Platformization and Opacity: How Digital Technology Shapes Public Opinion

In the post-pandemic era of technological warfare, platformization and digital opacity are increasingly generating manipulative effects on consensus-building dynamics, fundamentally altering how public opinion forms in democratic societies.

We now live in what experts call the era of the “self-informative program,” where the hierarchical dimension of information sources has virtually vanished alongside the collapse of authority, credibility, and trustworthiness of traditional media sources. Today’s digital individual creates their own information ecosystem, establishing new relationships with other users based on shared biases rather than shared facts.

This shift represents a profound transformation in how society processes information, particularly as platforms increasingly drive identity construction within digital containers that adapt to individual demands, leading to a flattening of search results that follow the principle of confirmation bias.

“The increasing complexity of the ecosystem, coupled with platformization that relies on data hoarding and the emergence of artificial intelligence, raises critical questions about our ability to govern these processes,” notes Francesco Pira, a leading researcher in digital communication. “The positivist view of technology’s impact overlooks the evolution of the disinformation industry within our media ecosystem.”

Public opinion manipulation through social platforms has emerged as an overt threat to public life. Studies show that disinformation strategically attacks three cornerstones of democracy: politics, science, and economics—with the explicit aim of manipulating public opinion and destabilizing democratic processes in Western societies.

The digital transformation has created what Pira calls a “polyphonic, polychromatic, multidimensional aspect of time and space,” where platforms scan time and create veracity within frames constructed to replace reality with representation. This digital capitalism generates significant consequences for identity construction processes that are increasingly mediated by technology.

“We are witnessing the transformation of social mechanisms of information exchange that are increasingly based on homophily,” explains Pira. “Platform architectures favor communication exchanges between like-minded people who don’t generate cognitive dissonance but instead reinforce existing beliefs through social similarity.”

The concept of “surveillance capitalism,” coined by Shoshana Zuboff, describes how those with surveillance power have expropriated assets from human experience, subjugating it to market mechanisms where behaviors become data ready for predictive analysis algorithms and trading in a marketplace of future behaviors.

The Hexagon of Fake News

To understand how misinformation spreads, researchers have developed the “fake news hexagon,” a tool that analyzes six key elements that power disinformation campaigns:

1. Appeal: The mechanism that attracts users through agenda-setting that aligns with existing beliefs
2. Virality: The capacity for content to spread rapidly through informational cascades
3. Speed: The exploitation of rapid communication channels that outpace verification processes
4. Flow: How information spreads strategically to support specific narratives
5. Cross-media: The ability for content to move seamlessly across different media platforms
6. Strength: The robustness of conspiracy narratives and polarizing information

A study analyzing misinformation on TikTok—where more than 60% of users are under 25—revealed how these elements combine to create powerful disinformation. This platform is particularly concerning given that fewer than one in ten students can distinguish between fact and opinion, according to OECD research.

The study examined videos related to health misinformation, including false claims about COVID-19 vaccines containing microchips, toxic spike proteins, and connections between monkeypox and Bill Gates. These videos had garnered millions of views with minimal warning labels or fact-checking interventions.

“We are observing a mutation in the process of spreading misinformation,” Pira notes. “We’re no longer in the era of blatantly false news. Today’s disinformation uses elements with apparent veracity, seemingly supported by ‘scientific’ sources and powerful keywords.”

The Crisis of Democratic Participation

This widespread manipulation of information threatens the foundations of democratic participation. As traditional institutions weaken and political parties lose their representative role, citizens become increasingly isolated in digital tribes with weak ties.

“The prevalence of individualism generates significant consequences on identity construction processes,” says Pira. “We assist to an increasing lack of recognition of the other, as individuals move away from commitment, sacrifice, and achieving higher collective good.”

The digital age has created environments that favor “hit-and-run” content where information prevails over knowledge. The line between inner values and social behaviors thins as identity construction centers on social media representation and the consensus it generates.

This crisis is running through all Western democracies. Citizens have lost trust in institutions and cultural intermediaries, while simultaneously showing decreasing ability to select, analyze, and understand information flows. The result is a social dimension characterized by increasing homogeneity, with social action based primarily on confirmation bias rather than critical thinking.

As the digital transformation accelerates, developing new interpretive processes to understand reality and rebuild public trust becomes not just important but essential for the survival of informed democratic participation.