Dear {name},

Happy New Year! Although 2025 is already a few days old, as long as it’s January it’s not too late for such wishes. The celebration of the new year coincides with our first-year anniversary as humanet3 research group, and we’re thrilled to start the second year with the first edition of our newsletter. From now on, one of the group members (on a rotating basis) will provide you every two months with some insights into our current work, about the things we’ve written, we’ve discussed, or we’ve enjoyed reading.

The newsletter is not the only ‘first’ we are excited about at the beginning of this year. In mid-February, our first humanet3 workshop will take place at the MPI for Human Development. We’ve invited a stellar group of scholars and practitioners to Berlin to re-imagine ‘Digital Public Spaces for Democracy’ with us. These experts, like our group, are representing a wide range of disciplines and approaches, ranging from Philosophy and Psychology to Law and Political Science. Together with them, we will discuss, among other topics, how the personalized experience of the digital public space is reshaping public debate, what democratic governance models for alternative public spaces might look like, and how current regulatory tools like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) can support these alternatives. We will report on the results of our workshop in the next newsletter!

As humanet3 group, we are conducting research on human-centred digital transformation, focused on the digital public space. Our group’s starting point is the diagnosis that we are currently experiencing a pivotal moment for the Internet’s future. From a legal perspective, major laws regulating the digital realm have entered into force last year in Europe (for example, the DSA and DMA), or will at the beginning of this year (the AI Act). While they have their flaws – and it’s part of our work to critically analyze them in our publications – the explicit aim of these laws is to promote and protect democracy, equality, and freedom of expression.

At the same time, however, we can observe fundamental shifts in the online environment going into the opposite direction. X/Twitter is barely usable anymore after Elon Musk took over, and Mark Zuckerberg announced just this week that he’s rolling back content moderation policies that protect women and the LGBTQ community. The influence of a few rich men, now openly cooperating with right-wing populist movements, painfully demonstrates the weaknesses of today’s architecture of the most frequented digital public spaces, the social media platforms operated by Big Tech.

It is my personal conviction that the current legal framework is only capable of meeting these challenges to a limited extent. The DSA in particular is a tool to restrain private power, but it’s capacities to fight ‘awful but lawful’ and factually wrong content are finite – and there are good reasons for that in a liberal democracy. What the current legal framework does not offer is a fundamentally different vision of how the digital public space should be structured.

While the best time to support such alternative spaces (financially, politically, and regulatory) that are democratically organized and committed to the common good was already a few years ago, the second-best time is now. As humanet3 group, we will do our best to do our part and keep on analyzing, deconstructing, and contributing to initiatives aiming at a human-centered transformation of the digital public space.

Best wishes for 2025,
Erik

PS: I've shared my thoughts about the limits of the law to create better online debates in more detail in this opinion piece on the website of the Max Planck Society (in German).

We’ve been quite busy as group and have attended a vast range of conferences, given talks, and published several articles and blog posts. A (more or less) complete overview can be found on our website, this is only (a very subjective) selection of activities:

• February 2024, Johannsen/Matarazzi, Discussion about the “Position Statement of the MPI for Innovation and Competition on the Implementation of the DMA”, Weizenbaum Institut, PLAMADISO Talk Series, More information
• April 2024: Tiedeke, Taking a road less travelled: A critical redescription of interactions as languages meeting in the contact zone, European Society of International Law (ESIL) Research Forum ‘Revisiting Interactions between Legal Orders’, Read more
• April 2024, Yun, Unraveling Bias: Why do we care? (Max Planck Law Tech Society Graduate Student Symposium, online), Read more
• May 2024, Yun/Jeon/Koh, Presentation of the working paper: "K-Datasets: The More the Merrier?" (ICLR 2024, Global AI Cultures Workshop, Vienna, Austria), Read more
• July 2024, Yun/Wagner/Heilinger, It’s not about bias but Discrimination (Third European Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness (EWAF ’24), Mainz), Read more
• July 2024, Johannsen/Banda, Presentation of the working paper: “Commons for the Commons: Climate Action in the Amazon through Data Collaboratives” (Data for Policy, Imperial College London), Read more
• July 2024, von Bogdandy/Cartabia/Cassesse/Tuchtfeld (chaired by Crego), Panel: The resilience of Republicanism, global, European, national, digital (ICON-S “The Future of Public Law: Resilience, Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence”, Madrid), Read more
• July 2024, Tiedeke, No Collective Here? – Collective Constitutional Counterstrategies in the Algorithmic Society (ICON-S “The Future of Public Law: Resilience, Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence”, Madrid), Read more
• September 2024, Tuchtfeld, Content Moderation Beyond Platforms: The Power and Human Rights Obligations of Infrastructure Service Providers (Annual conference of the European Society for International Law (ESIL), Vilnius), Read more

As humanet3 group, we’re meeting on a roughly bi-monthly basis for a Journal Club, discussing seminal papers from each other’s disciplines while having some pizza and drinks. Sometimes we invite guests to our discussions (in case you are based in Berlin and are interested to join, please drop us a line). The following list is an overview of some of the texts we discussed in 2024:

• Emily M Bender and others, ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM 2021)
• Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, ‘On Phantom Publics, Clusters, and Collectives: Be(Com)Ing Subject in Algorithmic Times’ [2023] AI & Society
• Katharina Pistor, ‘Rule by Data: The End of Markets?’ (2020) 83 Law and Contemporary Problems 101
• Sandra Wachter, ‘The Theory of Artificial Immutability: Protecting Algorithmic Groups under Anti-Discrimination Law’ (2022) 97 Tulane Law Review 149
• Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Bias in Computer Systems’ (1996) 14 ACM Transactions on Information Systems 330

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