Focusing on democratic platform and AI governance, this talk explores how information
technologies and social order mutually constitute each other and which political processes
shape such interactions. I start out by presenting my PhD research on the public controversy
surrounding the Network Enforcement Act, a pioneering law that regulates content
moderation in Germany. Methodologically, this analysis took a discourse-analytical approach
and included a framing analysis of media reports from sources across the political spectrum.
Based on this analysis, I outline how the meaning of central democratic values and principles
such as freedom of speech and the rule of law was publicly renegotiated during the
regulatory process and against the affordances of social media platforms. My findings show
that platform governance opens a space to renegotiate what democracy means and which
role public and private actors as well as individual users/citizens play in it. Critically reflecting
on my findings, I then argue that a compliance regulation like the Network Enforcement Act
(or even the Digital Service Act) is insufficient to fully take on the politically constitutive force
of information technologies. Consequently, I propose an agonistic approach to platform
governance that entails building democratic institutions for governing information
technologies beyond regulation and that includes the political constitution of a democratic
“we” within technological contexts. I end the talk by presenting my planned research for
TRAILS. In a tripartite manner, my proposed project seeks to productively take up the
previously outlined interactions between information technologies and social order.
Zooming in on the AI community, it explores how generative AI technologies such as Large
Language Models could be developed and governed in a participatory, just, and democratic
fashion.