Democ­ra­cies are fight­ing for their lives. Why?

For the first time since 2004, there are more auto­crat­ic than demo­c­ra­t­ic states in the world. Right-wing pop­ulist par­ties are on the rise around the world, while vot­er turnout is falling, trust in polit­i­cal sys­tems and the press is declin­ing, and fake news are on the rise. As if that was­n’t enough, dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies have cre­at­ed new chal­lenges for democ­ra­cies. We see fil­ter bub­bles, where social media algo­rithms only show users con­tent that con­firms their point of view, often accom­pa­nied by manip­u­la­tion and the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion on social media. In addi­tion, large tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies have dis­pro­por­tion­ate pow­er and use it for tar­get­ed manip­u­la­tion and sur­veil­lance. Final­ly, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence such as Chat­G­PT can do great harm in the wrong hands.

But: If tech­nol­o­gy is part of the prob­lem, it is also part of the solu­tion!