This Wednesday, in his speech at the European innovation and entrepreneurship forum, “Ruhr Summit,” Prime Minister Edi Rama spoke from Germany about the protests in Tirana, where for 32 days thousands of citizens have taken to the squares and streets demanding his resignation.
The head of government described the protest as an important message for him and his government, saying he is trying to understand citizens’ concerns and expectations, beyond the number of participants.
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However, he devoted a large part of his speech to criticizing social networks and algorithms, which he said have distorted the perception of the protest.
“Many of you have heard about the revolution of the flamingos. As prime minister, I consider this protest an important message for me and for my government. I am listening and trying to understand this message very carefully, not by counting people in the streets, but by trying to understand the concerns, anxieties and hopes that brought people there. A government that stops listening stops governing. Whatever conclusion we have reached on the issue itself, in fact we cannot say that it has not achieved something valuable, because it is part of Albania’s democratic transformation. We have lived in a time when protest was not allowed and agreement was mandatory. We came into a period when protests became dangerous. On the same boulevard where the flamingos celebrate freedom, we had people who were killed, protesters who lost their lives. Not very long ago,” Rama said.
Rama argued that the online protest created a “bigger, simpler and angrier” version of the real demonstration.
“What I want to say is that after all this good came the bad, the business model. The protest entered the machine of algorithmic amplification and was turned into the arena of malicious actors. Reality demanded a digital twin; every voice was turned into a recommendation, every exaggeration was turned into engagement, every emotional reaction became a signal for the platforms to produce even more of the same thing. Context disappeared, complexity disappeared, and the online protest was not describing the protest but was a bigger, simpler, angrier demonstration, and millions of people who had never set foot in Albania did not experience the demonstration itself, but the algorithm’s interpretation of this demonstration, and digital reality became more influential than physical reality. This is the ugly part, not the citizens, not the protest, but the distortion, the replacement of reality through optimization. This is not only an Albanian story,” Rama said.
