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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
In both digital and more physical, real-world settings?
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.
Right. Can you think of some examples of interfaces — digital or real-world — that allow citizens to engage with power and institutions beyond voting?
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.
What are those real-world events actually like?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.