Social Media Architecture and Democracy: From Twitter to the Fediverse

  • Workshop
  • Music Room
  • Thursday 22.05 — 16:00 - 17:15

Organising Institution

TU Delft

Netherlands

This interactive workshop explores how social media platform architectures shape democratic discourse and privacy, using Twitter's recent transformation as a springboard to examine alternative models like the Fediverse. We will present key insights on interoperability, content moderation, and democratic implications of different technical architectures. The workshop combines brief expert presentations (5 min each) with a world café hands-on collaborative sessions at themed tables. Participants will rotate through practical exercises exploring technical design implementation, community moderation strategies, and governance frameworks. (45 min). In the plenary discussion (25 min) we will discuss how architectural choices influence privacy, speech rights, and democratic participation. Workshop objectives: • Analyze technical and governance trade-offs between social media architectures • Develop practical insights into implementing community moderation in distributed networks • Explore accountability structures and regulatory frameworks for democratic platforms

Host

Christina Dinar

Catholic University of Applied Science Berlin - Germany

Christina Dinar is interested in digital public spheres shaped by communities that develop their own rules for dealing with hate speech and misinformation. For her, this creates a digital space that is more diverse, democratic, and oriented towards the common good. Coming from an educational background, she co-developed "Digital Streetwork," which transforms existing outreach support approaches into a digital environment. From 2015 to 2019, she developed and led digital projects for anti-discrimination work online with the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and frequently spoke and wrote as an expert on solutions to hate speech. Christina Dinar is a research associate at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Berlin, where she is pursuing her doctorate on the topic: "Our Street is the Internet" – Outreach Social Work in Social Media. She examines the functionalities of Digital Streetwork and its challenges to internet platform governance.

Host

Daniel Guagnin

nexus Institut Berlin - Germany

Dr. Daniel Guagnin studied Sociology, Computer Science, and Financial Economics in Freiburg and has been researching the interactions between technology and society in the fields of data protection, IT security, and digitalization since 2010. In his doctoral thesis (2014-2019), he investigated the interplay between community governance and the nature of collaborative products. Daniel has been a member of FIfF (Forum of Computer Scientists for Peace and Social Responsibility) since 2018. Since 2022, he has been heading the “Networks and Society” division at the nexus Institute in Berlin. There, he leads research projects on the “ethical” development of AI, data protection, and participation projects such as the Dialogue for Cybersecurity of the German Federal Office for Information Security. (Picture by Rahel Bott)