Manipulated Online

BOOK SPENDING DOWN, smartphone spending up 723%: the 59th Censis report at the end of 2025 unequivocally portrays one of the most widespread trends among the average Italian: culture on the margins, social media and mobile phones increasingly at the center of daily life. The total time spent online is approximately 6 hours a day, and the most used platforms in terms of time are Facebook (declining), Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (strongly growing). The average time spent in front of traditional TV is also increasing: approximately 3 hours and 24 minutes, rising to 6 hours for those over 50. A true triumph of communication and information, entirely dominated by digital technology, which now seems to dictate the rhythms of daily life, peremptorily imposing new times and habits. The decline in cultural consumption is largely due to the sharp contraction in spending on newspapers (-48.3% in just fifteen years) and books (-24.6%). We search for and read the news that interests us on screens, carefully choosing from the infinite options and versions available those that best align with our own thoughts, which we proudly express and emphasize with likes. Artificial intelligence maps our profile, precisely identifying our tastes, habits, and orientation, which, in effect, enter a more or less hidden and legal market. At best, this leads to daily harassment aimed directly at our private number, and at worst (again, for us naive tech-savvy users), it merges into a much broader profile that identifies and selects large groups of users united, for example, by similar social ambitions, political leanings, or personal inclinations, and transforms them into profitable commodities for the targeted consumer market.

BUT THIS DISTORTED, increasingly pervasive and invasive MECHANISM doesn't stop there; it's too rich and tempting a dish, and from pure commercial exploitation it opens up to political exploitation. Through information, television, print media, and increasingly social media, it moves like a chameleon, appealing to the most sensitive chords of enormous groups of potential voters whose vices, virtues, and expectations it now understands. True power, the subtle and hidden kind, orchestrates its plots precisely through these mechanisms capable of influencing, without ever appearing, enormous masses of people; the tried-and-tested commercial techniques to induce consumption of a particular product, simply transported and applied to the political sphere, a dangerous ploy capable of building consensus and guaranteeing votes. The coalition that governs us, which has over time appropriated, by occupying or buying them, the media, primarily television, has learned the use of these techniques very well, and its approval ratings remain high and unwavering. But let's not fool ourselves; this is not the result of good politics, but of excellent marketing.


NP January 2026
Michelangelo Dotta