The chancellor goes to war: in the viewfinder there are the Silicon Valley giants, together with their mysterious creature, the algorithm, in the jargon the “black box” (the black box) of information. While our lives and our data are entrusted to social networks and search engines with absolute “transparency”, much more opaque is what happens on the other side, or the criteria with which Google , Facebook or <Twitter they “spit us back” information. This is why the algorithm ends on the dock of the German leader, the sequence that gives instructions on what contents should end before our eyes, when and how: this “recipe” is as secret as the ingredients of Coca Cola were decades ago, but the difference is that it is constantly updated and above all that there is much more at stake. Information affects our behavior, even in politics: therefore “citizens must know”, says Europe’s most powerful leader during a media conference in Berlin.

So, Merkel launches the gauntlet. Merkel’s public accusation against Google, Facebook and comrades sounds like this: “The algorithms must be made public, so that every citizen can know how to answer the following question: what affects my behavior on the internet and that of others? algorithms are not transparent they can distort our perception, besides conditioning and limiting our approach to information “. We must therefore “pay close attention”, she says, identifying the “black box” as a threat to democratic principles. “The great web platforms, through algorithms, are filtering media content”. On the one hand, search engines like Google “filter” the contents to be submitted to us; on the other, social networks like Facebook encourage the phenomenon of “echo chambers”: they propose the contents already related to our opinions, closing us in the chamber of our certainties rather than opening ourselves to pluralism of ideas. A phenomenon that also has political effects: it favors polarization and some see in the filter trap a catch that favors populism. “We need to be on our guard,” Caleb Gardner, Obama’s former social media consultant, said recently. Experts have been saying this for a long time: like Eli Pariser, who since 2011 has been sounding the alarm about “filter bubbles”(those filters that cage us in the bubble of our beliefs).

Power to the algorithm, a test: the US elections. A small test is the US presidential election. The prestigious Pew research center is monitoring the electoral situation; in a fresh publication, titled “The tone of social discussions on politics” and released on 25 October, the researchers note that most of the users interviewed find it “stressful” to talk about politics via social networks with people who do not share their own point of view: “What stress! What frustration!”, says 58% of Republican voters and 60% of Democrats. It is true that the social “makes” politics and that the algorithm has a powerful effect, but it is also true – says the Pew Research Center – that changing one’s mind, coming out of the “opinion chambers already made”, is not impossible .Facebook & co. “My opinion on Trump got worse when I read his tweets”, “The matter of Hillary’s emails made me realize how corrupt she is”: these are just some of the testimonies collected.

What’s behind it? The background according to Lovink. How to evaluate now the German protagonism in the challenge to the USA giants of the algorithm? We asked one of the most authoritative European media scholars, the Dutch Geert Lovink, who founded the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and recently published The Abyss of Social Media (Egea, 2016). “The background – says Lovink – is the failed attempt by Germany and France to create a European version of” Baidu “ed) , called Quaero. The story goes back to 2008. The consortium, which had also received the support of the European Commission, failed within a few months because both the engineers and the companies involved could not agree on the project’s aims “. ‘Europe of imposing its own search engines and social media is an aspect of the question, according to Lovink, which does not spare hard judgments for the chancellor: “If Merkel had more courage, she would not just complain but would take action”.

” real game is played on cars “. What would be an effective action to take? “Propose to unpack Google and Facebook, a way that I think – says Lovink – is absolutely feasible with the European antitrust rules”. And what is really going on for Merkel? “I believe that behind this move are the German elections of 2017 and above all the future of car manufacturing: will German cars become slaves of Uber and , of their automatic navigation software ? Will Germany make the same mistakes again? Here, from how Berlin and Brussels will play the game of auto-guided cars we will understand how Europe can and above all how much it wants to be incisive in the challenge to US corporations “.