This interview with Björn Statchen, journalist and co-founder of the German initiative Save Social, explores how democratic participation is shaped by digital infrastructures and collective action. Drawing on his experience at the intersection of media, technology, and civic engagement, Björn reflects on the role of social media in opinion formation, the risks of platform monopolies, and the emergence of alternative, citizen-driven interfaces.
Nica: Björn, would you be able to confirm that you agree to this interview being recorded for reseqrch purposes of INTERFACED?
Just to be clear: you are okay with this interview being on the platform and being in the public space, as long as it is text and not audio, right?
Björn: Yes, I’m fine with being recorded.
However, I do not want my voice to be used for AI training or anything like that, but the text is fine.
Nica: Okay, thank you. Today is March 3rd, and this is an interview with Björn about a range of topics, including Save Social. Let’s start there. Could you tell me a bit about yourself, your background, and how you became involved with the Save Social initiative?
Origins of Save Social
Björn: I am a journalist and media scholar by profession, and throughout my career I have worked on the fault line between journalism and media management. I am 52 years old and I live in Hamburg.
I have also reported extensively on technology. For a while I had a kind of tech briefing segment on national television, and I used social media as a tool for gathering information as a journalist. For example, during large protest marches there is often an imbalance in access to information: the police have a press office, but demonstrators usually do not. In that context, Twitter was an important research tool.
At the same time, I increasingly felt that not everything was going well on these platforms. So I wrote a book called In der Social-Media-Falle (In the Social Media Trap), which was published about a year and a half ago.
But the book did not change the world, and it did not make me rich, so I had the feeling the work was not finished. In the process of presenting the book to different communities, I got in touch with quite a lot of people, and we gradually formed something like an informal network.
Then, when Donald Trump came into office for the second time, and there was that picture of the tech bosses lined up behind him, we very quickly agreed that we needed to do something. At that point we were still not really an organisation, just a group of connected people.
So we started a petition on a large campaign platform in Germany called Campact. In that petition, we demanded that politics take steps to protect the democratic public sphere on social media: on the one hand by scrutinising the privileges of big tech, and on the other by dismantling monopolies.
And on the other hand, we called for strengthening open alternative platforms on the open social web, platforms that work with open protocols.
The petition itself was actually quite complicated, but it still found around a quarter of a million supporters. We were also able to influence the coalition negotiations leading up to the formation of the new German government, and some of our demands made it into the coalition agreement.
There was so much support for what we were doing that over the summer we founded a small non-profit organisation. We also secured a bit of funding, which at the moment runs until the end of June this year. What we are trying to build is, essentially, a kind of lobby against big tech.
Together with other organisations, we also started a movement called Digital Independence Day. So far it is mostly German, but it is a website and a project designed to encourage people to switch their digital services to better alternatives, such as services that offer stronger data protection and are further removed from fascist tech monopolies.
We ask people to make one such change on the first Sunday of every month. Right now, around 250 organisations are participating, with more than 200 events taking place across Germany on that first Sunday of each month. So that has also become an important part of what we do.
At the moment, I have the privilege of working for Save Social full-time, but only until the end of June. After that, we will have to see what happens.
Nica: Thank you. That gives really helpful context. I’ll come back later to a set of more specific questions that connect directly to your work with Save Social.
Defining “Interface” in Democratic Participation
Nica: When we were chatting on Nextcloud before we moved here, I mentioned the name of our project, INTERFACED, and how, among the project partners, we have almost an ongoing discussion group about what the word interface actually means. So I have been asking everyone I interview: in your own words, how would you define an interface in the context of democratic participation?
Björn: That is a really good question.
I think an interface is anything that creates a connection between people, including a digital connection, and that enables communication to flow in both directions. For me, that would be an interface in this context.
Nica: In both digital and more physical, real-world settings?
Björn: Yes. And I think connection is really the crucial word here: there has to be an actual connection between the people using it. Not just a connection mediated or staged by a platform, but a real one in which people actually interact.
Nica: Right. Can you think of some examples of interfaces — digital or real-world — that allow citizens to engage with power and institutions beyond voting?
Björn: Yes, there are many.
There are petitions and petition platforms, for example, and then there is the actual handing over of a petition to politicians, which we also did. That was a direct interaction. We also wrote open letters.
There was also a lot of media coverage, which in the end is another way of influencing politics. We had many meetings with politicians, with parts of parties, and with entire parties, in order to shape their political goals on these topics.
We were also commissioned by a larger foundation to lay the groundwork for what we are doing in the form of a more scientific report, and I think that also influenced politics and helped make this possible.
And then there is our campaign, Digital Independence Day, which brings people together in person at actual events. People interact with each other there, and we hope that this too becomes a way of influencing politics.
Nica: What are those real-world events actually like?
Björn: Well, last Sunday alone we had more than 200 of them.
They are organised by regional groups of the Chaos Computer Club, but also by libraries, institutions that provide adult education, vocational schools, bookshops, and community centres — the kinds of places that towns or local communities often have.
Usually there are one, two, or three people there who already understand what this change of services is about. They support others who want to make the switch — for example from Windows to Linux, from WhatsApp to Signal, or from one cloud service to another.
So these are gatherings where people come to get support, offer support, and connect with one another.
Nica: And in that sense, would you say that Save Social itself is an interface? Or is it something that enables other interfaces? How do you see it in that space?
Björn: I may not be fully familiar with your concept of interface, but I would say that Save Social is itself an interface. It is also a means of interconnecting people who have a purpose with those who can help them achieve it.
Digital Power, Democratic Participation, and the Role of Platforms
Nica: If we zoom out a little more broadly: how do you understand democratic participation beyond voting? What forms of participation feel most effective or consequential to you?
Björn: That is actually one of the reasons Save Social came into being.
Democratic participation also means being able to access information and being able to form an opinion. And since more and more people now do that through social media, the fact that social media is not governed by the societies that use it becomes a very serious problem.
So for me, digital conversation is itself a very important element of democratic participation. Participation means being able to access information, take part in discussion, and form opinions with your peers, whether digitally or in person.
Beyond that, there are many forms of people engaging with communities and with specific issues. In the end, even being a member of a sports club and campaigning for new lights for your sports field is a form of democratic participation. Even choosing not to buy something in a supermarket can, for me, be a form of democratic participation.
Nica: Yes, that makes sense. Can you think of any examples from your own life, recently or earlier, when you felt: I am participating, I am having an effect , outside the voting booth?
Björn: Well, I have had the great privilege of working for Save Social and co-founding it. I sat down with politicians, we told them what we wanted, and some of our demands were taken into the coalition treaty. Now we are watching closely to see whether those demands are actually translated into real politics.
So that was a very direct experience of participating in democracy.
Nica: You said something earlier like: social media is not governed by the rules of the society it serves. Could you expand on that a little, and explain how that affects democratic participation?
Björn: Yes. There are a few white men, mostly in the United States, one in Sweden in the case of Spotify, and a few others in China in the case of TikTok, who decide who sees what, when, and where in society.
They also decide how algorithms distort conversation. For example, the margins of a debate are often amplified and shown to many more people than the middle ground of that same debate.
That gives people a false impression of public opinion. It makes opinion formation more difficult, because you no longer get a feeling for how society as a whole sees a topic. Instead, you are constantly shown the most extreme positions.
That is already a serious problem. But there is also direct influence. Elon Musk, for example, not only promoted the far right in Germany a great deal on X, but also amplified the messages of both the far right and the far left much more than those of parties in the political centre.
So in effect, he is silencing the middle and turning up the volume at the margins. And this is not only happening on X. It is happening on the other platforms too.
Nica: Got it. So, whether in the digital world, the physical world, or at the intersection of the two: are there any forms of democratic participation that feel mostly symbolic, or not very effective, to you personally?
Björn: I feel torn about petitions.
Some petitions work very well. Others are more like a loud shout, and then nothing really happens. I think there is also a danger that this tool gets used too often, and that this reduces its effectiveness. Maybe you could call it a kind of inflation: if petitions become too easy and too frequent, their weight and value decrease.
Today it is very easy to mobilise a large crowd digitally. So in that sense, I think street demonstrations are a stronger signal. But are they always effective? That depends very much on the topic.
Here in Hamburg, for example, there are also forms of direct democracy where people can vote on specific issues. And that works very well. In one case, people forced the Hamburg government to commit to climate neutrality five years earlier than originally planned, and now the government has to follow through. So in that case, the instrument worked very well.
Covid-19 Period & Hybrid Movements
Nica: One of the things that interests us in this project is the role of Covid as a kind of pivot point or generative moment for new interface innovations. Some of those new forms remained, and some did not.
So thinking back to the Covid period: how did participatory interfaces change, in your experience? Did new digital spaces emerge? Did existing platforms take on new political roles?
Björn: I think one major change was that we became much more used to campaigning digitally — for example, holding large gatherings by video conference or through online meeting links.
There is one major movement called Europe Calling — I do not know if you have heard of them. I had a talk with them at the end of last week, and there were around 1,500 people listening to what Save Social does. That kind of format did not really exist before Covid.
So I think what really changed was the level of trust in digital means for campaigning and for bringing people together.
At the same time, however, there was also a lot of distrust that grew during Covid. So I think there is now more scepticism too, for example, questions like: is this a group I can trust? Is this a group I want to be associated with?
So once again, I would say there are two sides to it.
Nica: Save Social itself did not exist yet during Covid, right?
Björn: No, no.
Nica: When did it begin? It is more recent.
Björn: The petition is now about a year and a month old.
Nica: Right. So were you involved in digital progressive spaces during Covid yourself?
Björn: Actually, yes. Now that you ask, my wife and I started a video blog during Covid because we were so fed up with education policy in Hamburg. It ended up getting quite a bit of traction.
And I think it only worked because everyone was sitting in front of their computers and not out in the world. So yes, on a different topic, we actually did use digital means during Covid to try to influence politics.
Nica: That makes sense, and it fits with my own memory of that period: everyone sitting in front of their computers, opening channels of participation and engagement they might not otherwise have opened.
So beyond Save Social — and I almost said Truth Social, which is obviously something very different…
Björn: Yes, very different.
Nica: Very different. Do you think there were innovations in democratic participation that emerged during Covid, gained traction, and then remained in some form? And do you think there were others that simply faded away?
Björn: For me, video conferencing is definitely one tool that really gained traction during Covid.
I am less sure about campaign platforms. They entered my life around the end of Covid, or during Covid, and I do not really know how strong they were before that.
But more generally, the whole idea of being able to deliberate quickly, meet people quickly, gather quickly, share data online, and write collaboratively on documents — all of those tools became much more central. I think their existence and their wider spread happened in parallel with Covid. I do not know exactly how much Covid caused that, but it certainly accelerated it.
And Save Social is itself a completely decentralised organisation. We simply would not exist without the digital tools that are available now.
Nica: The same is true for us at Edgeryders. I am in New York, Bojan is in Brussels, someone else is in Croatia, and so on.
That brings me to another question. You mentioned a recent gathering where 1,500 people joined. So it sounds like the community is, in some sense, hybrid — both online and offline. What are your thoughts on these hybrid interfaces? Have they become more important since Covid?
Björn: The example I gave there was completely digital, and yes, that has definitely become much more important.
Nica: I thought you had also mentioned something where around 200 people came together in person — maybe not for Save Social, but for something related? I may be mixing things up.
Björn: You may be thinking of the more than 200 local events we had on the first Sunday of the month through Digital Independence Day. Those are in-person gatherings, spread out across Germany, and they are a good example of how digital coordination can lead to physical meeting spaces.
I am already getting old — I forget things I said ten minutes ago.
Nica: I am too. It was something about a Germany-specific project where people came together in person. But rather than both of us trying to force our old brains to remember, let me ask it this way: what do you think about movements or initiatives that combine strong digital tools with opportunities for people to gather physically and meet in real life?
Björn: I do not like hybrid formats in the narrow sense such as meetings where some people are in a room and others are on Zoom at the same time, because I usually find that they do not serve either group very well. They do not really work properly for the people online, and they do not really work properly for the people in the room either.
But I do think that everything happening in digital space works better if the people involved have also met in person. Real connection, or at least a stronger connection, often grows more easily when people have actually met physically.
Nica: I think we may have meant two different things by “hybrid.” You were thinking of one meeting happening partly in person and partly on Zoom. I meant something more like a movement or initiative where some activities happen online, but people also have opportunities to meet in person and assemble physically.
Björn: In that sense, yes: I think that is much more effective than being only digital or only in person.
Digital tools help you get work done and move faster. But when people meet in person, they create real connection. That strengthens trust, and it also increases confidence in one another’s abilities. So I think that mixture is what makes a movement strong.
Nica: We are both affiliated with quite decentralised organisations, and I am thinking about another interview I did recently. I asked the person about the difference between digital and real-world interaction, and he said that this is actually a false dichotomy. If you and I are talking right now, this is real too, because we are real people.
So in that sense: if people in a collective meet weekly on Zoom or on Nextcloud for a year, but never meet in person, do you think that is still fundamentally different? Is there some kind of special quality or “magic” to in-person meetings?
Björn: It really depends. And I think sometimes you only find out after you meet in person.
It can work without in-person meetings, depending on the personalities involved and the way they communicate. But I do think that meeting in person can make a connection much stronger, or change it in a significant way. It could even make it less strong in some cases. But yes, I think in-person meetings do matter.
Governing the interfaces
Nica: Okay. Going back for a moment to Save Social, and to your broader perspective on these questions: who should govern democratic interfaces? Should it be states? Civil society? Users? Some combination?
Björn: We the people should govern them. The people who use the system should govern the system.
If we are talking about digital spaces, I think there needs to be something like user representation: user advisory boards, for example.
Nica: So if you could design an ideal democratic interface from scratch, what would it look like?
Björn: That is difficult for me to answer in a very abstract way, because in a sense we are already trying to build something like that with communities.
But I think it would need, first of all, to meet the needs of its users. It would need to connect them without distortion by algorithms or similar mechanisms. It would need to protect their data. And it would need to make people feel seen and valued in their positions.
There would also need to be some form of user representation, for example, an advisory board that discusses the rules by which the digital space works and agrees on them.
Those rules would need to be transparent, so that users can decide whether they want to be part of that space or not. And there would need to be ways for users to influence and change those transparent rules.
Finally, there would need to be proper enforcement of the rules by the people who govern the service.
Nica: That’s a very comprehensive answer. I think I’ll end with the question I usually ask: are there other people you think would be good for me to talk to about these topics?
Björn: I would definitely look at Europe Calling. It’s an association, and they have a website.
Yes. One is Emily Parsons, and the other is Maximilian. I’m doing something I normally don’t do and just copying their contact details, because I believe they are publicly available.
They run these very large video-conference gatherings on different topics, and I was really impressed by that. I think the initiative originally emerged from a Green Party context, but by now it is non-partisan and no longer connected to the Greens.
I would also recommend looking at the people behind Campact.
It is a campaign platform. The organisation itself is called Campact as well, and it is the largest petition platform in Germany. They have a very well-functioning interface for petitions and for influencing politics.
Nica: Thank you so much. I think it was a very interesting and fruitful conversation.
Björn: Thank you very much. I’m sorry I came in late and then had to keep an eye on the time.