During the Trump presidency in the United States of America, the social media network Twitter (now known as X) became a new, unofficial media channel through which the former president issued many political statements and informed the public about planned activities and new decisions. At the same time, however, he also continued to use this venue for more personal information, most frequently somehow connected to his office, for example on the size of his ‘nuclear button’ in comparison to that assumed to be the North Korean leader’s one after a news report. This type of communication was until then unknown as a general communication strategy at least for most public officials. Press conferences and bulletins were the typical means of informing the public and professionally interested parties about the standpoints of the government, its actions and its plans. Also, government information was typically delivered in a rather neutral and down-to-earth tone and was carefully drafted and revised, rather than being spur-of-the-moment ideas frequently dismissing other ideas using direct, sometimes offensive language.

State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem.

Today is a time of retrogression in sustaining rights-protecting democracies, and of high levels of distrust in institutions. Of particular concern are threats to the institutions, including universities and the press, that help provide the information base for successful democracies. Attacks on universities, and university faculties, are rising. In Poland over the last four years, a world-renowned constitutional law theorist, Wojciech Sadurski, has been subject to civil and criminal prosecutions for defamation of the governing party. In Hungary, the Central European University (CEU) was ejected by the government, and had to partly relocate to Vienna, and other attacks on academic freedom followed. Faculty members in a number of countries have needed to relocate to other countries for their own safety.

The typical arguments concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private counterpart. This chapter challenges this approach for leaving unaddressed other important consequences of shifting responsibilities to private entities. Privatization cuts off the link between processes of decision-making and the citizens and, therefore, erodes political engagement and its underlying notion of shared responsibility. Consequently, privatization undermines individuals’ public autonomy.

The effects of privatization are not restricted to the question of whether a public prison is better or worse qua prison than its private counterpart, or whether private forestry is better or worse qua forestry than its public counterpart. Stripping the state of its responsibilities erodes public responsibility, for privatization is not only the transformation of detention centers, trains, tax inquiry offices, forestry operations, and so on, considered one service at a time. It is also the transformation of our political system and public culture from ones characterized by robust shared responsibility and political engagement to ones characterized by fragmentation and sectarianism.

Piero’s life has been a missing chapter in the history of Florence during its transition from republic to principate, considered irrelevant, except by its failings, to the crisis of Italian states at this time. As with any biography, the importance of his life lies in providing a witness to events as they happened – in his case the threat to Italy’s, and especially Florence’s, stability in the face of foreign invasions. Piero was very articulate in expressing himself and the pressure he suffered in his unofficial role as Florence’s capo, neither powerful enough to rule nor free enough to indulge his talents and pleasures as a prince. He enables us to appreciate the situation faced by republics like Florence that had become territorial states without the military power or the permanent leadership to withstand foreign armies – except at risk of being accused of tyranny. This, of course, was Piero’s fate, and it again raises the question of whether he was the ambitious tyrant that his reputation suggests or whether, instead, his temperament and experience would have qualified him to be the new type of civilian ruler that political realists like Machiavelli, Francesco Vettori and Guicciardini were proposing for Florence after the unexpected death of Piero’s son in 1519.