Elections will be held in October 2025. This means that election manifestos are currently being written. That is why, together with Public Spaces and Waag Futurelab, we are sending the political parties a letter with four text suggestions for their policies on digitization in their election manifestos. In 2025, we cannot ignore the role of technology in our society, and with a few steps we can protect our rights and secure our future.
Digitalization is having an ever-increasing impact on our society. Digital technology offers many opportunities, but we are also seeing its disruptive effects on society more and more often. Polarization and disinformation on social media platforms threaten our democracy. Mental health is under pressure from addictive elements and suffocating algorithms in apps and platforms. Our public debate takes place on private platforms that use addictive and misleading algorithms. An important cause of this is the lack of a digital public domain. Our excessive dependence on centralized American and Asian big tech companies means that we are losing control and authority over our data and digital infrastructure.
It is essential that we reduce this dependency. The government has launched a number of initiatives to become less dependent itself. But what about society? Support is needed for public alternatives for families, foundations, associations, and SMEs, public and social organizations, healthcare, and education to organize themselves digitally. Where are the public bandwidth, the public computer, and the public tools and environments? If we want to regain our social resilience, the foundation of our constitutional state, we will have to invest in the digital public domain and in social institutions and programs that support the digital society.
That is why we are sending the program committees a letter with the following suggestions for the digital policy section of their election programs:
1. Alternative public social media
Social media has the potential to strengthen society and our democracy. It enables people to connect, inform, and organize. Citizens are now dependent on private platforms that undermine the rule of law. We are therefore investing in alternative, public, and independent social media. We support social initiatives that are committed to this, such as #MakeSocialsSocialAgain and TheNextSocials: a growing movement of organizations that are developing, implementing, and managing a new generation of social media based on public values.
2. Social moderation
Social media moderation is currently carried out by foreign private parties. This is undesirable because of misleading and polarizing algorithms. Public debate is a task for society. Within the development of alternative public social media platforms, we therefore enable public and cultural organizations and public media to take on this responsibility by making public funding available for this purpose.
3. Public management of digital infrastructure
Societal resilience is the foundation for strategic resilience. A digital public domain is a critical infrastructure for this and contributes to our defense objectives. Essential societal functions such as communication, information provision, cybersecurity, and payment transactions are now dominated by non-European big tech companies. This is undesirable and poses a threat to our security. Such essential infrastructure must be under public management. That is why we are structurally investing at least 2.5% of the 1.5% of the NATO standard for support matters and critical elements in essential public digital infrastructure.
4. A Sovereign Tech Fund
We are setting up a new investment fund for the digital domain and public AI, following the example of the successful German Sovereign Tech Fund and the Sovereign Tech Agency, which invests in and supports initiatives, companies, and organizations working on components of public digital infrastructure such as cloud services, social media platforms, and public AI. The Sovereign Tech Fund will invest in technology and business models that safeguard public values, such as open source, digital commons, interoperability, privacy by design-based technology, and corporate structures in which the mission is monitored by stakeholders rather than shareholders.