Hofmann notes at 30 BSPC

30TH BSPC: SECOND SESSIONDemocracy in a changing media landscapeSpeaker : Prof. Dr. Jeanette Hofmann , Weizenbaum Institute Berlin- reported speech to the presentation -Chairwoman Stålhammar introduced the next speaker, Prof Jeanette Hofmann, whowas a political scienti st specialised in internet policy and digital society. She was thefounding director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society aswell as professor for internet policy at the FU Berlin. At the international level, ProfHofmann had pa rticipated in the UN World Summit on the Information Society and theInternet Governance Forum. Her current research focused on digitalisation anddemocracy as well as the emergence of the internet policy in Germany.Speech by Prof Jeanette Hofmann, Director Alexander von Humboldt Institute forInternet and Society , FU BerlinProf Hofmann said it was a great honour for her to address this important conferenceand to share her thoughts on digitalisation and democracy. I n the short time allotted toher, she wished to address two points. The first concerned the question of howdigitalisation and democracy were actually connected. The second was about currenttendencies regarding the regulation of platforms.When looking a t how the public discourse was talking about digitalisation anddemocracy, a recurring pattern could be seen. Usually, digitalisation was regarded asthe driver of democratic change. It was held responsible for the decline of mass media,for the increase o f disinformation campaigns, for phenomena such as hate speech andpopulism. It seemed that the internet was being blamed for anything threateningdemocracy at the moment. In her view, this interpretation was looking in the wrongdirection because technolog y – particularly digital technology – was not somethingacting on its own. It had been invented by human beings, and more importantly, it wasused by human beings. Prof Hofmann suggested that they look at the relationshipbetween digitalisation and democra cy in a different way, namely as two entities thatwere shaping each other. The way digital technology was used shaped how engineersfurther developed it, and the way it was used created new ways of institutions that thenshaped who people were and how the y perceived the world. It was this interactionbetween the people using technology and engineers further developing technologiesthat was so interesting, in her view, when discussing digital democracy.A closer look at how democracy had developed over the past decade would show howdemocracy as a practice introduced certain demands towards technology. Over thedecades, it could be seen that democracy had been changing quite a bit. Even if theirconstitutions were fairly stable, even if the democratic rule a nd institutions seemed tostay quite the same, as a practice, a lot had been changing. Two lines of change couldbe distinguished. One had to do with aging institutions, the other with expandinginstitutions. Considering the first, she noted that certain t ypes of political participationthat had used to be at the core of democracy were losing in terms of attention andvalue for the people when they were looking at democracy. Young people were notbecoming members of political parties anymore, they did not t hink voting was the mostimportant aspect of democracy. Moreover, US parliamentarians were surely aware thatthe relationships between voters and representatives was changing. That shift wasoccurring in many ways. For example, the core electorate of polit ical parties wasshrinking. People were making short -term decisions these days about the politicalparties they voted for. The respect for members of parliament was decreasing as well.At the same time, trust in parliamentary institutions was clearly decli ning in manycountries. That did not mean that democracy as such was in decline. Prof Hofmannbelieved that democracy was changing. New institutions were emerging that gavethem a lot of hope. For example, lots of people wanted to participate in new ways, suchas many social movements springing into being. Young people wanted to express theirconcerns in movements, for instance Fridays for Future. Political participationnowadays was more oriented towards specific issues, i.e., people did not commit tolong-term engagement, through unions and political parties, for example. Youngpeople expressed their concerns in non -institutional, more informal ways gearedtowards what specific issues they cared about. Climate change was one of theseissues, immigration po litics another of concern to many young people. That was onetype of change, she noted: political participation outside of political parties.Another significant change was the growing importance of the public sphere and digitalmedia. Even before there h ad been platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, it couldbe seen that the public sphere was changing in many ways. People were expressingtheir political opinions instead of just reading the newspapers. The public sphere overthe last decade had become muc h more interactive, and new ways of expressing one’sopinion were emerging. Platforms such as Facebook facilitated people’s urge tocomment on political actions, observing what governments were doing and alsocriticising governments. Voting for or against a government every four or five yearswas not the only way of expressing one’s democratic rights as there were other waysnow. The public sphere was playing a truly important role in this. Democracy, evenwithin the constitution, was changing in what could be called daily practice. This shiftwas what Prof Hofmann saw as creating certain impetuses and demands on digitaltools. People used digital tools to express their new way of participating in democracy.Digital democracy in her understanding took part at the intersection of the changingdemocracy and digital tools allowing individuals to enact their rights as citizens out ofa desire to participate. While it was true that in most democratic countries, only aboutten per cent of the population were very active while others were more passiveobservers of what was going on, these ten per cent of active people were driving thedevelopment of digital networks. They were driving it by using it for new ways ofengaging in democracy. As an example, Prof Hofmann mentioned a new phenomenoncalled “platform parties”. Parties were set up in a much speedier way, often evenwithout formal membership, using off -the-shelf platform software to create neworganisations in the hope of interacting more horizontally and less hierarchically. Thespeaker was a bit sceptical whether this would work out in the long run, yet there wasan attitude towards experimental organisational structures to change politics in theeveryday setting. Instead of the hierarchical, large organisatio ns, people were givingnew ways of interacting a try and also finding consensus. Therefore, democraticchange was also a driver of technological change as well, the professor emphasised.People wanted to have less hierarchical, less bureaucratic and more s pontaneousways of working together, and they were using the internet for that purpose, forexample. They desired methods of instantly expressing their concerns, their criticismbut also what they wished to see happen. Particularly for the young generation , thiswas an important issue. They were impatient and thought that there had been nochange. They wanted to see action right at this moment, and the internet was their wayof expressing it.Prof Hofmann suggested that they should talk about and see the cu rrent situation as adigital constellation where new phenomena such as user -generated content served asan alternative to media representation of politics. It was an alternative in the sense thatthe media did not control the public sphere any longer. One could see both mediareporting but also people commenting and discussing their political realities. Thissituation amounted to a thorough transformation of the public sphere. Saidtransformation called for new rules, she underlined.Starting perhaps in Ger many, new laws had been enacted that were geared towardsenforcement of existing laws – such as the Network Enforcement Law – but also theDigital Services Act on the European level. These shared a few items. They dealt withthe takedown of illegal content , which was really important not because there had beenno illegal content before but because of the lack of forms of enforcing existing laws.Both the Network Enforcement Law and the Digital Services Act set strict deadlines forplatforms to remove illega l content, and they imposed heavy fines for platforms whichdid not follow these new laws. What was equally important, they imposed new rules forplatforms and social networks to report what they were doing, called transparencyreporting. The platforms had to issue reports about complaints but also about thealgorithms they were using. The ambition of the Digital Services Act was to askplatforms to tell the public about the algorithms in use and the principles behind themfor filtering content but also for the advertisements they showed to their users. Therewould be new forms of complaint management as well as, in the long run, data sharing.As an academic, Prof Hofmann considered it very important that they got access to allthe data gathered by platforms about their users and about societies.So far, so good, she commented. The emphasis of these new laws was on enforcingexisting laws. In her view, they must not forget that it was not only about lawenforcement, but that user -generated content demanded th at one look at the changeof human rights, its changing role. Some of these human rights, she hoped, wouldextend their scope towards digital platforms. Human rights usually regulated therelationships between citizens and governments. These platforms, tho ugh, hadbecome so powerful and were affecting the exercise of human rights to such a greatextent that Prof Hofmann believed that in the long run, they would need to askplatforms to not only respect human rights but also to help people exercise humanrights. That seemed to her a very important step that all of them had to take. Second,forms of institutions for citizens’ right to appeal were needed. When platforms filteredcontent, citizens had to be able to appeal when their content had been taken downeven though users believed they had the right to publish certain things. She explainedthat algorithms did not understand irony, they did not understand citation or other formsof rightful ways of expressing oneself. So there had to be powerful rights to ap peal.Furthermore, the speaker believed that support for victims of disinformation and hatespeech had to be institutionalised. Not enough was being done at the moment to helppeople who were victims of hate speech. In the long run, she envisioned the goal asheading towards a public -private infrastructure for protecting human rights online.People could now speak up, use their human rights in new ways that also called fornew environments to be created that would support the people making use of thesehuma n rights.