This column started from a news story and a wave of hate that engulfed an entire city. Nine episodes later, I close the circle with the only question that really matters: what can we do about it.
The answer is both disappointing and incredibly powerful. We can remove the fuel.
What Technically Happens When You Don't Respond
It's not about elegance or moral superiority. It's a very concrete chain of events.
An offensive comment, just published, has minimal visibility. It sits at the bottom, very few see it, and within a few hours it disappears under the rest.
If someone responds, everything changes. The response is an interaction, and interactions are the main signal the system uses to decide what's worth showing. That comment rises. It rises above more sensible comments that didn't generate discussion. It's shown to people who would never have seen it. Some will respond in turn.
At the same time, the person who wrote it receives a notification. If what they were after was attention, they got it within thirty seconds, with immediate reinforcement that encourages them to do it again.
Your outraged response, written to counter it, gave three gifts at once. Visibility to them, dwell time to the platform, and confirmation that the method works.
Without responses, none of this happens. The comment stays where it is and dies there. That's not an opinion, it's how the ranking system works.
The Serious Objection
There's a legitimate criticism to all this, and it must be addressed rather than sidestepped. Isn't silence complicity?
No, and the distinction is precise.
Not responding doesn't mean doing nothing. It means choosing an action that doesn't produce visibility. Reporting the content is an action. Blocking is an action. Documenting with a screenshot, if that's the level, is an action. Contacting the appropriate authorities when a crime has occurred is an action. None of these gives an inch of reach to the person who wrote it.
Complicity would be pretending not to see. Here, instead, we are choosing to intervene in a way that the algorithm cannot turn into a spectacle.
Then there's the second objection, more concrete. What if someone says something false about me, my company, my city? Then you respond, but only once, with facts, without adjectives, and without going back to check. The correction serves those who read in good faith. The back-and-forth only serves the algorithm.
The Divide, in One Question
How do you distinguish a genuine interlocutor from someone just looking for a fight? You don't need to guess anyone's intentions. Just look at one thing.
Did they ask you a question or label you?
Someone who debates challenges a specific point and leaves room for you to respond. Someone looking for a fight qualifies you, and at that point no response is possible that isn't fuel.
To the first, you respond, and often come out with something more. To the second, you remove the stage.
Why It's Not Useless
The final objection is that others will do it anyway, so your gesture changes nothing.
That's only partly true. The visibility of content is not a threshold, it's a sum. Each interaction that doesn't arrive is reach that is not distributed. It's not necessary for everyone to stop, it's necessary for enough people to stop so that comment doesn't exceed the attention quota that would have allowed it to spread.
And above all, it changes something for you, which is the only part you truly have control over. The hours spent arguing with strangers don't come back, they haven't convinced anyone, and they have been monetized by a company that doesn't even know you exist.
This column continues, because the way these machines decide what we read is one of the least told and most decisive aspects of our daily lives.
But if from ten episodes only one line should remain, let it be this one. The algorithm can monetize your anger, your fear, and your outrage. It hasn't yet found a way to monetize the fact that you scroll past.
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.
