Online policy panel - Digital infrastructures and platforms: Sovereignty in an age of information disorder
07.02.’25
07.02.’25
After passing a wave of digital policies in the past five years, such as the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act or the AI Act, European Union institutions - in their new constellations following the European elections and with a new Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty - are setting up for the policy implementation phase. However, the global challenges to platform and digital infrastructure governance have been intensifying, exemplified by widely documented information manipulation incidents both within the EU and globally. In Romania, the results of the recent presidential election have been annulled due to national security concerns relating to successful Russian influence campaigns on social media. In the meantime, the US is weighing options on a possible ban of the highly popular Chinese-owned platform, TikTok.
How can we make sense of the fact that while digital platforms represent an important source of entertainment, information and means of communication for millions of people around the world, they have also come to be regarded as national security concerns and major threats to democracy, challenging our notions of state and other forms of sovereignty? Can the recently passed EU policies help protect the European and global information space? Our panel of experts will discuss these increasingly pressing tensions around platform power and control over critical digital infrastructures.