On July 20, in Sciacca, four puppies died on a terrace under forty-three degrees Celsius. A forty-one-year-old man is under investigation, the municipality has moved to join as civil party, and associations have filed complaints.
So far it's news. Serious, indefensible, but news.
What happened next is something else. And it's not about the dogs.
Forty thousand people in the dock
In forty-eight hours the city was overwhelmed. Not comments on the event, comments on the city. Insults to the inhabitants, references to the mafia, calls for tourist boycott. Hoteliers have moved to protect themselves legally.
One man is under investigation. Forty thousand people have been put on trial.
And there is a detail that almost no one has told, which is the key to everything. Even the activist who led the mobilization in Sciacca received threats. Screenshots handed over to law enforcement.
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Let's stop for a second. The person who reported the incident was threatened. Those who live in the city where it happened were insulted. Opposite sides, same wave.
If you thought it was one faction against another, it's not. The machine has no side. It grinds everyone.
The paradox I see from inside
I use these platforms every day for work. And there is something I want to say clearly, because I see it up close.
Try to advertise on a social network. You have to verify your identity with an ID. You have to declare who you are. Every single ad goes through a review. You get a word wrong inside an image and the ad is rejected. You persist, and they block your account. Quick, ruthless, perfectly functioning processes.
Now try to write that an entire city is made up of criminals. No verification. No review. No consequences.
The platforms are not incapable of moderating. They are very capable. They have built identity checks, reliability scores, automatic suspensions. They built them for advertisers.
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Because the advertiser is a risk to revenue. The hater, instead, is the revenue. Arguing means staying on the app, and staying on the app means seeing another ad.
It's not a rhetorical accusation. It's the only reading that explains the difference in treatment.
Speaking is a right, being amplified is not
When I say that a license for social media would be needed, many jump out of their seats. Censorship, freedom of speech, who decides.
Let's be clear, because the distinction is everything.
When you write a comment, the platform doesn't just host it. It chooses to show it to ten thousand people instead of ten. That push is a commercial decision made by a machine. And that can be intervened on without silencing anyone.
Two things, concretely. First, reputation affects reach. Those who accumulate well-founded reports, defamation, threats, are not silenced, they simply stop being boosted. They continue to speak to their followers. The megaphone is no longer given to them. Second, verification proportional to influence. If your content exceeds a certain threshold of people reached, you tell the platform who you are. As already happens for political advertising.
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The tools exist, and the European Digital Services Act already obliges large platforms to account for their moderation choices. What's missing is the will, because the will would cost revenue.
The only thing that depends on us
On how platforms are designed, today, we can do little. On what we feed, everything.
Every outraged reply to an infamous comment is a gift. It gives visibility to the writer and dwell time to the platform. Responding to defend oneself, however human, moves that content to the top and shows it to another thousand people. Who will respond.
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Reporting and moving on is not giving up. It's the only move the algorithm doesn't know how to monetize.
And justice for those puppies is not achieved in the comments. It is achieved in court, where the proceeding has already begun. That is the venue. The rest is noise that sells well.
As long as the click is worth more than the quality of debate, we'll remain in a Wild West where those who shout loudest drown out those who try to reason.
With one difference. In the Wild West, at least, the sheriff didn't take a percentage of every shooting.
Segnale & Rumore is a column about how digital communication really works, between algorithms, platforms and online reputation. It is written by Calogero Bono, who works with these machines every day.
