About The Workshop
SW 11 Democracy, free speech, disinformation and digital literacy
Convenor: Oscar Pérez de la Fuente- Enrique Armijo
Contact: oscar.perez@uc3m.es
Democracy rests on a single, fragile premise: citizens can access reliable information, debate it freely, and then make reasoned choices. Free speech is therefore not a decorative luxury; it is the circulatory system of self-government. Without it, voters become disconnected from reality, and power flows to whoever controls the loudest megaphone.
Yet the digital age has broken the old filters that once separated signal from noise. In the pre-internet era, professional gatekeepers—editors, broadcasters, and fact-checkers—were imperfect, often biased, and sometimes captured by vested interests, but they operated under legal accountability, reputation costs, and shared norms. Today, any individual or state actor can reach millions instantly, anonymously, and at almost zero marginal cost. The result is an information environment in which deliberate disinformation spreads faster than truth because it is engineered to do so: emotionally charged, identity-affirming, and algorithmically boosted.
This is not an argument for censorship. State or corporate control of speech is the historic fast track to tyranny; the cure is almost always worse than the disease. The 20th century is littered with regimes that promised to “protect democracy” by silencing dissent and ended up destroying both. Once governments or unaccountable tech platforms are granted the power to decide what counts as “disinformation”, that power will inevitably be turned against political minorities, whistle-blowers, and legitimate controversy.
The only sustainable answer is mass digital literacy—taught early, reinforced often, and treated as a core civic duty comparable to jury service or voting itself. Citizens must learn to recognise motivated reasoning in themselves and others, to check primary sources, to distinguish between disagreeable opinion and verifiable falsehood, and to demand transparency from both platforms and officials. Schools that graduate functionally illiterate readers of charts, statistics, and metadata are failing democracy as surely as if they stopped teaching history.
Ultimately, democracy in the digital age will survive not because we found the perfect referee, but because enough citizens refuse to be passive consumers of weaponised narratives. Instead of this, they need to develop skills and habits to learn how to interpret the complexity of today’s world.
Participation and publication:
This workshop is open to those scholars interested in democracy, free speech, disinformation and digital literacy from different perspectives. Please write an email to oscar.perez@uc3m.es with a title and an abstract (300-400 words) of your paper, your affiliation and a short bio by 20 March 2026.
We expect to publish a good selection of presented papers in a collective book with a prominent publisher, such as Routledge, or in a special issue of a well-indexed Journal.
Updated information:
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