Uninformative blackout: neither light nor bulos | Opinion

On Monday we not only returned for a few hours to A civilization without electricity. The blackout also made us experience a brief return to a world where digital misinformation did not exist. Without social networks, WhatsApp or Telegram to receive or extend bulos. With a handful of accessible information, consolidated radio stations, each with its editorial approach. And with only a few spokespersons available, all of them official and with knowledge of the facts, were governmental or corporate. They were a few hours without digital noise. Without jokes, without threads of pseudoexpertos, without political memes in group chats, without videos and audios forwarded with crazy theories, without Influencers or public characters spreading unfounded opinions. Without (and this is very important) misinformation campaigns – interns or external – coordinated to try destabilize the system. We could not access the information during the blackout, but not to misinformation either. If the good ones could not emit it, nor the bad ones.

« There was analog misinformation, » he tells me Clara Jiménez Cruz, founder of the verification medium Damned. To her, like me, we were stopped by the neighborhood neighborhood when we saw each other with transistors. They asked us if what they had heard or reached them in the brief connection flickers was true. The doubt was always in the question: is this that I have heard that it goes from Finland to Italy? I remembered the theory of Robin Dunbar that gossip makes us human, because it is a form of social cohesion, such as the dismissal of the monkeys. It seems that, somehow atavistic, we are very well equipped against the traditional rumor, and we give informal oral communication the value it has: relative. The digital rumor, uncontrollable and more sensitive to interested manipulations, is something else. Before the lack of connection, in the offices of Damned In Madrid they went to Factchecking Analog: They wrote on a board what they knew and placed it on the street. Clara reviews the misinformation acts that they monitored in the first hours: that if I alvo saying that it was cyber -terrorism, that if Ursula von der Leyen declaring that it was an attack on « European sovereignty », that if the CNN reporting a « critical cyber attack. » But of course, the bulles are launched does not mean that they arrive.

I also ask for your opinion Raúl MagallónExpert Professor in Disinformation of Carlos III, who has an interesting idea: « Without the network dopamine people were quieter. » The information was very limited, it tells me, but we saw that nothing serious happened and that lowered the level of general uncertainty. Clara believes that – independently of the acting of the President of the Government – the forecasts of Red Electrica, which at two hours of the blackout already gave correct information about when and how the light was going to be recovered (in 8 or 10 hours, by areas), it was essential to keep calm.

In summary: for a few hours we trust the traditional media and the experts, we saw that their predictions were fulfilled, we listened to our own eyes and replaced the dopamine of the networks with the dopamine of social contact. I doubt that there are precedents of a similar social and communicative experiment, which covers entire countries.

Now the thing will change. After this parenthesis, the misinformation industry has returned, sowing the idea of ​​the inconvenience of Renewable energies.