Key skills in and for digital democracy

Democracy and digitalization: a tense relationship

Digitalization influences democracy in many different ways. On the one hand, social networks promote anti-democratic tendencies such as hate comments, shit storms, fake news and conspiracy theories that polarize the political debate. Filter algorithms and AI applications reinforce these dynamics. On the other hand, digital participation approaches offer the opportunity to compensate for the weaknesses of representative democracy. Projects such as the Conference on the Future of Europe show how digital democracy can activate tens of thousands of citizens and involve them in the legislative process.

With this project, we are creating a program at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) that enables students to develop key skills in the field of digital democracy. At the same time, a platform is growing here on which projects and expertise at KIT are bundled and made visible.

We are putting digital democracy in the spotlight!