Retrospect: European Leadership Workshop 2024

Navigating the Confluence of Real-Life Crisis and Digital Democracy

Urgent action on digital literacy and platform accountability is crucial as misinformation and polarisation erode democracy and threaten public discourse.

The digital world is inseparable from real life, with immediate and sometimes dangerous effects. The rapid spread of disinformation and amplification of hate speech on online platforms are fuelling division and violence. This erosion of public trust extends offline, leading to political instability, social fragmentation, and weakened confidence in democratic institutions. While the European Union recognises these risks, regulations like the Digital Services Act fall short.

A unified European approach is crucial to combat misinformation and address the algorithms behind it. As Professor Achim Rettinger (FZI) highlights, control over the online space, and most recently AI profoundly impacts both our democracies and cultural identities: “Whoever manages the curation of training data and fine-tuning of AI models defines the cultural identity of these models and the communities that use them.”