Digital education

Francesco Oggiano is a well-known face for those who follow social networks.
Journalist of Will Media, one of the most innovative information realities of Instagram.
The tools and means of communication change, but responsibility remains a compass. For this reason it becomes crucial to learn to move well in digital environments. We talked about it with him in an episode of Piazza Giovani.

Education first. Why?
It all stems from the idea of explaining how news is born. Thanks to social networks, we are faced with thousands of news items that come from a multitude of sources, which assail us with very captivating topics and titles. It is not possible to remain simple consumers of news, but we must become journalists, develop a critical sense to distinguish fluff from substance. Indeed, when you scroll through the news on your mobile phone, it is easy to fall prey to the emotions that the same headlines arouse. In reality you have to breathe for 10 seconds, and have fun trying to trace and reconstruct the genesis of the information itself.

So is there a method for recognizing fake news or clickbait, news that catches users?
The main commandments are two. The first: when the news is too good, you have to think that it's never like that, that maybe it's incomplete.
In fact, incomplete news is much more slippery than fake news, which is blatantly false.
Second: don't be satisfied with just one source, you have to look for others to be able to cross them. If you find a headline in one paper but in others, maybe it's not so true news.

You have just published a book: Sociability, a book to better understand how social networks work and above all how we work within social networks. Once you went to Instagram to escape from the world, today you go to Instagram to understand the world. How did this transition happen and how do you see it?
The transition took place between 2019 and 2020. The first cause was Instagram which allowed sharing a post within a story. Before you could only put a like. A post you like can easily go viral because it's shared. Secondly, the pandemic: after the first week we no longer knew what to photograph and what to talk about. Then users began to turn their gaze to the outside world. The third cause: the murder of George Floyd. The news of his killing was the most viral of all time. Black activists have begun to focus all outreach activity on Instagram. Today we all inform ourselves with Instagram, but Instagram is made up of waves: events such as the Afghan crisis or the Ukrainian crisis can monopolize Instagram pages for days, leaving no room for anything else.

Tiktok has been depopulating for two years, what experience do you have and how can we act?
I'll answer you with a fact: between February 20-28 of last year, videos with the tag "Ukraine" were viewed 17 billion times. Tiktok is increasingly becoming an information social network.
War videos are best suited for Tiktok: instant impact, vertical format, sensational images.
At the beginning Toktok was only ballets and songs, now it has passed the adolescent phase: everyone can follow any event and the videos are very popular. Many realities of the world of information are trying to go to Tiktok. From nice contents, we move on to hard news, chronicles, wars.

By the editorial team
NP March 2023