to level where people feel they are consistantly being controlled and watched, you will get AfDs and actually majority will sway to it unlike edge case people in single digit.