Platforms’ Accountability to Strengthen the Digital Public Sphere – MT 04 2026

Digital platforms wield unprecedented power in shaping public debate. The way they are designed and operated significantly affects the digital public sphere.

The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) recognises platforms’ systemic risks to democratic processes, civic discourse, and fundamental rights. More recently the Council of Europe Recommendation on online safety and the empowerment of users and content creators lays a common ground for human-rights based platform accountability frameworks, featuring prominently promotion and protection of user agency.

Yet engagement-driven architectures, further amplified by generative AI and synthetic media, continue to fuel disinformation, hate speech and crime, and other online harms, eroding the conditions for civic agency and reducing users to consumers of algorithmically curated content. Moreover, algorithms and AI are reshaping human cognition and autonomy. These challenges are addresses in foundational texts like the Rome Declaration on Media Ecology and Technology Diplomacy, the Cannes Declaration on the Sovereignty of Mind, and the Declaration Universelle des Droits de l’Esprit Humain.

Against this backdrop, this session brings together civil society, academia, public authorities, and platform actors, to explore what conditions are needed for users to participate in the digital public sphere as citizens rather than as audiences. The discussion will address the legal, governance, and practical dimensions of safeguarding democratic debate in platform-mediated environments, against the background of European regulatory frameworks