Today’s big social media platforms are directly manipulating and polarising public discourse in countries worldwide, and are undermining individual and societal wellbeing. What if, instead, we had social technologies that enabled open, informed public debate – and helped individuals and societies thrive?

In many countries today, the main space where citizens encounter political candidates, hear campaign messages, debate local priorities, and even learn where and how to vote is not a public forum — it is Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X, or YouTube. These platforms have become default infrastructure for democratic participation. Yet they were not designed to support informed deliberation or civic trust. They were designed to maximise a primitive form of engagement as measured in clicks and likes, often by amplifying outrage, polarisation, and misinformation.

This example points to a deeper issue: many of the social functions we rely on most — civic debate, community organising, public consultations, local information sharing — are not inherently global. They operate within national and subnational jurisdictions. Yet the infrastructure enabling them has been ceded almost entirely to a handful of global platforms, with little interoperability, accountability, or public-interest governance.

In this blog, I argue that a solution to this issue is not only possible, but critically important to achieve. I propose that countries should reclaim the power to set the rules and mechanisms for digital spaces where civic discourse occurs, and apply an infrastructure mindset. They should advance social technologies to strengthen people’s relationship with, and participation in, the jurisdictions they are part of.

We can imagine national digital spheres - where participants would first verify their affiliation with that national jurisdiction to enter. These spheres could allow users to discover and connect to technologies that enable democratic deliberation and debate, local communities formed around hobbies and civic engagement, and other solutions that the private, public, and civil sectors could be inspired and incentivised to build. Crucially, these solutions should be built on open protocols to ensure interoperability with a broader landscape of better regional and global solutions that are simultaneously underway.

To do so, the DPGA Secretariat is working with practitioners with deep technical expertise to bring these different worlds together through a verifiable credential technology that can be used to build trust and information integrity. We will be working with partners, including DPGA members, to test this approach in the months to come.

To understand why we are focusing on the concept of national digital spheres enabled by social technologies, it is helpful to first look into why people use today’s big social media platforms.

Why Do We Keep Using Social Media - Even When We Know It’s Harmful?

A leading reason why we continue using social media - despite the harms that we know it causes - from polarisation and extremism, to mental health impacts - is that it has become deeply woven into our daily lives and habits. Our complex relationships with these platforms feel like a Gordian Knot. They are so interconnected with our habits and social systems, that it is hard to know where to begin untangling them. People keep using social media for several reasons:

• We get immersed and lose track of time - due to the individually tailored and highly engaging nature of these digital solutions, shaped by dark pattern designs.

• We experience fear of missing out (FOMO) - due to hundreds of millions of people, including almost everyone we know, being on these platforms.

• We need them and have to use them - because social media is often the default option for participating in groups and processes that are key parts of our daily lives.

By looking at why these platforms hold such a competitive advantage, we can better see how to kickstart a transition to better alternatives, including where digital public goods can help:

Fun, outrage and addiction. It is very hard, and not in the public interest, to compete with existing social media on their terms of engagement. Their engagement model is a combination of entertainment, outrage, and addictive design, with all three intrinsically woven together. Platforms use our personal data to profile us, hold our attention, and sell it to the highest bidder. They are playing to our weaknesses, not our strengths.

FOMO. It is also difficult to compete directly with Big Tech’s global network effects, which have been created by amassing huge user bases and locking users, and their data, into walled gardens that do not interoperate with other platforms.

However, social technologies do not need to operate as the global monocultures we associate with today’s social media platforms. Instead, they could form parts of rich and diverse ecosystems, where different solutions cater to different network sizes and are designed to strengthen connections to our physical environment and communities. This is in stark contrast to much of what we experience today, where individually crafted online realities increasingly fragment and alienate us from the real societies we live in.

People and societies derive high value from global interaction online, and that should not be lost. But much of our everyday use is far more locally oriented. If we look more closely at our social media habits, we often use these platforms to participate in groups and processes taking place within the jurisdiction we live in. While social media may feel borderless, one of our main purposes when using it in practice is to reinforce the social, political, and community networks closest to us.

Little to no choice: We don’t just use social media because it might be fun, but it’s often simply because we are required to. For example, one may be required to use it to be part of a school group, to participate in a local choir, to get the most recent updates from a government institution, or for voicing an opinion about a debate during national elections.

Dispelling the Myth of Irreplaceability

But are there truly no alternatives? If we look at many of the reasons why we use social media today - participating in groups, sharing information, joining public consultations or engaging in civic debate - they rely on relatively standard technology functions like identity, public and private group chats, messaging services, polling, deliberation and discussion fora, and content sharing solutions. Trusted open-source alternatives for these functionalities exist and should be considered by stakeholders looking to build new social technologies. Digital public goods such as Decidim and PeerTube are just two examples of many relevant DPGs that cover these functionalities, and there is also a much wider landscape of open-source alternatives that could be nominated to become recognised as DPGs in the near future.

Using Open-source Infrastructure to Advance Public Interest Innovation

Approaching the social media paradox through the lens of “which parts of today’s social media usage belong within a national sphere” can give countries an opportunity to quickly reclaim the public power of imagination.

We can do this by asking questions such as “How can digital solutions strengthen open public debate and societal participation?” and by reframing these digital solutions as “social technologies” that can enable new and improved public interaction. Naming these “social technologies” rather than social media platforms is important because language shapes how these solutions are understood, governed and regulated. The “social media” term has become too loaded with preconceived notions and assumptions, and often obscures the fact that these platforms increasingly function as important societal infrastructure, not just as fun engagement tools.

This way of thinking is not new. We already apply it to physical infrastructure. When governments plan transport infrastructure, like highways, public interest goals and mandates are given, including proactive consideration of negative externalities. Today’s social media were not shaped by the same aspirations and constraints, and over time have evolved in ways that directly undermine many public interest-considerations.

In order to move quickly and with trust, governments should take advantage of open source as a transparent and scalable approach to designing, building, and evolving societal digital infrastructure that the private, public, and civil sectors can shape and build a new technology landscape on top of. Open source-based collaboration is already well established across business, government, and civil society. It can create a more equal playing field, while still allowing commercial solutions to thrive.

For example, open source can lower barriers to entry by operationalising regulatory requirements and embedding public interest direction-setting into shared open-source technology components. These components, which could be digital public goods, funded and governed as digital commons, should be actively maintained and evolved by appropriate institutions as social technology infrastructure that all stakeholders within the sphere can rely on and build upon.

This will save time and cost for those building new solutions, and will also be good for users, since regulatory compliance in key areas, such as the right to privacy and right to portability, could be standardised with the users’ interests in mind. This is very different from today’s situation where the largest companies have led the way in operationalising the letter of the law in ways that favor their business models, not the consumer, let alone the public at large.

Importantly, civil society organisations have been working to address the harms of today’s platforms for years, and that sustained effort has helped push these issues into major policy and public-interest debates. The goal now is not simply to “fix” social media, but to build and maintain new forms of social technology that are designed differently from the start.

Where regional regulatory approaches exist, for instance within the EU, there are significant opportunities for collaboration and cost-sharing in building this kind of public interest infrastructure. Here digital public goods could be built as shared foundations for social technologies in Europe, while still enabling countries to make additions or tweaks to meet specific national requirements and evolve their distinct national public spheres. This approach could build on new collaborative governance and financing structures, such as the European Digital Infrastructure Consortia (EDICs), in particular the Digital Commons EDIC and the IMPACTS-EDIC. Other countries and regions with shared regulatory approaches and values could similarly leverage the same open-source components.

Balancing the Local and Global through Shared Protocols

Reclaiming national power to define and incentivise the creation of social technologies should not come at the cost of efforts to also improve the global technology landscape. One way to advance both aims is by enabling interoperability with existing and emerging initiatives to build and scale regional and global solutions that serve the public interest.

A particularly promising approach here is the social technology framework that has recently been defined in the decentralised social tech protocol called AT Protocol, originally built by the team behind Bluesky. The Eurosky initiative is building new open-source infrastructure components initially aimed at European countries. In February 2026 Eurosky is launching a European-based common web identity, eurosky.social, which opens up access to dozens of applications built using the AT Protocol. Eurosky will progressively add more social technology infrastructure in the coming year, to ensure that data are hosted in Europe and in support of European privacy and expression rights and regulations.

From the DPGA Secretariat’s perspective, we see great potential in allowing national sphere models to be tested and refined, while still ensuring interoperability with the broader set of technologies built using the AT Protocol. We have begun working with experts to integrate a technology known as Verifiable Credentials as a shared infrastructure layer, using the same technology that has been adopted by the European Union through their eID framework. This can unleash innovation potential by enabling new solutions to verify important attributes and improve trust, including attributes of high relevance for social technologies that operate within national spheres. For example, it could help verify that an account belongs to a citizen of a certain country or municipality, is authorised to speak on behalf of a public authority or political group, or meets certain eligibility criteria such as age.

No Need - or Time - to Wait

The approach outlined here proposes country-led joint action that should involve diverse groups of stakeholders, including start-ups, media, academia, civil society organisations, and relevant regional multilateral institutions as well as the general public. I hope that DPGA member countries, in particular, will help chart a course that can help other countries shorten their learning and adoption journeys.

And this should happen now. The necessary technical foundations already exist. Policy debates in the EU and elsewhere are helping provide direction needed to turn critique into tangible action. And the public discourse and societal fabric in countries worldwide is at risk.

From the DPGA Secretariat’s side, we aim to work with a few DPGA members over the coming months to test this verifiable credential technology. We will also convene virtual webinars to showcase examples of how DPGs can serve as social technologies and we will actively coordinate with like minded initiatives as this landscape evolves.

The window of opportunity is here now. We should not let it close.