Information and communication technology has undergone dramatic developments over the last two decades. Increasing interconnectedness has led to more self-organized public debates, platforms, and their algorithms have gained new power over discourse, and generative AI has made content fabrication easier than ever.

In this talk, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen argues that power over discourse in these environments increasingly resides not in top-down control of content, but in the structural levers encoded in platform architectures. Drawing on insights from complexity science and our recent empirical syntheses, this talk develops potential ways to explain why digital platforms produce beneficial democratic outcomes in some political contexts while exacerbating polarization, mistrust, and autocratic resilience in others. He discusses how authoritarian actors worldwide leverage the structural power of platforms, though with varying aims and capacities, depending on the political systems.

Failure to conceptualize this structural platform power, they argue, will hinder efforts to build democratic alternatives, which work differently from commercial U.S. platforms or state-controlled autocratic ones. He will conclude with a research agenda grounded in studying authoritarian actors, online platforms, and their power in the digital age.