Democratic by Design? On the Difficulties of Creating Open and Free Spaces in the Digital Sphere

The web 2.0 started off with a euphoria about what this innovation could mean for democracy and society. However, the resignation that the internet is not a participatory network for everyone came soon. On the one hand, marginalised groups had to experience how digital infrastructures mirror or even intensify discriminative patterns from the offline world. On the other hand, new problems specific to the online world, such as the spread of hate speech and disinformation amplified through recommender systems and filter bubbles, appeared to further threaten the aim of an open public discourse. The answer to the question why the
web 2.0 is failing to serve the common good has been found to lay in the architecture of our digital landscape. Thereby is especially alarming what Srnicek (2017) describes under the term of platform capitalism; platforms are dominated by the idea to generate profit rather than to foster democratic processes in society.
But what digital landscape should we aim for instead and which platform architecture would favour deliberative values the best? There are already alternatives to the commercial platforms; the community led platform Wikipedia for example, which aims to unite and provide free knowledge by letting anyone edit their content. ... mehrOther examples are non-profit e-participation platforms that try to involve citizens in political decision-making. However, even those platforms which aim for democratic values by design run into problems of exclusion
and partly fail to meet their aim of participatory citizen involvement. Wikipedia has been heavily criticised by Xenofeminists for structurally excluding certain groups from the knowledge production and thereby promoting highly gender-biased perspectives of knowledge. E-participation struggles to provide a user-friendly design, attracting heterogeneous groups of people and thereby questioning representativeness.
Key to understanding why and how even these platforms fail to deliver the promised outcome of open participatory spaces, is research on platform design. Platform architecture is by no means neutral and only in rare occasions driven by the interest of its users. From this perspective, it is crucial to understand where the problems of the discussed non-commercial platforms lay in order to contribute to the development of platforms that live up to their democratic demands. By critically engaging with current platform mechanisms of non-profit platforms, this contribution will deal with the questions of inclusive platform design from an Information