Media, social networks, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and control of information
“For centuries, power tried to control what people were allowed to know. In the twenty-first century, it discovered something more effective: controlling what people get to see first.”
WHEN TRUTH ENTERS A FACTORY
Truth no longer needs to disappear in order to stop governing our perception. In the twenty-first century, it can survive intact and still lose the battle. In the past, power censored newspapers, burned books, shut down radio stations, or banned an image. Today, it has considerably more sophisticated mechanisms at its disposal: it can select, rank, amplify, recommend, conceal, displace, or simply saturate the information space until an important truth is buried beneath a hundred others.
At each stage, someone decides what enters, what remains, what is highlighted, and what disappears from public attention. The fact may be true from beginning to end and yet ultimately become part of a carefully managed representation of reality.
“The truth of the twenty-first century does not always arrive mutilated; many times it arrives complete, but behind a hundred other truths carefully placed in front of it…”
I. THE MEDIA: THE OLD FURNACE OF THE FACTORY
For more than a century, newspapers, radio, television, and news agencies were the great furnace where facts began to become public narrative. This means that every news story passed through owners, editorial lines, economic interests, audiences, available sources, and relationships with institutions capable of facilitating or restricting access to information.
Governments learned this system. Press conferences, selective leaks, official spokespersons, reports, carefully chosen photographs, and intelligence sources make it possible to feed the media every day with material that already arrives accompanied by interpretation.
“Whoever succeeds in becoming the habitual source of a news story also begins to participate in shaping how that story will be understood.”
II. SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGED THE PRODUCTION CHAIN
Social media promised to break the monopoly of the major media organizations and allowed millions of people to speak without asking permission from a newsroom. But the new public square did not remain free of intermediaries: it changed owners. Private platforms establish rules, organize trends, moderate content, sell advertising, and use algorithms to decide what appears first on every screen.
For States, this transformation opened an extraordinary opportunity. They no longer need to persuade only journalists or editors; they can address millions of users directly through official accounts, targeted campaigns, influencers, advertising, and coordinated networks.
“The Internet allowed everyone to speak, but it did not allow everyone to be heard equally.”
III. THE ALGORITHM: THE EDITOR NO ONE ELECTED
The algorithm became one of the most powerful editors of our time and yet no citizen elected it. It does not necessarily work to distinguish truth from falsehood, but rather to organize content according to probabilities of attention, reaction, retention, and return.
The State can learn that logic and produce messages designed to circulate more effectively within it. The algorithm does not need to receive political instructions in order to favor certain narratives; it is enough for it to reward whatever generates the greatest response. Therein lies a new form of power: manufacturing information adapted to the machine that determines its visibility. Visibility also governs.
“The algoritmo does not need to lie; it only needs to discover which truth, which fear, or which outrage will keep us watching…”
IV. THE LIONS LEARNED TO SPEAK TO THE ALGORITHM
The great lions have already learned that producing information is not enough: it must be produced in the language of the algorithm. The United States possesses a technological and cultural ecosystem with enormous global reach. China combines its own platforms, domestic regulation, and external communications expansion. Russia has developed operations aimed at amplifying fractures and distrust. The European Union attempts to respond through regulations, transparency, and oversight of major platforms.
They do not use the same tools, nor do they always pursue the same objectives, because their political systems and capabilities are different. But they all understand that attention can alter perceptions before a diplomatic or military decision is even carried out.
“The lions do not need to use the same machine to manufacture perception; it is enough for each of them to find the lever that works best within its own savanna…”
V. FOUR LIONS, FOUR WAYS OF MANAGING REALITY
The United States, China, Russia, and the European Union do not control information in the same way, but all four understand that dominating the information space means increasing power.
The United States possesses an extraordinary advantage: a large share of the platforms, search engines, social networks, technology companies, and audiovisual production with worldwide reach originated within its ecosystem.
China built a different architecture, with its own platforms, strong domestic regulatory capacity, and an international strategy that accompanies trade, infrastructure, and diplomacy.
Russia has used state media and digital operations to establish narratives, challenge Western versions, and exploit divisions within other societies.
The European Union uses another muscle: regulation. The Digital Services Act makes it possible to demand transparency and accountability from major platforms; in 2025, the Commission went so far as to fine X €120 million for transparency violations.
“The United States owns the great windows, China builds its own rooms, Russia tries to change what we see behind the glass, and Europe seeks to write the rules governing who is allowed to open it.”
VI. THE TRUTH MANUFACTURED THROUGH REPETITION
Repetition possesses a force that power has understood since long before the Internet. A statement that appears once may provoke doubt; one that reappears in speeches, headlines, interviews, official accounts, commentators, and influencers begins to acquire familiarity.
This creates an ecosystem in which the same message appears to emerge from different places even though it often has a common origin. Repetition does not turn a falsehood into truth, but it can turn it into landscape, and that landscape eventually conditions what the citizen considers normal.
“When a version is repeated enough times, it stops looking like an interpretation and begins to establish itself as truth.”
VII. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE FACTORY NO LONGER NEEDS TO SLEEP
Artificial intelligence changes the scale of the factory once again. A State can produce texts, images, voices, videos, and translations in quantities that once would have required armies of writers, technicians, and operators.
Propaganda then ceases to be exclusively mass-oriented and becomes personalized. It is no longer a matter of delivering a single speech to the entire population, but of producing millions of slightly different speeches for specific audiences. Costs fall while speed, reach, and precision increase. The information factory no longer needs to close at night because its machines can continue producing without rest.
“Industrial propaganda required buildings filled with people; algorithmic propaganda may require only servers filled with instructions.”
VIII. THE DEEPFAKE: WHEN A LIE LEARNS TO HAVE A FACE AND A VOICE
For much of the twentieth century, a photograph, a recording, or a video could function as evidence capable of cutting through official narratives. Artificial intelligence weakens that certainty. Today an image can be fabricated, a voice cloned, and a face placed in a nonexistent scene with increasing realism.
This produces a disturbing paradox: the more perfect the fabrication becomes, the easier it is to deny what actually happened. Power then acquires a double tool: manufacturing what does not exist and sowing doubt about what does.
“The deepfake is dangerous not only because it can manufacturé a lie; it is dangerous because it makes it possible to call an inconvenient truth a lie.”
IX. SATURATION: WHEN EXCESS ALSO CONCEALS
Traditional censorship attempted to remove information from the public space. The new factory can achieve a similar result through excess. Every minute, news stories, videos, scandals, wars, statements, memes, rumors, and controversies emerge, competing for a few seconds of attention. An important truth may remain available and yet become virtually invisible beneath an avalanche of content.
For the State, saturation may be less politically costly than prohibition. There is no need to eliminate an investigation if another controversy succeeds in pushing it off the screens, nor is there any need to shut down a newspaper if the public becomes exhausted before reaching the relevant story. Information abundance can thus become an unexpected form of darkness.
“The most sophisticated censorship may not silence a mouth; it may simply fill the room with so many voices that no one can hear it…”
X. HOW MUCH IS CONTROLLING ATTENTION WORTH?
Controlling attention is no longer merely a business for private platforms; it has also become a dimension of State power. The great lions also spend billions to project their narratives.
The United States mobilizes more than US$2 billion annually through public diplomacy and government-funded international media.
China spends approximately US$1.4 billion annually to expand the international presence of its state media, according to estimates cited by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, while other U.S. agencies maintain that Beijing’s total information influence effort amounts to several billion dollars per year.
Russia allocates approximately US$1.7 billion annually to public media and broadcasting, including structures linked to RT.
The European Union, through the Commission’s central communications programs alone, mobilizes approximately US$130–150 million annually, a figure that rises considerably when the national budgets of its 27 member states are added.
“The great lions no longer compete only for territories, oil, or minerals; they also invest billions in conquering something much more intimate: what millions of people ultimately see, hear, and believe…”
XI. THE FACTORY DOES NOT PRODUCE A SINGLE TRUTH
The modern factory does not necessarily contain a central room where someone decides every message. Its strength may arise precisely from the opposite: thousands of different actors simultaneously pushing perception. States, corporations, media organizations, platforms, algorithms, advertisers, influencers, political organizations, and citizens produce, select, and redistribute information for different reasons.
This decentralization makes it more difficult to identify responsibility because every participant can claim that they merely performed a small function within the chain. Nevertheless, millions of small decisions can ultimately construct an extremely uniform landscape.
“The deception of the twenty-first century does not always have a single author; it can be built through thousands of small decisions that, together, ultimately lead millions of people toward the same perception of reality.”
XII. THE HARD NUMBERS: HOW MUCH IS THE FACTORY OF TRUTH WORTH?
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, surpassed US$400 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2025; YouTube alone exceeded US$60 billion from advertising and subscriptions, while Google Search generated US$63.1 billion in advertising revenue during the fourth quarter alone.
“When a single company can mobilize more than US$400 billion a year around the digital universe, it begins to resemble one of the great industries of power…”
XIII. WHEN THE LIONS NO LONGER NEED TO CONTROL THE PRINTING PRESS
For centuries, controlling the printing press meant controlling an important part of the narrative. Then came radio and television. Today, information power is distributed among data, platforms, algorithms, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and the ability to decide which content reaches millions of people first. The lions of the twenty-first century no longer compete only for oceans, minerals, trade routes, chips, energy, or territory. They also compete for something far more intimate: the order in which citizens come to know the world.
“The most effective power does not always force us to believe; sometimes it simply narrows the field of what is visible so much that the conclusion ends up feeling like our own.”
“Even before we know that someone organized the path…”
“The power of the twenty-first century does not need to decide completely what we should believe.”
“It only needs to decide which truth appears first, which one is repeated until it dominates the conversation, and which one disappears before it ever reaches our eyes…”
Author: Mauricio Herrera Kahn
Brief Bibliography
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism —Digital News Report 2025.
Analyzes the shift in news consumption toward social media, video platforms, influencers, algorithms, and new artificial intelligence interfaces, as well as the relative decline in the influence of traditional media.
UNESCO — Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms, 2023.
Examines disinformation, freedom of expression, access to information, and the responsibilities of States, digital platforms, and other actors in shaping the information ecosystem.
Reuters Institute — Digital News Report 2025, section on personalization and AI
Examines how algorithms, aggregators, and artificial intelligence systems personalize and rank the news received by each user, as well as public concerns regarding what may be left outside their information field.
