Lab co-director Ben Crum examines what forms of democratic regulation allow us to ensure that digital technologies serve our public values.
As an ever-wider range of social interactions is mediated by digital technologies, it is a matter of public concern how these technologies are organized, what they are allowed to do, and how they affect the very ways in which we interact in society. Hence, we need to ask what forms of democratic decision-making and regulation allow us to ensure that digital technologies serve our public values? On the one hand, Ben's research is aimed at identifying the public values at stake - like social inclusivity, a high-quality public sphere and privacy – and the ways they are affected by digital technologies. On the other hand, he theorizes how alternative models of governance (market-based, decentralised network governance, state ownership) may be able to safeguard these values. He also uses these models to map and evaluate the actual systems of digital governance in the EU, the US and China.
Against this background, Ben co-organized a workshop for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in the Spring of 2023 on ‘Democracy in Times of Digitalization’. There he presented an outline of a project on three models of social media regulation. As a next step, Ben will be studying the regulatory paradigm that informs the Artificial Intelligence Act proposed by the European Commission and compare it with the regulatory approaches adopted by the United States and China.