Roundtable discussion: Perspectives on the Futures of Platforms and Democracy

This is an edited transcript of the audio recording of the roundtable on Future, Democracy, and Platforms, which was organized at the EUMEPLAT project meeting at Charles University in Prague on 15 January 2024, in collaboration with the MeDeMAP (Mapping Media for Future Democracies) project. The current digital public spaces have been transformed by platformization, and besides the positive consequences such as democratization of communication or access to information, these processes driven by algorithms have brought political, cultural, and economic asymmetries. At the roundtable, we discussed challenges and threats to fostering more democratic platform environments in the future with experts from fields such as digital and economic anthropology or new media philosophy. Among the discussed platform related topics were public and cooperative ownership, the need to strengthen their democracy and imagination or pleasure as the key principles.