The myth of digital neutrality

Ever since humans discovered that a single word can ignite a war´-or-topple a throne, the real question has never been what we say, but who gets to speak.
This is precisely what John Burn-Murdoch, data journalist and analyst, tries to unpack in his recent Financial Times column: social media amplified a loud, unruly populism, while artificial intelligence may usher us back toward a calmer, expert‑-;-driven discourse.
As you once wrote in these pages, “technology does not arrive to save anyone, but to rearrange power.”
And that is exactly what we are witnessing today. Social media redistributed power chaotically, allowing voices that were never permitted to speak to suddenly erupt into the public sphere. AI, by contrast, re-concentrates authority, returning it to institutions capable of training models and controlling their outputs. It is a shift from the disorder of the crowd to the discipline of the elite-;- from unfiltered noise to polished silence.
But it is a silence with teeth. A silence that decides what should be said and what should be forgotten.
The problem is not the diagnosis, but the hidden assumption: that AI can be the antidote to populism, that it can -restore- order to a space that has slipped beyond control.
Here lies the real disagreement. Social media did not create populism-;- it exposed it. It did not invent anger-;- it dragged it out of the shadows. It did not manufacture polarisation-;- it revealed the fragility of societies that had long been sedated by state‑-;-run media. Social platforms are not factories of populism-;- they are magnifying mirrors.
And if these platforms amplified the voices of the angry, it is simply because they were the first technology in history to let the angry speak without permission. That is what shattered elite standards, not populism itself.
AI is not the opposite of populism-;- it is the opposite of chaos when it is designed to lean toward moderation.
As Burn-Murdoch, now a lecturer at the London School of Economics, notes, this moderation is not a virtue but a structural outcome: AI is trained on institutional, academic and journalistic sources. It is born in the library, not the street.
Which means one thing: AI does not kill populism-;- it kills spontaneity. It returns discourse to those who possess knowledge,´-or-to those who possess the means to train the models. We move from “the chaos of the people” to “the discipline of the elite.” This is not progress-;- it is a change of masks.
The real danger is not populism, but the monopolisation of meaning. AI may produce calmer language, but it is filtered, sanitised, reshaped according to the values of those who built the model. It is not neutral, only performatively neutral. And performative neutrality is far more dangerous than explicit bias.
The populist shouts-;- you can see him, hear him, understand his motives.
The generative model whispers-;- it sounds rational, but carries within it the finger-print-s of its designers, not its users.
So the question becomes: do we want a quieter discourse,´-or-a less manipulated one?
What Burn-Murdoch proposes, perhaps unintentionally, is a return to a world where elites decide what counts as “reasonable” and “acceptable.” But the world has changed. Those who escaped the cloak of traditional media will not return to it through the back door of artificial intelligence.
AI may calm the surface, but it does not -alter-the current beneath. And today’s current is not merely populist-;- it is deeply suspicious of any absolute epistemic authority.
What we truly need is not a technology that pacifies speech, nor a platform that inflates it, but a space where people can speak, facts can be contested, and ideas can clash without guardianship.
Populism is not a disease-;- it is a symptom.
AI is not a cure-;- it is a tool.
The real illness is the collapse of trust, trust in institutions, in media, in those who hold information.
AI may be less polarising than social media, but it is not more democratic. It may be quieter, but it is not more truthful. It is simply the voice of the elite returning in new clothes.
And if the world is exhausted by populism, it is even more exhausted by paternalism. No matter how serene AI sounds, it will not shepherd people back into obedience.
In the end, the problem is neither social media nor artificial intelligence, but the illusion that technology can replace politics,´-or-that algorithms can rebuild trust shattered by decades of mismanagement. Technology is not salvation-;- it is a mirror. And today’s mirror tells us one thing: the world will no longer accept anyone, neither a populist platform nor a language model, speaking in its name.
That is what makes the future more complicated, and far more interesting.

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