Well, the Draghi report offers some pointers for where we would need to go :)

Beyond that, the harsh fact is that Europe is simply unwilling to go through the necessary painful reforms to become competitive. So we can complain about our dynamic „big brother“ USA all we want (re. platforms, climate, Ukraine etc.), but we simply do not have the strength to offer an alternative.

I think the word „run“ is key here. Economically, I doubt that would be a wise use of public resources. I would rather agree with: it is up to government to set the conditions for economic agents to develop and offer these infrastructures. Which is what the EU does (DSA, DMA).

So while „we should…“ or „we need…“ sounds nice, a thorough analysis must take economic and political economy facts and frameworks into account. Which would lead us back to the status quo: imperfect attempts to regulate the platforms we have within the given geopolitical realities. /end

And even if European governments could mobilize the required resources, from a political economy perspective, what reason do we have to expect that government is capable and willing to create & run platforms that are more conducive to a liberal and open democracy? 4/

First, the enormous cost of offering & running state-of-the-art digital platforms. Europe cannot even mobilize sufficient resources to maintain its defence in the face of a hot war. What should make us believe that it could mobilize billions of Euros to run competitive „public“ digital platforms? 3/

…what reason do we have to expect that they would differ in any meaningful way from the current platforms?
So that would imply that we can or should not depend on the market to provide these platforms, but government? Which would lead to more problems: 2/

There are also important economic arguments here: Social media look and work the way they do due to market dynamics, supply and demand. If Europe had sufficiently open and dynamic (capital) markets to create competitive digital platforms (which it doesn’t)… 1/

This was a wonderful cooperation with Patric Raemy and @manuelpuppis.ch, and or Leipzig team Daniel Bendahan Bitton, Hannah Oetting and Alexander Godulla. More on our #DeepfakeProject below 👇🏼2/2

bsky.app/profile/cpho...

3. In "It's Fine If Others Do It Too" @cphoffmann.bsky.social and ‪‪@shelleyboulianne.bsky.social‬ nvestigate the relationship between privacy concerns, social influence, and online political expression on Facebook across five Western democracies. doi.org/10.1177/2056...

We hope that this study will inspire future research on politics @Twitch. We believe that Twitch already is an important platform for politics and will become even more so in the future. Thanks to my co-authors @shelleyboulianne.bsky.social & Thomas Feiler, and the editorial team @JITP 🙏🏼 /end

We apply a personality psychology lens and find that those who post politics are low(er) on openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. We argue that politics on Twitch still goes against established platform norms and attracts rule-breaker personalities. 5/

We find that about half of the surveyed Twitch users post political content at least occasionally. However, quite a few Twitch users dislike politics on the platform, many streamers avoid political content. So who posts political content? 4/

Almost 2/3 of our sample see political content on the platform at least occasionally. Even in the process of conducting this study, we realized that many still underestimate the importance of Twitch for political communication. 3/