The European Union has produced the world's first comprehensive regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The two main regulatory instruments mobilised by the EU are the binding 2024 AI Act and the voluntary General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice, a combination that reflects a structural tension between the regulatory oversight exercised by EU regulators and the growing role of technology platforms as co-stewards of regulation. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as shared visions of desirable futures and risks to be avoided, we ask: What sociotechnical imaginaries are embedded in the EU’s approach to AI? To explore this question, we empirically compare the imaginaries embedded in the 2024 AI Act, the 2025 GPAI Code of Practice and the preceding 2019 High Level Expert Group on AI report ‘Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI’ as a window to trace the imaginaries upon which the EU has built its approach to AI. We examine how the EU articulates the promises and risks of AI, which actors are legitimised to govern safety, what solutions are promoted, and what type of regulatory leadership emerges. We show how responsibilities are distributed between EU institutions and Big Tech, highlight the risks of regulatory capture, technosolutionism, and reliance on private infrastructure, and point towards democratic alternatives.
How should digital political platforms be compared, and what kind of participation do they actually enable? This article proposes a three-dimensional framework for the study of online participation that brings into dialogue political sociology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies (STS). Rather than classifying platforms within broad normative families such as direct, deliberative, or liberal democracy, it analyses them along three axes: political governance, software affordances, and infrastructural dependencies. This framework makes it possible to assess not only how participation is formally organised, but also how it is encoded in interfaces and materially conditioned by servers. Empirically, the article draws on forty qualitative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 with developers, public officials, civic-tech professionals, activists, and NGO actors involved in the design or deployment of participatory platforms across Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the United States. The framework is applied to four emblematic cases: Rousseau, Decidim, Consulta P & uacute;blica, and vTaiwan. The comparison shows that most platforms remain confined to reinforced forms of consultation, despite participatory rhetoric, because citizen power is limited either by top-down governance, constrained deliberative affordances, or strong infrastructural dependencies. Only Decidim approaches a more co-decisional, deliberative, and commons-oriented configuration, although even this project continues to rely on private cloud infrastructures.
This paper revisits the concept of freedom of the media in the context of digital societies. It distinguishes between freedom of the media as an individual human right and media freedom as an institutional guarantee of autonomy and accountability, showing how both together sustain informed citizenship and democratic deliberation. The analysis advances a systemic understanding of freedom of the media that integrates epistemic and normative dimensions, connecting human rights protection with governance design in digital communication environments. Drawing on the notions of epistemic power and epistemic welfare, the paper conceptualises platforms and AI systems as emerging epistemic institutions whose dual role—empowering and dominating—requires new accountability frameworks to protect individuals’ epistemic agency. By situating freedom of the media within the digital public sphere, the paper demonstrates how the concept can evolve to address the challenges of technological mediation, platform power, and democratic resilience.
In June 2020, stories of abuse related to the streaming site Twitch flooded Twitter (now X). Hundreds of individuals turned to social media to share their experiences. We explored these allegations to better understand why individuals turned to social-media based informal systems of justice rather than traditional civil or criminal systems of justice. Our findings were situated within the context of community-based policing of social media. We used a semi mixed methods approach, quantifying 150 allegations with descriptive statistics, qualitatively exploring motivations and desired outcomes, and identifying trends and relationships. This study is unique in its approach to studying both on- and off-line relationships, and in focussing on the role of individual notions of justice in regulating the streaming environment. This study found that, perhaps contrary to initial assumptions, social media, community-based informal systems of justice were quite similar to traditional formal systems of justice. Individuals sought similar outcomes centred around consequentialism, deterrence, and protection of society, while organic elements of due process emerged. Our study ultimately contributes to our understanding of the conflicting power dynamics in the streaming industry, challenges some of the gender stereotypes attached to this industry, and adds a new dimension to the critiques of the use of community-based policing and informal systems of justice, where we see that justice, in some instances, can indeed be achieved
Political fear increasingly operates as an infrastructural feature of digital governance. The article conceptualises fear as an affective and socio-technical condition that becomes durable through platform design, engagement metrics, and regulatory blind spots. Building on media logic and attention-based politics, with Goffman's dramaturgical perspective used as a micro lens, the analysis traces how fear moves from staged performances to recurrent amplification in ranking, recommendation, and political advertising systems. Two illustrative cases suggest convergent patterns under different institutional contexts. Donald Trump's post-2021 mobilisation highlights portable threat routines that travel across platform environments and interact with moderation settings. Viktor Orb & aacute;n's long-term governing strategy illustrates how threat frames become routinised through state-aligned media infrastructures and platform-facing campaign formats. The discussion relates these dynamics to European policy debates around the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act and outlines the limits of content-focused approaches in addressing affective amplification. Policy directions emphasise systemic-risk assessment and independent auditing, procedural transparency, and structured access for qualified researchers, alongside resilience measures that integrate affective literacy, platform literacy, evidence-oriented reasoning, and support for public-interest media.
This study presents a validated psychometric instrument for assessing filter bubble effects and underscores the need for targeted, system-level interventions that extend beyond individual user-focused solutions. By situating filter bubbles within electoral dynamics, this study contributes to a more nuanced and policy-relevant understanding of how social media platforms shape democratic discourse. This study examines the impact of algorithmic personalisation on electoral perceptions through the lens of the filter bubble phenomenon. Drawing on a multidimensional instrument, the Bubblemetrix Index, we assess four core components: algorithmic curation awareness, perceived source diversity, ideological homogeneity and confirmation bias, and repeated interaction and engagement. Data were collected through an online survey of 451 Romanian Facebook users during the pre-electoral period and analysed using latent profile and latent class modelling. The findings identify three distinct user profiles, with the largest group consisting of younger individuals who demonstrate high algorithmic awareness but also exhibit strong confirmation bias and repeated engagement, which suggest that awareness alone is insufficient to counteract ideological encapsulation. Older users, by contrast, exhibited lower susceptibility to ideological homogeneity and engagement-driven reinforcement. The results challenge the assumption that media literacy and perceived diversity constitute adequate safeguards against polarisation and suggest that algorithmic systems may create an illusion of diversity while structurally amplifying partisan exposure.
Millions of parents across Europe use mobile baby-tracking applications. These digital aides generate intimate data sets by accessing sensitive information about (un)born babies, pregnancies, and family caregiving routines. Crucially, the tracking infrastructures embedded in these apps enable what we call extraction-by-design, whereby routine caregiving inputs are captured, standardised, and repurposed for behavioural profiling and monetisation within an opaque digital economy. We ask: (i) How do baby-tracking apps extract and circulate sensitive health data? (ii) How do tracking infrastructures enable behavioural profiling and monetisation? and (iii) What data governance interventions are needed to strengthen the current regulatory environment? We conducted a mixed-method audit of 14 of the most downloaded Android baby-tracking apps. We combine a manifest data audit (qualitative analysis of app manifests using large language models), reviews of privacy policies and data safety agreements, and walkthroughs of app interfaces to assess how data is collected, processed, and shared. All 14 apps shared data with third parties, including sensitive due dates and pregnancy loss data. Many also transmitted identifiers across borders, often without meaningful consent. We conclude by arguing for policy interventions that treat (infant) data privacy as a matter of collective public interest, including clear limitations on inference-based profiling.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the most ambitious effort taken by liberal democratic nations to regulate social media platforms. One of the main ways it does this is by establishing various transparency obligations applicable to all platforms and search engines, as well as a specific transparency and data-sharing regime for the largest platforms and search engines, defined by the number of users. Specifically, Article 40 of the DSA grants vetted researchers access to data “for the sole purpose of conducting research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union.” This article argues that Article 40's requirement for the requested data to be “necessary and proportionate” to conduct a specific type of research may hinder effective research. Indeed, researchers have been denied broad access – or any access to data – on privacy or confidentiality grounds before (Bontcheva, 2024). Consequently, researchers have limited prior knowledge of social media impacts and thus may have limited knowledge about what data, exactly, they need. Drawing on cutting-edge social media research, we explain why vetted researchers may thus need broad access to social media data to meet the objectives of the DSA. More specifically, we argue that researchers need access to system-level data, meaning data that captures how an entire digital system or platform operates, not just the activity of individual users. Consequently, we propose an interpretation of the DSA's data request requirements that would enable researchers to study the online political landscape of EU member states effectively.
This paper introduces the concept of the superplatform to analyse and regulate Google’s online advertising ecosystem. As the operator of the world’s largest ad exchanges, Google often escapes regulatory oversight and scholarly scrutiny. The superplatform is conceptualised as an integrated process comprising a demarketised computational-industrial supply chain and a supermarketised dual-core exchange system. It operates through three main economisation modes – marketisation, barterisation, and demarketisation – and coordinates a network of platforms, including AdX, AdSense, Ad Manager, and Google Ads. The dual-core structure encompasses a direct exchange for Google-owned inventory and an open exchange with limited competition. Google simultaneously acts as market maker, buyer, seller, producer, publisher, and infrastructure provider. Advancing critical platform studies and regulatory frameworks for platform economies, the concept of superplatform serves as a simple theoretical tool to make sense of a complex stacked economisation process that shapes market dynamics and their disruption under corporate control.
Political debates, campaigns, and advertising increasingly take place on online platforms. However, research on election communication has been significantly hampered as formerly accessible data sources have been withdrawn or commercialised. With the implementation of the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) a number of platforms have (re-)established data access modalities for ‘public’ data via APIs or specific portals. How access to public data is implemented, what it contains, and who gets access all depends on decisions by the platforms. This leads to a series of inconsistencies, challenges, and limitations for election research. In this contribution, we discuss the implications of regulated data access under the DSA for election research. We first review central research questions and relevant data types for election research. Then, we provide a historical overview of how data access modalities have changed over the last two decades. Next, we discuss relevant articles of the DSA that aim to improve data access for academic research as well as different data access paths and modalities, including alternatives to APIs such as web scraping and data donations. Finally we summarise key challenges and formulate requirements for data access to enable robust and reproducible election research.
Government by regulation structures how constitutional democracies normally operate. Legislatures and executive agencies enact formal rules that govern conduct, embodying the ideal of government by laws rather than by individuals. Yet regulators also govern through threats of regulation. When public officials seek to alter private behavior, they may warn regulated actors that failure to comply will trigger new or stricter rules. These warnings can achieve regulatory goals without the adoption of formal rules. Because officials often issue such threats in informal, private communications, the practice escapes public scrutiny and challenges the dominant model of democratic rule-making, which assumes open deliberation by accountable institutions. This paper theorizes threats of regulation as a governance device that remains largely invisible to outsiders but offers significant advantages to regulators. Although United States courts attempt to distinguish unlawful coercion from permissible persuasion, they struggle to enforce these boundaries in practice. The paper argues that increasing transparency in routine communications between regulators and corporate actors would reduce the risk of abuse while preserving regulatory effectiveness.
This introduction situates Digital Solidarity Economies (DSE) as an analytical and practical framework for reimagining the digital economy through cooperation, mutual aid, and shared ownership. In response to the concentration of power within platform capitalisms, DSE highlight grassroots and institutional initiatives that democratise digital infrastructures and governance. Drawing on traditions of the social and solidarity economy, free and open-source cultures, and feminist and decolonial technoscience, the special issue explores how communities across the world build technological sovereignty from below. The contributions collectively advance a plural understanding of digital solidarity economies by foregrounding infrastructural arrangements, situated practices, and institutional experimentation as key sites through which digital economies oriented toward the reproduction of life are being built.
While centralised digital infrastructures and corporate platform ecosystems continue to dominate the digital landscape, raising concerns around data governance and dependency, various initiatives within the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) are exploring alternative pathways. These efforts do not offer a wholesale emancipation from mainstream systems, but rather introduce modular, context-specific adaptations grounded in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and shared digital commons. This article presents a case study of the Catalan multi-stakeholder cooperative femProcomuns, which since 2017 has facilitated the adoption of ethical digital tools among SSE entities, particularly through its cloud service SomN & uacute;vol (CommonsCloud). Drawing on our experience as practitioners and researchers, we analyse the adoption of the Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management (ERP-CRM) tool Dolibarr by various cooperatives from the SSE sector, representing diverse organisational models, including service provision, production, and consumer distribution. Our participatory action research methodology combines digital activism, collaborative documentation, and ethnography. By foregrounding shared knowledge practices in collaborative sessions and facilitation processes, we trace strategies that enable commons-based governance and strengthen digital intercooperation. Our findings contribute to debates on alternatives to platform capitalism and highlight how SSE actors can scale digital infrastructures without compromising ethical or democratic values. This case demonstrates the potential of FLOSS and commons-oriented approaches to support the growth of digital solidarity economies while fostering sustainable, self-managed, and replicable models of technological development.
The article examines the case of a Barcelona-based cooperative that is a member of the platform cooperative CoopCycle, specialised in bike delivery. Welcoming the invitation from labour scholars to adopt the concept of grey zone as a methodological and theoretical tool, we start from our empirical observations in the field, and intersect our critical perspectives in geography, organisation studies, and sociology to explore existing grey zones in the platform cooperative movement. Building on this concept, we highlight grey zones in economic and labour relations as well as in the circulation of knowledge happening within the cooperative. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study, this article describes how this counterplatform is based on permanent compromises that generate grey zones between solidarity and competition, between paid and unpaid work, and among reinventing, integrating or hybridising managerial knowledge. It shows how the implementation of platform cooperatives is supported and constrained by the different relationships between the alternative and its economic and institutional context. This paper pleads for both a grounded and longitudinal approach to alternative organisations such as platform cooperative; this insider-focused approach suggests researchers to cross disciplines and exchange views with practitioners and policy makers in order to build shared and situated knowledge.
This article examines the relationship between the digital solidarity economy and free culture in Latin America, based on case studies using semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. The cases are three emblematic initiatives: C & oacute;digo Libre and Alternativa Laboral Trans (Argentina) and EITA (Brazil). Results highlight contemporary advances and challenges, systematising principles and indicators that demonstrate how free culture not only enhances the digital solidarity economy but is essential to genuinely collaborative digital economic initiatives. The study concludes that adopting free culture principles transcends technical improvement, serving as an ethical and practical foundation for alternative economic models capable of integrating social transformation, equity, and sustainability in the region.
The Lunch Bell project, a platform-based meal delivery initiative launched in March 2024 by Kudumbashree, a women-led community network in Kerala, India, exemplifies a state-assisted curation of the digital solidarity economy. Emerging against the gendered paradox-where women dominate unpaid domestic cooking yet remain excluded from commercial food entrepreneurship-the project redefines extractive logics of labour organisation within the digital economy. Through qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviews, analysis of policy documents, responses obtained via India's Right to Information Act, and a walkthrough method examining Kudumbashree's Pocket Mart mobile app, conducted between March and August 2024, our paper explores how state support for women-centred digital platforms fosters principles of feminist economics, gender justice, and sustainability in the digital solidarity economy. We argue that although the Lunch Bell project operates within an "invited space" for participation shaped by top-down design logics of the state, it nonetheless embodied a reflexive, non-gender-agnostic approach in addressing the concerns of gendered labour, demonstrating the potential of state support for a digital solidarity economy.
This research analyses the processes of CoopCycle's adaptation in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico between 2020 and 2023. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that integrates Socio-Technical Analysis and Social Network Analysis, it seeks to answer the question: How are the processes of CoopCycle's socio-technical adaptation developing in Latin America? Solidarity is identified as a central programmatic idea, one that does not operate merely as rhetorical discourse but is materialised at different levels in regulatory and policy frameworks, social relations infrastructures, skills, organisational practices, and even within decision-making networks. It plays a role in determining courses of action aimed at subverting dominant problem-solution framings and directly shapes CoopCycle's adaptation processes. By understanding these processes as appropriation of knowledge and technology through historically situated socio-technical trajectories, the study challenges deterministic views of technological and social change. In this way, it contributes to debates on the viability and sustainability of platform cooperatives as counter-hegemonic alternatives that come from Digital Solidarity Economies, especially in contexts of structural inequality, informality, and exclusion that demand specific technological and organisational adjustments.
This paper presents an in-depth case study of The Drivers Cooperative (TDC), a driver-owned ride-hailing platform based in New York City, to examine the challenges faced by multistakeholder platform cooperatives. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews, six months of participant observation, and extensive desk research, the study traces how TDC’s growth efforts ultimately led to a fracture between its cooperative membership and its platform infrastructure. This dynamic – conceptualised as the Blown Head Gasket Effect – illustrates how diverging stakeholders can fracture during the development of democratic platform alternatives. Factors such as limited access to capital, political divergence among stakeholders, and temporal pressures are identified as key drivers of this effect. The paper concludes by discussing TDC’s legislative achievements and offering practical recommendations for cooperative practitioners and policy interventions. By situating TDC within broader debates on platform cooperativism and the digital solidarity economy, the study underscores the importance of learning from defeats to enhance cooperative business resilience.
This study examines the rise and fall of a government-led collaborative mobility platform in "City P," South Korea. Framed as a "people-centred" digital solidarity economy project, the initiative promised blockchain-enabled transparency and community co-ownership. Drawing on Hansmann's ownership theory, Korea's mutual-aid traditions-dure (labour pooling), gye (rotating credit), and hyangyak (village compacts)-and Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives, we conducted a qualitative case study using municipal documents and 11 stakeholder interviews. Findings reveal a "cascade of failures" across four dimensions: a state-led sociotechnical imaginary prioritised technological complexity over user needs; opaque "black-box" designs displaced community agency; participatory forums devolved into performative consultation; and appeals to traditional solidarity collapsed without visible reciprocity. Despite official reports claiming measurable gains in jobs and traffic reduction, residents experienced friction and mistrust. Tensions escalated into over 1,500 complaints and local boycotts, eroding social capital. We argue that meaningful digital solidarity economies require enforceable governance rights, legible accounting, and culturally resonant ownership structures. The City P case underscores that without these foundations, well-intentioned platforms risk reproducing the hierarchical and extractive dynamics they seek to overcome.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are blockchain-based entities that enable decentralised coordination through self-executing code. Although often associated with financial speculation and crypto-libertarianism, DAOs have also been imagined as democratic, community-owned infrastructures aligned with the solidarity economy. This article explores whether DAOs can be considered solidarity economy organisations in practice by evaluating the type of working conditions they produce. Based on ethnographic research with 38 DAO contributors, rooted in workers' inquiry, we examine the extent to which DAOs produce working conditions consistent with solidarity economy values, such as decent and stable employment. Our findings show that while many DAO contributors aspire for DAOs to be solidarity economy vehicles akin to cooperatives and mutualist organisations, in practice, DAO labour falls short of this vision. We identify key areas-psychosocial security, financial predictability, and regulatory clarity-that must be addressed for DAOs to realise their solidarity economy potential. Several proposals, generated through research activities with participants, are outlined to improve key issues. This article contributes to ongoing debates on the potential of DAOs and provides the first comprehensive empirical study into working conditions in DAOs.
