Issue Two · 22 October 2026
In this issue
- From the Room · Five points for anger
- The Argument · Who pays for what a machine has read
- Worth Your Attention · Books, creativity, cinema, music, school, press freedom
- The Calendar · 22 October to 5 November
- One Question · What a feed changes
From the Room
Five points for anger
When you open Facebook you do not see everything your friends and the pages you follow have posted. There is too much. A computer program, the algorithm, gives every post a score and puts the highest first. The column it builds is called the News Feed, and for most of the people who use Facebook it is Facebook.
In February 2016, next to the thumbs-up of the like, Facebook added five small faces for answering a post: love, laughter, surprise, sadness and anger. From 2017, according to internal documents later published by the Washington Post, the program counted each of those faces as five likes, the angry one included. In January 2018 Mark Zuckerberg gave the feed a new goal, “meaningful social interactions”: posts that make people react and comment would rise. He expected people to spend less time on Facebook as a result.
Until then, the posts that did best were the ones people read, watched and clicked on. From then on, the posts that did best were the ones that stirred a feeling strong enough to make people answer, and nothing makes people answer like outrage. The polarisation that followed was not an accident. It was induced: a machine rewarded for reactions learned that division pays.
Political parties have increasingly adapted their language to the logic of social media algorithms, discovering that outrage, confrontation and divisive rhetoric generate more engagement, and therefore greater visibility.
An internal Facebook report from April 2019 revealed just how far this dynamic had gone. An unnamed Polish political party told Facebook researchers that it had radically changed its communication strategy: while its posts had initially been evenly split between positive and negative messages, negative content had eventually risen to 80 per cent. The reason was simple: negativity performed better on the platform.
Political parties in Spain, Taiwan and India reported similar experiences. The findings remained buried in Facebook’s internal documents until 2021, when Frances Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s election integrity team, exposed them.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: political parties become more confrontational to gain visibility, while algorithms reward precisely the content that fuels division. In this system, political polarisation is no longer simply a reflection of public debate: it is also shaped and amplified by the economic incentives built into social media platforms.
The film
Aaron Sorkin has now turned the story into The Social Reckoning, adapted from Broken Code, the book by Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter who received Haugen’s documents. Mikey Madison plays Haugen; Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg. I saw it in Rome, at a screening for the film industry. In America it took $5.5 million on its first weekend, little for a Sorkin film. The scandal that filled front pages five years ago does not fill cinemas.
Sorkin told NPR what he wanted the audience to leave with: “There’s supposed to be some kind of tension between growth and safety.” At Facebook, the film argues, there was none.
The square and the editor
The question underneath is as old as the internet. Is the owner of a platform the landlord of a public square, who answers for the paving but not for what people shout? American law says yes. Section 230, written in 1996, holds that no online service “shall be treated as the publisher or speaker” of what its users post.
Or does the landlord choose? A newspaper editor decides what goes on the front page and answers for it. An algorithm that gives five points to anger also decides what goes on the front page, for 3 billion people, every second. Haugen put it to the European Parliament in November 2021: ranking by engagement is “one of the root causes of the greatest systemic risks that social media poses to our societies”.
What Strasbourg asked
In January 2025 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the forum of 46 national parliaments, adopted Resolution 2590 on content moderation, on the basis of a report I had spent two years preparing. It did not ask platforms to stop choosing. It asked them to say how they choose: algorithms whose “operation modalities should be disclosed”, users “duly informed on how these algorithms filter and promote content”, an end to shadow banning, the quiet demotion of a post without telling its author, and an external audit, with a seal for platforms designed to break echo chambers rather than build them.
A choice that is declared can be judged. A choice that is hidden can only be suffered. The European Union has written part of this into law: since 2023 its Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms to explain their recommender systems and to offer a feed not based on profiling. The switch exists. It is rarely the default.
The Argument
Who pays for what a machine has read
On 10 March 2026 two European institutions looked at the same question on the same day. In Luxembourg, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union heard a Hungarian news publisher, Like Company, which accuses Google of letting its chatbot reproduce its articles. In Strasbourg, the European Parliament voted 460 to 71 on a report asking that artificial intelligence pay for the books, songs, films and articles it learns from.
The rule at stake is seven years old. In 2019 the EU’s copyright directive allowed anyone to “mine” texts and data, that is, to copy them automatically and extract patterns, for any purpose, commercial included. Article 4 added one condition: the copying is allowed unless the rightholder has reserved the use “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means”. The directive was written before ChatGPT. It is now the ground on which AI companies claim the right to train their models in Europe.
Should artificial intelligence pay for what it learns from?
For
Authors, publishers, film and music producers
The exception was written for search engines and researchers, not for products that compete with the works they were trained on.
A reservation in “machine-readable” form is a trap. In Hamburg, a photographer’s opt-out written in ordinary words on a website was held not to count.
Without disclosure of what was used, no one can enforce anything. Transparency must be work by work.
Payment is possible: Anthropic settled with American authors for $1.5 billion; Google now licenses content from more than 400 news outlets.
Against
AI developers, and governments that want an AI industry
The law says what it says: lawful access, no reservation, copying allowed. Changing it now punishes those who followed it.
Training does not store the works. In London, in November 2025, the High Court found that Stable Diffusion contains no copies of Getty’s images.
A public summary of training data is already required by the AI Act. Listing every title is impossible at the scale of the web.
Licences fit large publishers. A system built on them would shut out small developers and leave the field to the richest companies.
The two columns agree on more than they admit: both want rules that can be read by a machine and checked by a person. The European Commission has opened a consultation on technology and copyright that closes on 3 November. The Court’s answer in Like Company is expected in 2027. In the meantime the cases multiply: on 8 October USA Today’s publisher sued OpenAI in New York for more than $250 million; two days earlier, six Canadian news organisations sued Anthropic in Ontario.
Worth Your Attention
Books
Anne Carson, born in Toronto in 1950, a classicist who translates Sappho and writes poems that look like essays and essays that look like poems, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on 8 October. Her first reaction: “Crazy. I think they’re all crazy.” The day before, in Frankfurt, the Italian Publishers Association reported that foreign publishers bought the rights to 8,645 Italian books in 2025, in 45 languages and 64 countries: almost five times the 1,800 of 2001, the first year it was counted. More than a third were books for children.
Creativity
On 13 October, in Paris, the culture committee of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly heard two guests for a report I am preparing on generative AI, creativity and education. Isabelle Degeorges, who runs Gaumont’s television arm in France, pointed to what disappears first: the simple tasks a machine can do are the ones through which young people learn a trade. The philosopher and writer Mazarine Pingeot drew a different line. Communicating, she said, is not dialogue, and a conversation with a machine only looks like one.
Cinema
On 6 October Paramount Skydance closed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery for $110.9 billion. One company, run by David Ellison, now owns Warner Bros., Paramount, HBO, CBS and CNN: two of the five studios that built Hollywood and two of America’s television newsrooms.
Music
YouTube Music began labelling songs made with generative AI on 14 October: fully, partly, or not at all. The French platform Deezer said in July that it was receiving almost 90,000 entirely AI-made tracks a day.
School
The world needs 50 million more teachers by 2030, UNESCO calculated for World Teachers’ Day on 5 October. There are 107 million today. Most of the gap is not new jobs but people leaving: 58 per cent of it comes from teachers who quit.
Press freedom
On 15 October the Committee to Protect Journalists asked Indonesia’s president, Prabowo Subianto, to stop undermining the press. Since 1992, 14 journalists have been killed in Indonesia; in 8 of the 9 murders committed in retaliation for their work, no one has been convicted.
The Calendar
The next fortnight, and what each of these actually is.
Until 23 Oct Rome. MIA, the international audiovisual market, where producers from 83 countries look for partners and money for films, series and documentaries before a single scene is shot. 104 projects were selected out of 630.
25 Oct Brazil. Second round of the presidential election between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president, who came first in the first round on 4 October with about 47 per cent against 45. The largest democracy in Latin America chooses its president for the next four years.
26 Oct–4 Nov Tokyo. The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, the largest in Asia, with its market for film and television rights, TIFFCOM, from 28 to 30 October.
27 Oct Israel. General election for the 120 seats of the Knesset, the parliament, which dissolved itself in July. Parties need 3.25 per cent of the vote to enter.
2 Nov Paris. International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. At UNESCO the Director-General presents the 2026 report on the safety of journalists. Since 2006 more than 1,800 journalists have been killed; about 86 per cent of the cases remain unresolved.
3 Nov United States. Midterm elections: all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats of the Senate and 36 governors. Republicans hold the Senate with 53 seats.
3 Nov Brussels. Deadline of the European Commission’s consultation on technology and copyright: anyone can answer, from authors to AI companies.
One Question
When did a feed last show you something that changed your mind, rather than something that confirmed it?
Two lines are enough. The best answers run in the next issue, with your name and your country.
What this is
Plotline is a letter about how power is exercised over what people are allowed to know, to make and to watch. Every two weeks, in English, about ten minutes.
I am an Italian member of parliament, vice-president of the culture committee of the Chamber of Deputies, and at the Council of Europe I write the Assembly’s reports on media freedom and on what artificial intelligence is doing to creative work. Before all of that I was a journalist, the trade that taught me how to look.
What I can offer is the view from inside the room, and some sense of which arguments will still matter in a year.
Valentina Grippo
Rome
