Civic Engagement in the AI Age: The Role of Digital Activism in Fostering Democratic Technologies
Abstrakt
This paper examines the crucial role of activism and civil society in strengthening democratic values, particularly in the context of the contemporary challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI). People’s involvement through different forms of associative participation fosters accountability and social capital, essential for democratic resilience. However, the rise of AI poses risks, including manipulation through disinformation, deepfakes, and privacy violations, which threaten democratic processes and fundamental rights. In response to such threats, digital activism emerges as an essential tool, not only for mobilising people but also for steering technological development towards more inclusive and responsible forms. The article argues that digital activism should not be limited to awareness-raising or AI literacy initiatives, but rather should be recognised as a proactive force in the definition of an ethical AI consistent with democratic values. In this framework, participatory design represents a fundamental methodological tool; indeed, it aims at involving different stakeholders in AI design processes to create more responsible technologies. Therefore, through the active involvement of digital activism associations in AI decision-making processes, people can contribute to the democratic control of technologies and the safeguarding of fundamental freedoms. Just as civic engagement has historically strengthened democratic institutions, digital activism therefore has the potential to guide AI development towards fairer and more transparent and accountable technological futures.Bibliografia
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.
Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768.
Binder, M. (2020). Enhancing democracy: Can civic engagement foster political participation? Social Science Quarterly, 102(1), 47–68.
Biorcio, R., & Vitale, T. (2016). Italia Civile: Associazionismo, partecipazione e politica. Donzelli Editore.
Bødker, K., Kensing, F., & Simonsen, J. (2004). Participatory IT design. The MIT Press.
Borchers, M., Gierlich-Joas, M., Tavanapour, N., & Bittner, E. (2024, May). Let citizens speak up: Designing intelligent online participation for urban planning. In Mandviwalla, M., Söllner, M., &
Tuunanen, T., (Eds.), International conference on design science research in information systems and technology (pp. 18–32). Springer Nature Switzerland.
Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data. Information Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679.
Brynjolfsson, E., Pentland, A., Persily, N., Condoleezza, R., & Aristidou, A. (2025). Introduction: Artificial intelligence and democracy in America, The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy
in America, https://www.digitalistpapers.com/essays/introduction.
Castillo Esparcia, A., Smolak-Lozano, E., & Llorent Vázquez, V. (2023). Artificial intelligence and citizen communication: Risk awareness, digital literacy, and civic participation. Communication & Society, 36(1), 1–17.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2024). Why AI undermines democracy and what to do about it. John Wiley & Sons.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2025a). LLMs, truth, and democracy: An overview of risks. Science and Engineering Ethics, 31(1), 1–13.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2025b). AI and epistemic agency: How AI influences belief revision and its normative implications. Social Epistemology, 40(1), 1–13.
Coeugnet, P., Labatut, J., Duval, J., & Vourc’h, G. (2023). Including citizens through co-design in a participatory research project to explore innovative agro-food systems: The case of future dairy
livestock systems. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7, 1098295.
Cornils, M. (2020). Designing platform governance: A normative perspective on needs, strategies, and tools to regulate intermediaries. AlgorithmWatch, 26, 1–88.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press eBooks.
Croce, M., & Piazza, T. (2022). Che cosa sono le fake news. Carocci Editore.
Delgado, F., Yang, S., Madaio, M., & Yang, Q. (2023). The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice. In Association for Computing Machinery
(Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, 37, 1–23. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3617694.3623261.
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press eBooks.
Dencik, L., Hintz, A., & Cable, J. (2016). Towards data justice? The ambiguity of antisurveillance resistance in political activism. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 1–12.
Edwards, B., Foley, M., & Diani, M. (2001). Civil society and political context. In B. Edwards, M. Foley, & M. Diani (Eds.), Beyond Tocqueville: Civil society and the social capital debate in comparative
perspective (pp. 17–31). University Press of New England.
Etter, M., & Albu, O. B. (2021). Activists in the dark: Social media algorithms and collective action in two social movement organizations. Organization, 28(1), 68–91.
Fallis, D. (2021). The epistemic threat of deepfakes. Philosophy & Technology, 34(4), 623–643.
Feltrero, R., & Osuna-Acedo, S. (2023). Social innovation on educational AI developments: A case study on social participation on designing AI generative models for diversity. In Kubincová,
Z., Hao, T., Capuano, N., Temperini, M., Ge, S., Mu, Y., Fantozzi, P., & Yang, J. (Eds.), International symposium on emerging technologies for education (pp. 16–26). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
Helmond, A. (2015). The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready. Social Media + Society, 1(2), 1–11.
Hsu, Y. C., Verma, H., Mauri, A., Nourbakhsh, I., & Bozzon, A. (2022). Empowering local communities using artificial intelligence. Patterns, 3(3), 1–7.
Huang, L., Yu, W., Ma, W., Zhong, W., Feng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, Q., Peng, W., Feng, X., Qin, B., & Liu, T. (2025). A survey on hallucination in large language models: Principles, taxonomy, challenges,
and open questions. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 43(2), 1–55.
Lane, D. S., Kim, D. H., Lee, S. S., Weeks, B. E., & Kwak, N. (2017). From online disagreement to offline action: How diverse motivations for using social media can increase political information sharing and catalyze offline political participation. Social Media + Society, 3(3), 1–14.
Loi, M. (2020). People analytics must benefit the people: An ethical analysis of data-driven algorithmic systems in human resources management. AlgorithmWatch, 1–56.
Maloney, W. A., & Van Deth, J. W. (2010). Civil society and activism in Europe, Routledge.
McCaughey, M., & Ayers, M. D. (2003). Cyberactivism. Routledge eBooks.
Mentxaka, O., Díaz-Rodríguez, N., Coeckelbergh, M., de Prado, M. L., Gómez, E., Llorca, D. F., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2025). Aligning trustworthy AI with democracy: A dual taxonomy of opportunities and risks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13565.
Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity. Information Communication & Society, 18(8), 887–900.
Mohamed, S., Png, M., & Isaac, W. (2020). Decolonial AI: Decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 659–684.
Mora, F. A. (2014). Emergent digital activism: The generational/technological connection. Journal of Community Informatics, 10(1), 1–13.
Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme, 17(2), 141–161.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.
Nurik, C. L. (2022). Facebook and the surveillance assemblage: Policing Black Lives Matter activists & suppressing dissent. Surveillance & Society, 20(1), 30–46.
Overton, S. (2025). Overcoming racial harms to democracy from artificial intelligence. Iowa Law Review, 110, 805–866.
Özkula, S. M. (2021a). The unmaking of collective action: Changing organizing logics in civil society organizations through social media activism culture. International Journal of Communication, 15
(19), 1984–2002.
Özkula, S. M. (2021b). The problem of history in digital activism: Ideological narratives in digital activism literature. Journal of Digital Social Research, 3(3), 60–84.
Özkula, S. M. (2021c). What is digital activism anyway? Social constructions of the ‘digital’ in contemporary activism. Journal of Digital Social Research, 3(3), 60–84.
Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78.
Rini, R. (2020). Deepfakes and the epistemic backstop. Philosophers’ Imprint, 20(24), 1–16.
Schick, N. (2020). Deep fakes and the infocalypse. Octopus Books.
Selbst, A. D., Andrew, L., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Fairness in machine learning: A survey. Communications of the ACM, 62(2), 56–65.
Sloane, M., Moss, E., Awomolo, O., & Forlano, L. (2020). Participation is not a design fix for machine learning. arXiv.org, https://doi.org/10.1145/3551624.3555285.
Smith, R. C., Bossen, C., & Kanstrup, A. M. (2017). Participatory design in an era of participation. CoDesign, 13(2), 65–69.
Spielkamp, M. (2017). AlgorithmWatch: What role can a watchdog organization play in ensuring algorithmic accountability? Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data, 32, 207–215.
Stamboliev, E. (2023). Proposing a postcritical AI literacy: Why we should worry less about algorithmic transparency and more about citizen empowerment. Media Theory, 7(1), 202–232.
Stark, B., Stegmann, D., Magin, M., & Jürgens, P. (2020). Are algorithms a threat to democracy? The rise of intermediaries: A challenge for public discourse. AlgorithmWatch, 26, https://algorithmwatch.
org/en/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Governing-Platforms-communications-study-Stark-May-2020-AlgorithmWatch.pdf.
Suchman, L. (2002). Located accountabilities in technology production. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2), 91–105.
Tsai, L., & Pentland, A. (2025). Rediscovering the pleasures of pluralism: The potential of digitally mediated civic participation. UCLA Journal of Law and Technology, 30, 179–195.
Westerlund, M. (2019). The emergence of deepfake technology: A review. Technology Innovation Management Review, 9(11), 40–53.
Zytko, D., Wisniewski, P., Guha, S., Baumer, E., & Lee, M. (2022). Participatory Design of AI Systems: Opportunities and Challenges Across Diverse Users, Relationships, and Application Domains.
Conference: CHI ‘22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 154, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516506.
