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he fundamental debate that What defined the 20th century was freedom of expression. In the era of mass media – radio, television, press – information was a scarce and powerfully concentrated resource. Whoever controlled these channels not only shaped public discourse, but, to a large extent, defined reality itself. Professional journalism acted as the gatekeeper, the final authority that discerned truth from false for a captive audience. Influencing the media was, effectively, influencing political and social reality. The struggles for democratic opening and against totalitarian regimes were fought, in essence, for the right for dissident voices to make their way through that information monopoly.
The news landscape of the 21st century has imploded, a seismic shift that has redefined the terms of debate. Today, the discussion no longer focuses primarily on freedom of expression – almost unlimited in the vast digital space – but on the ability to discern the truth.
Digital platforms and social networks have pulverized the traditional information monopoly. The vast majority of the global population learns about events not from a front page curated by an editor, but from what an algorithm determines to be “relevant” in its context. feed. This personalization mechanism, designed to maximize interaction (and therefore profitability), operates as a mirror of our previous interests and affinities.
The economic result of this digital architecture is rampant polarization. People unconsciously predetermine the information we consume, creating “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles.” This ecosystem reinforces our prejudices (confirmation bias), while making it difficult to contrast, balance, and expose ourselves to genuinely opposing ideas. Public debate fractures into parallel monologues, undermining the basis for informed democratic deliberation.
The architecture of polarization that social networks have shaped over the last 15 years is about to be devastated by a true technological tsunami: generative artificial intelligence (AI).
If social networks taught us to distrust the sender, AI will force us to distrust our own eyes and ears. In the next five to 10 years, AI will take the truth crisis to an exponential level. The ability to generate deepfakes ultra-realistic – videos, audios and images – that simulate real people saying or doing things that never happened, will be democratized.
We will have a hard time differentiating the truth from the truth put on our phones; Objective reality, always elusive, will be transformed into a personalized commodity predetermined by our hobbies or previous consumption on the Internet. The algorithm will stop only showing us news that we like; will begin to create, on demand, “facts” that confirm our deepest biases, making it almost impossible to distinguish manipulation from authenticity.
This crisis of truth far transcends the borders of journalism and information, having a direct and systemic political effect. AI will become the definitive tool for segmentation and microtargeting political, allowing campaigns to generate hyper-personalized messages that directly appeal to the emotions and prejudices of specific voter groups with never-before-seen precision.
In this new landscape, campaigns will not be won with solid ideas or coherent public policies, but with emotionally powerful and untestable narratives, designed to avoid rational scrutiny. AI has the potential to shape leaderships that are, in essence, digital simulacra optimized for polarized mass consumption.
Our regulatory frameworks, our educational systems and our democratic institutions are based on the premise of a shared public sphere and a minimum consensus on the facts. If AI destroys the ability to find that common basis of reality, rational deliberation will collapse. It is urgent that governments at all levels seriously invest in advanced digital literacy, content verification tools powered by AI (the same technology that creates deepfakes must be used to detect them) and, fundamentally, in an international ethical and regulatory framework that limits the use of generative AI in electoral politics and the public sphere, before the truth becomes a relic of the past.
20 years ago, politics changed with the emergence of social networks in campaigns. From “bot farms” to the need for a digital presence. This change is nothing compared to the revolution that artificial intelligence implies and the cultural and political impact that, no one doubts, it will have on this generation and those that follow.
