The États généraux de l’information were launched on the initiative of the President of the Republic in the summer of 2023, with the aim of examining contemporary changes in the information space, and presented their conclusions on 12 September 2024. After a year of work, around 200 recommendations were made by the 5 working groups to inform public authorities, media and information producers, and citizens. Indeed, the business model of social networks aims to maximise user engagement and virality. It favours the spread of false information generated by artificial intelligence at the expense of the reliability of content. The whole public information space is therefore destabilised.
Three proposals were studied in particular so that citizens are no longer objects but subjects of access to information : pluralism of algorithms, which guarantees the right to customisation, ultimately based on a principle of unbundling.
- For a pluralism of algorithms.
Today’s social networks favour viral content, often the most hateful and the most false, thereby disturbing individuals and threatening democracy. Pluralism means both having many media outlets and information producers, and allowing users to rank for themselves the content they wish to be confronted with, and imposing on the large platforms this right of users to customise their services and choose these alternatives.
- For a right to customisation (extracts from an interview with Celia Zolynski, professor of law)
Currently, users see their interactions steered solely by the platforms’ interests. The aim is to offer them the possibility of customising the tool according to their own interests. This customisation could notably cover the level of notifications, and what each person sees appear as recommended content. Users should be able to vary these criteria according to their context of use. In a professional setting, their social networks could therefore be set up differently from in a private one.
At first, users could simply select content they come across to indicate whether or not they wish to be exposed to it. Later, users would have access at all times to a user-friendly dashboard in the app’s settings to adjust their choices.
For this right to be genuinely used, design must also be considered so as to make this customisation desirable, and not offer a mechanism for accepting all default settings in one go. Likewise, the choice must not be too tedious, with too long a list of settings. An appropriate design really must be devised, with clearly identified and easily accessible categories of choice so as not to discourage the user
The same goes for AI : everyone should be able to pre-set the conversational agent according to their own interests and have the possibility of re-setting it at any time.
- Unbundling social networks (extract from an interview with Maria Luisa Stasi, competition law lawyer)
“ Social networks such as Instagram, TikTok and others offer many services at once : among other things, they store users’ profiles with all the photos, information and content they can upload; they organise the content users see or have access to; they remove or suspend illegal content or accounts; they provide instant messaging services. All these services are offered as a package or a “bundle”.
This contributes to locking users in, who find themselves in a situation where they must “take it all” or “leave it all”. Moreover, this bundle has a broader strategic economic value for the large platforms. By offering all these services together, they manage both to protect themselves from competitive pressure and to deprive users of alternatives. Without competition, these platforms have no incentive to improve the quality of their services : they are not obliged to stop surveilling users, excessively collecting personal data, using addictive designs, or silencing certain voices and amplifying others on the basis of their economic interests alone.
It is clear that the bundle has an impact on users’ fundamental rights, such as privacy and freedom of expression.
Unbundling social networks and requiring large platforms to interoperate with other providers would change this status quo, open the market to competition, allow a diverse community of providers to offer their services and give users the possibility of choosing the services they value most. Unbundling would finally give users control over their online experience.
So, if unbundling were implemented, what would social networks look like? For users, unbundling services would mean that, when they create or hold a profile on a large platform (for example Instagram), they would be asked whether they want Instagram itself or another player (freely chosen) to provide the content recommendation service. In this way, users could choose content recommendation services that meet their concerns or preferences. ”
This text was written from the Conseil national du numérique newsletter published online on 12 September, and from fragments of two of the interviews it contains.
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