What AGCOM Found
On August 5, 2026, Italy's communications regulator AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) published survey findings on how Italians followed the campaign for the March 22-23, 2026 constitutional referendum on judicial reform. Television held the top spot overall — 58.7% of respondents used TV to follow the campaign, ahead of the 46.2% who turned online. But AGCOM's more granular digital breakdown is the finding that matters: sources that curate content algorithmically — social networks, video platforms, search engines and aggregators — accounted for 34.2% of online political information, compared with 22.4% for edited sources such as newspaper and broadcaster websites and native digital newsrooms.
AGCOM's own language was blunt. The data, it said, signals "uno spostamento rilevante del potere di intermediazione" toward platforms whose systems "selezionano, ordinano e personalizzano automaticamente i contenuti" — a significant shift of intermediation power toward platforms that automatically select, order and personalize content. That is a claim about institutions, not just habits: the entity doing the work of deciding what counts as relevant political information has moved from newsrooms exercising editorial judgment to ranking systems optimizing for engagement.
Steelman: the concern is not manufactured
AGCOM has a legitimate case. Editorial outlets, whatever their flaws, operate under defamation law, press codes, and — in Italy — the par condicio broadcast-pluralism rules AGCOM itself enforced during this same referendum, including a February 12, 2026 order rebalancing coverage on channels found to be over-representing one side. Algorithmic feeds carry none of that institutional accountability: a ranking system can amplify a claim to millions of voters with no byline, no correction mechanism and no regulator watching in real time. AGCOM also found that among social-platform users, professional journalist accounts remained the most-followed category (49%), suggesting audiences still seek out credentialed sources — but the algorithm, not the audience, decides which of those accounts they actually see. On a question as consequential as a constitutional referendum, a regulator flagging that the referee has quietly changed is doing its job.
Where the alarm overshoots
The report's framing nonetheless risks treating the shift as inherently dangerous rather than merely new. AGCOM's own numbers cut against a crisis narrative: television, the most heavily regulated and least personalized medium in Italy, still reached more voters than the internet in total, and word-of-mouth among family and friends (25.1%) — the least "algorithmic" channel imaginable — outperformed every individual digital category except social platforms. University graduates leaned on the internet as their primary source (61.5%), consistent with a more media-literate population making an informed channel choice rather than being passively captured by a feed. None of this looks like an information ecosystem collapsing under algorithmic manipulation; it looks like a media market in the middle of an ordinary, decades-long transition that regulators are only now instrumenting well enough to measure precisely.
The deeper risk is definitional. "Intermediation power" is doing a lot of work in AGCOM's report without a clear threshold for when it becomes a problem requiring intervention rather than disclosure. A search engine returning results and a newspaper's homepage editor both rank content by criteria readers don't fully see; the difference is one of degree and transparency, not of kind. If AGCOM's finding becomes the premise for mandating specific ranking outcomes for political content, it edges toward the kind of content-shaping power that a free press has spent two centuries resisting — regardless of whether a human editor or a recommender system is doing the shaping.
What proportionate oversight already covers
The useful response is not new Italian legislation but full use of the powers AGCOM already holds. As Italy's Digital Services Coordinator under the EU Digital Services Act (Regulation 2022/2065), AGCOM can require large platforms to disclose the main parameters of their recommender systems, offer users a non-personalized feed option, and — under DSA Article 40 — grant vetted researchers data access to study exactly the intermediation dynamics this report describes. Those tools target transparency and optionality, not outcomes, which is the right altitude for a regulator that also enforces broadcast pluralism: audit the mechanism, disclose the ranking logic, let voters opt out of personalization if they choose — but stop short of dictating what a ranking algorithm must surface during an election.
Italy's real test now is whether AGCOM uses the DSA's disclosure and researcher-access levers on the platforms its own survey named — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube — before the next national vote, rather than letting this report become a rhetorical case for heavier-handed rules. A regulator that already has the tools to make algorithmic intermediation legible should use them before reaching for tools that would make it, instead, controllable.