Reversing the privatisation of the public sphere: Democratic alternatives to the EU’s regulation of disinformation

The emergence of social media companies, and the spread of disinformation as a result of their “surveillance capitalist” business model, has opened wide political and regulatory debates across the globe. The EU has often positioned itself as a normative leader and standard-setter, and has increasingly attempted to assert its sovereignty in relation to social media platforms. In the first part of this article, we argue that the EU has achieved neither sovereignty nor normative leadership: Existing regulations on disinformation in fact have missed the mark since they fail to challenge social media companies’ business models and address the underlying causes of disinformation. This has been the result of the EU increasingly “outsourcing” regulation of disinformation to corporate platforms. If disinformation is not simply a “bug” in the system, but a feature of profit-driven platforms, public–private cooperation emerges as part of the problem rather than a solution. In the second part, we outline a set of priorities to imagine alternatives to current social media monopolies and discuss what could be the EU’s role in fostering them. We argue that alternatives ought to be built decolonially and across the stack, and that the democratisation of technology cannot operate in isolation from a wider socialist political transformation of the EU and beyond.