Alternative Public Sphere

Executive Summary

Online freedom of expression has undergone continuous evolution over the last twenty years, with numerous advances and setbacks. As the different waves of the Internet evolved, European expression became increasingly more dependent on private infrastructures, enabling, prioritizing, or constraining certain types of online expression over others. These infrastructures constitute the backbone of a European ‘public sphere’ — a digital space in which European citizens gather to exchange and contrast ideas — but have historically been controlled by third-country technology. This dependency has generated numerous conflicts, which are well known and on the rise, ranging from the spread of disinformation to ongoing confrontations with very large online platforms such as X or TikTok, to an increasing number of European legislative measures addressing different dimensions of the digital public sphere.

The What of this Project: How to Build a European Social Media Platform

The project’s main objective is to deliver a complete reflection on what European Social Media Platforms (ESMPs) could look like in practice. Admittedly ambitious, this project seeks to kickstart a longer discussion about infrastructural technological dependencies, European sovereignty and the role of informational control in geopolitics, using ESMPs as a compelling and practical case study of such realities.

WP #1: Theoretical Groundwork

This WP will bring together several disciplines (from computer science and economics, to political science, journalism, law and transnational policy) and different stakeholders, from civil society, coders, companies and public entities, in an effort to build the entire regulatory ecosystem for these new ESMPs. This requires fully interdisciplinary work to answer a series of interconnected questions, including both technological and regulatory questions, as well as those of economic and political feasibility. In this WP, the project will also map the entire existing multistakeholder ecosystem in Europe, seeking potential solutions in development and alternative models to the centralization of current third-country social media platforms.

In practice, the WP will focus particularly on the following questions:

• What technological means are required to achieve European autonomy at this application layer? What technological models exist to transmit multimodal information and what kind of infrastructure do they require?
• What level of centralization or decentralization should be required of ESMPs? Should social online expression be built using open-protocol architectures such as ActivityPub or AT Protocols, or rather centralized around European companies?
• What should be the financing incentives to build such an ESMP? Should they be fostered through private innovation, VC capital, and other private structures, or rather directly created by European Member States (e.g. public social media)?
• What business models should these ESMPs themselves adopt? Should they explore data-driven markets, subscription models, or novel methods? What does traditional media models say about the possibility of creating such ESMP?
• What infrastructural stack is required to support these ESMPs, mapping the supply-chain needs at each step (e.g., dependency needs on cloud infrastructure), and what is truly feasible to be rendered autonomous from third-country suppliers?

WP Deliverables

• A report on the existing European landscape of social media solutions — ranging from centralized, to federated, to P2P — mapping the ecosystem of European information beyond traditional social media platforms and building on EMIF’s partner network;
• An interactive sketch of those existing models — and new potential imaginaries — and how such models would connect to the deeper problem of the entirety of tech stack dependencies (e.g., is a federated solution dependent on American cloud infrastructure?);
• A Workshop entitled ‘Building an Alternative Public Sphere’, to be held in Florence, Italy, joining leading academics, European startups/scaleups and NGOs working in the field of platform governance, online information, media freedom, and disinformation, to debate the findings.

WP #2: Prototyping and Development

Building on the theoretical work and debate on the best possible model for an ESMP, the second WP focuses on the practical aspects of developing a small working prototype. This will turn the project from a simple theoretical exercise into a practical experiment. The idea is to develop the technical artifact, building on the interdisciplinary work, structuring it in line with technical possibilities (e.g. open protocols versus centralized algorithms), incentive structures (e.g. price-point, public financing) and the best practices for healthy information ecosystems (e.g. user-based content curation versus multiple communities). The beauty of this second WP lies in its entirely experimental nature, which will prove or disprove some of the assumptions of WP 1.

In practice, this WP will focus particularly on the following questions:

• Do the theoretical conclusions hold true when experimenting with an actual prototype product?
• What are the main obstacles to the development and hosting of such ESMP? Are they technical, financial, or cultural?
• What is the best level of centralization of control (e.g. instances versus P2P) and where should it be placed (which layer?)?
• What is the impact of such a solution on the quality of information in Europe? Does it provide for strong safeguards against disinformation tactics and FIMI?
• Do infrastructural dependencies play a role in the technological solutions adopted to make the ESMP possible? Are there some unavoidable dependencies? In which part of the stack are they most felt?

WP Deliverables

• A working prototype of an ESMP, created on the basis of the joint conclusions from the interdisciplinary work;
• Testing stage and feedback loops with a pool of European beta users, experimenting with the tools’ capacity in different fields;
• Controlled deployment of the tool for a selected number of institutions to scale the experiment across different audiences.

The Why of this Project: An Alternative is needed

Europe’s public sphere has been structurally dependent on large third-country online platforms for social communication, which has strongly impacted Europe’s own innovation. Companies such as Meta, X, and TikTok have created spaces for communication where European citizens gather, democratic conversations take place, and teenagers and children interact daily. This public sphere, however, has been burdened by increasing challenges of disinformation and misinformation.

The fact that the quality of the European public sphere depends on such architecture has often been framed as part of a US-EU dependency, with large American companies controlling the online supply chain end-to-end and deciding which ideas to prioritize or disseminate. The matter is particularly delicate when the information under discussion relates directly to core European values, such as the protection of fundamental rights, the integrity of electoral processes, or the spread of dangerous and addictive content to children, teenagers, and adults. The quality of such online expression is then framed as a matter of ‘system risks’ to the European Union as a whole, thereby importing geopolitical considerations and positioning the discussion as an existential matter vis-à-vis other global players.

The EU’s response has been mostly reactive, approving a barrage of pieces of digital regulation ranging from online expression (Digital Services Act), AI (AI Act), market power (Digital Markets Act), and data governance (Data Act), all while discussing the future adoption of infrastructural legislation such as the EU Cloud and AI Development Act. Calls for simplification are now on the table, too (Omnibus Package).

Interestingly, much less attention has been paid to the possibility of proactively building European infrastructure that could compete with these other forms of online governance, and in which such European values could be better protected. Notably, few have attempted to develop a coherent picture of what a European social media ecosystem could look like. While it is a fact that such a transition — from dependent to European autonomous infrastructures — faces numerous technical, political, societal, and economic obstacles, it is equally true that the current information ecosystem is no longer sustainable in an increasingly polarized world. This project seeks to tackle the problem directly by fostering such a debate, imagining what an alternative public sphere could look like for the future of online speech.

The How of this Project: Building | Not just Copying

The Alternative Public Sphere will deliver a series of outputs following a logical strategy that builds from mapping the existing ecosystem of alternative European solutions to discussing key obstacles to its development, scalability, and general adoption. The first major output will deliver a visual and interactive representation of the ecosystem, as comprehensive as possible, focusing on a series of filterable criteria such as technological infrastructure, business models, public versus private nature, level of centralization, among others. Once the mapping is concluded, the project will host a big interdisciplinary conference on ‘Where do we go from here?’ aiming at discussing how to build the prototype of a practical alternative(s) for social media in Europe.