Restoring the Democratic Public Sphere

This text was originally published by Umeå Association of International Affairs and was originally made available in PDF here as part of their magazine Utpost (Outpost).

For the past twenty years, the places where citizens meet, debate, organise and form public opinion have quietly been moved from public squares, newspapers, forums and broadcast media into privately owned closed digital platforms. These platforms have democratized the ability for open public discourse on the Internet. However, this historic outsourcing of the democratic conversation happened almost without public debate or meaningful democratic oversight. National parliaments, the European Parliament and governments, elected by you, largely stood by while the infrastructure of public discourse was handed over to a small number of actors, often purely commercial, whose core business model depends on keeping users scrolling as long as possible.

The result is no longer in doubt: extreme polarisation, collapsing trust in institutions, coordinated disinformation campaigns and a measurable decline in the quality of public debate in almost every European democracy. The problems are structural, not the result of any single company’s malice or fault. When the main revenue source is attention sold to advertisers, the incentives inevitably push toward content that triggers strong emotions. When moderation for three billion people is centralised in a few hands, local context is lost and mistakes become systemic. When the only way to reach one’s own citizens is through closed, proprietary systems, democratic actors become tenants in someone else’s house – always at risk of sudden rule changes, shadow-banning or outright deplatforming. The European Commission recently had their account disabled at X after trying to control the foreign company with fines.

Europe’s response so far has largely been to try to control the symptoms inside the closed platforms: fact-checking programmes, content-removal orders, transparency reports and – most controversially – proposals such as ChatControl (the proposal for scanning of private messaging for illegal material). These approaches treat citizens as objects of surveillance rather than subjects of democracy and violate the European Convention on Human Rights. Your elected representatives pour enormous political and technical energy into monitoring and surveilling every word of what people say inside walled gardens, while doing very little to create viable, democratically governed alternatives outside those walls.

This is backwards. Instead of your politicians spending political capital on mass surveillance of your legal right to private communication, the same European politicians should use its regulatory power to make the open, federated internet the easiest and most attractive choice for all politicians, public sector, civil society organizations, private business and citizens.

I suggest five concrete, actionable directions that would genuinely strengthen democracy and development:

1. Ban addictive design patterns and non-consensual behavioural data trading or force open source algorithms

The Digital Services Act should be amended to prohibit infinite scroll, autoplay, personalised “For You” feeds optimised solely for engagement metrics, and the sale or commercial reuse of behavioural data without explicit, granular, revocable consent. Platforms would still be allowed to make money, but they would have to compete on quality, privacy and usefulness rather than on their ability to hijack attention. An alternative would be to force platforms to open source the algorithms with clear information to the user.

2. Mandate real interoperability and data portability for dominant platforms

Gatekeepers (platforms with more than 1 million monthly EU users) should be required to implement open protocols such as ActivityPub within a fixed timeline (e.g. three years). Concretely: you as a user must be able to move your entire social graph, posts, media and follower relationships from Instagram to a Pixelfed instance, or from YouTube to a PeerTube instance, with one click – exactly as you can already move our phone number between operators. This single measure would break the network-effect monopoly overnight and make the open Internet, e.g. the Fediverse, immediately viable for mainstream use.

3. Require public money → public code → open infrastructure

Whenever public bodies (schools, universities, municipalities, government agencies) pay for, or provide, social-media-like services, the software must be free and open source, and the instance must federate by default. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund and the European Commission’s own Next Generation Internet initiative already finance many Fediverse projects – this principle should simply become systematic procurement policy across the Union.

4. Create strong incentives for chronological and non-algorithmic feeds

Platforms that offer only chronological timelines, user-curated lists, or fully transparent and auditable ranking algorithms should receive regulatory “fast-lane” treatment: lighter reporting requirements, eligibility for public-service advertising budgets, and the right to use an official “democracy-compatible” label. Conversely, completely opaque, engagement-maximising black-box algorithms could be restricted or banned for political and news content.

5. Fund and protect civic Fediverse infrastructure at European scale

The EU should create a permanent, well-funded programme (similar to the Horizon Europe missions) dedicated to resilient, decentralised social infrastructure. This could include:

• Grants for cities and regions to collaborate and run their own Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon and Pixelfed instances - eventually buying from market actors or self-hosting within an ordinary budget.
• Legal and technical support against SLAPP suits and DDoS attacks aimed at independent servers.
• Development of official, easy-to-deploy “Fediverse-in-a-box” packages tailored for schools, small associations and local media.
• A European “public option” instance (or a network of instances) run under public-service principles, open to all EU residents as a safe default home if they do not want to choose a smaller community.

None of these measures require banning existing commercial platforms or forcing anyone to leave them. They simply level the playing field so that democratic societies are no longer forced to hold their conversations inside systems whose primary purpose is to sell attention and personal data and under the control of a single actor, susceptible to failure, bankruptcy or change or direction.

The technology does not have to be addictive, centralised and opaque to be successful – it only became that way because regulation was absent at the critical moment when the infrastructure was built. Europe now has the legal tools, technical knowledge and the democratic legitimacy to reverse that mistake.

If your elected politicians spend the next five years fighting over how to scan private messages inside European, American, Chinese or other platforms, Europe will have lost another decade. If instead your politicians use that time to make open, federated, non-addictive infrastructure the easiest, best and most trusted choice, we can bring the democratic conversation back under democratic control – without surveillance, without censorship panics, and without outsourcing our public sphere to whoever pays most for your attention.

The suppliers, tools and infrastructure already exist in Europe. Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and the rest of the Fediverse are not toys for enthusiasts – they are working proof that another model is possible. All that is missing is your politicians’ decisions to stop managing the symptoms inside closed platforms and start building the future: an open Internet that serves democracy instead of exploiting it.

Utpost magazine in PDF.