Digital Governance of Internet for Accessible Protected Public Spheres

The DIGI-APPS project aims to investigate the challenges of regulating virtual public spaces and to devise legal and policy strategies for fostering accessible and protected public spheres online.  

The traditional concept of the public sphere encompasses analog spaces, or institutions located in the physical world (e.g., town-halls, public parks, newspapers), where members of the public come together to engage in discussion and interaction leading to the formation of free public opinion in a manner that promotes participatory democracy. To achieve this aim, it is imperative that such public spaces remain open and inclusive with low barriers to entry (i.e., accessible) while safeguarding the public's freedom and autonomy to engage in rational, critical public discourse (i.e., protection).  

The proliferation of social media and the advent of virtual and augmented reality (including the Metaverse) has shifted our public sphere from the physical to the virtual. These virtual spaces constitute not one homogenous public sphere, but many diverse and oftentimes overlapping public spheres. Traditional rules and concepts for governing the analog public sphere are often unsuitable and/or inadequate for ensuring that these public spheres remain accessible and protected.  

The DIGI-APPS project will explore the nature of public discourse taking place within diverse virtual worlds (e.g., social media, virtual worlds, online games) from a multidisciplinary angle. It will investigate the fitness of existing legal, regulatory and policy frameworks for regulating virtual public spheres and devise legal and policy strategies for ensuring their accessibility and protection. In doing so, it will focus on several key questions, for example, how do we regulate virtual spaces that can be created and entered anonymously? Who should be responsible for ensuring the protection of human rights, due process and natural justice in virtual spaces? Is it possible to design future-proofed legal rules and policies that will remain relevant in the face of technological transformation and the evolving nature of discourse taking place in digital public spheres? 

The DIGI-APPS project wants to figure out how to make sure online spaces are fair and safe for everyone. Just like we have rules for places like town halls and parks where people can talk and share ideas in real life, we need rules for the internet too.

Nowadays, with social media and things like virtual reality, our conversations are happening online more than ever. But the internet isn't just one big space—it's made up of lots of different places where people talk. The old rules we had for real-life places don't always work online.

So, the DIGI-APPS project will study how people talk and interact in different online places, like social media, virtual workplaces, public digital twins and more. It'll look at whether the rules we have now are good enough for the internet or if we need new ones. It'll also try to figure out how we can make sure everyone can join in and feel safe online, even as technology keeps changing.