New videos online: How digital public spaces can strengthen democracy
Experts from law, economics, philosophy, and the social sciences share their visions
Digital public spaces are playing an increasingly central role in democratic discourse. Yet, with the dominance of global social media platforms, core principles such as diversity of opinion, transparency, and participation are coming under growing pressure. Personalized content, algorithmic moderation, and the rapid spread of generative AI content raise the pressing question: Do these digital spaces still promote democratic exchange—or are they undermining it?
To explore this, the interdisciplinary research group humanet3 invited experts from law, economics, philosophy, and the social sciences to a workshop in March 2025. Together, they discussed the state of digital publics, their significance for democracy, and how they can be designed to be both future-ready and democratically sustainable.
A video series has emerged from this exchange, featuring selected participants who share their perspectives and offer impulses for the further development of digital spaces. They address the question: How do you envision a digital public space that benefits democracy?
In one of the newly released videos, economist and digital policy expert Francesca Bria calls for reclaiming the digital public space – for people and for the planet. “We need to reclaim the digital public space for the people and for the environment,” she says. Bria advocates for data commons that support public services and take into account both industrial and societal needs. She calls for green supercomputing technologies, sovereign cloud infrastructures, and public AI systems.The goal, she argues, is a fundamentally restructured digital economy – one that is not controlled by tech oligarchs, but instead creates democratic value, serves the public good, and benefits society as a whole.
Josef Drexl, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and Principal Investigator of the humanet3 group, also addresses the challenges facing digital publics. In his view, the contemporary internet suffers above all from a lack of diversity. Users are often only exposed to information that confirms their existing views—a situation that erodes curiosity, openness to dialogue, and the capacity for change.
Drexl emphasizes the need to create new value streams that support community-based projects. As a possible model, he refers to public service broadcasting—a system financed by society, committed to ensuring pluralism of opinion and to fact-checking information.
In his video, Robert Gorwa, postdoctoral researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, discusses alternative digital spaces. His vision is of a non-commercial, community-operated, and open-source-based public digital sphere.
He points to examples such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and PeerTube, all of which are built on open-source infrastructure and operated by non-profit organizations. “So why aren’t these spaces more popular? Why aren’t more people using them?” he asks. Although Mastodon now has around 15 million accounts, that number remains small compared to the billions of users on commercial platforms.
While the technical infrastructure is already in place, the necessary norms, rules, and content analysis mechanisms to make these platforms globally scalable are still missing. Gorwa calls for increased funding for governance projects, community-based moderation, and open-source tools that can help communities meet regulatory requirements—such as those set out in the UK’s Online Safety Act or the EU’s Digital Services Act.
The video series is part of an ongoing dialogue on the future of democratic publics in the digital age. Earlier videos featured contributions from Erik Tuchtfeld, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Kristina Rao, Thorsten Thiel, Raffaela Kunz, Chaewon Yun, Catalina Goanta, Gérman Oscar Johannssen and Clara Iglesias Keller. Further contributions from academia and practice will follow in the coming weeks.
humanet3 is an interdisciplinary research initiative that critically accompanies and actively shapes human-centered digital transformation — in line with the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade. The project is supported by three Max Planck Institutes: the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
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