IONEL BARBALAU<fnref n="1" />

JOSÉ VAN DIJCK, KARIN VAN ES, ANNE HELMOND, FERNANDO VAN DER VLIST (EDITORS). 2025. *Governing the Digital Society Platforms, Artificial Intelligence, and Public Values*. London, New York: Routledge. 264 p.

The 2025 volume "Governing the Digital Society: Platforms, Artificial Intelligence, and Public Values" examines how digital societies can be effectively governed to safeguard public values (like safety and transparency) against the profit-driven power and pervasive misinformation spread by digital platforms and AI systems. It aims to offer an interdisciplinary analysis, as well as actionable insights for scholars and policymakers working to embed public values into algorithmic systems and strengthen institutions in data-driven democracies.

Building further on José van Dijck's well-established critical approach of digital platforms, social media, and datafication, this book is an edited volume that brings together a range of scholars to analyze the complex challenge of governing a society increasingly shaped by digital technologies, particularly online platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As the editor presents it, "the authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media" (p. 265). To enrich the discussion, the volume incorporates in-depth conversations with specialists,

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<footnote n="1">¹ http://orcid.org/0009-0001-2497-4286, University of Bucharest, Romania, <ionel.barbalau@fjsc.ro>.</footnote>
shedding new light on current policy initiatives designed to tackle the
complex issues surrounding the regulation of digital communities

The authors emphasize that governance extends far beyond mere
technical or legal mechanisms; it represents a multifaceted social process
that weaves cultural norms, ethical principles, and moral considerations
into the fabric of our institutions and everyday existence (p. 265). The
volume clearly acknowledges that digital technologies – now deeply
embedded in our communities and societies – offer both substantial benefits
and significant challenges. That said, throughout its 15 chapters, the
discussion leans more toward exploring the risks and concerns rather
than equally highlighting the opportunities. Topics like “misinformation,
disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities”
have drawn the volume authors’ discerning attention. In response, they
adopted a perspective that foregrounds institutional power over individual
agency or technological determinism. Users are not seen as free agents;
they are instead trapped and “governed”, “co-constructed” by platforms,
which are engineered by private interests, inherently antagonistic to public
values, and they desperately need saving… from themselves, thus the
need for constant and paternalistic platform policing and censorship
(content and user moderation) via powerful institutional oversight.

However, what such vision ignores deliberately is: individual agency
 users do negotiate, resist, or subvert platforms – e.g., privacy tools, alternative
 networks); technological determinism (some platform effects are emergent –
 e.g., viral memes, network effects); entrepreneurial innovation (platforms solve
 real problems – connection, access, efficiency); user complicity (people
 voluntarily trade privacy for convenience).

Section 1 of the book focuses on governing online platforms, while
Section 2 addresses the governance of AI. All sections, but particularly
Section 3, emphasize the role of public values in decision-making processes
that involve both humans and machines, as van Dijck, van Es, Helmond,
and van der Vlist put it in their Introduction chapter (p. 16). The rationale
the volume proposes is this: “while human users are *governed* by online
platforms, state actors attempt to govern the digital platforms in return”,
using analog governance mechanisms (such as new laws, norms, and
limitations) to make them fit for the digital age. Moreover while doing it, a
golden opportunity arises: “to negotiate public values and subsequently
embed these values into online mechanisms for organizing trust", under
the umbrella of a new powerful tool, which is *digital (good) governance*
(pp. 16-17).

However, as the editors argue in the same introductory chapter,
aligning these new digital world frameworks with "accepted standards
and mechanisms for democracy" is a challenging task, especially when
*the standards* are not... universally accepted (p. 17). Thus, the need for
this book is to combine a diverse range of perspectives and approaches
to serve the cause better. Therefore, the chapters in this volume "alternate
between scholarly analysis and academic reflection, and they shift between
argumentative and conversational discourse", as it features also three
expert interviews: C. Goanta, principal investigator of the HUMANads
project at Utrecht University (legal insight into digital advertising done
by influencers and content creators); N. Helberger, one of the leading
Dutch experts on the EU AI Act (legal insight on EU digital governance,
fundamental rights and role of tech giants); and J. Gerards, professor of
fundamental rights law at the same Utrecht University (insights on the
development of FRAIA - Fundamental Rights and Algorithms Impact
Assessment project of the Dutch Government).

The first section of the volume focuses on the organization of social
media platforms. Authors present the case of the decentralized online
social networks (DOSNs), praising the “good governance” they managed to
implement, opposite to mainstream digital platforms. Where they failed
was to acknowledge the profound (radical) left-wing political bias platforms
such as BlueSky have had at their inception, which further translated to
the “public values” they upheld. Another sensitive issue addressed was
platform content and user moderation using computational linguistics means
with the intention of banning content and users, while allowing only
“constructive comments” on the five top international progressive news
outlets. However, the reality call comes in the next chapter, where van de
Kerkhof, a legal scholar, is stressing out eloquently the conflict between
the so called “trusted flaggers”, entities entitled to police and censor the
digital platforms, under the banner of ‘good governance’, the new EU
legal frameworks (such as *the Digital Service Act*, which formalizes this
practice in Article 22), and the pre-existing national and international
legislation upholding fundamental rights, such as the Right to Freedom
of Expression – the Article 7 of the *Dutch Constitution* and the Article 10 of the *European Convention on Human Rights* (pp.83-96).

The second section of the volume further focuses on AI regulation in the European Union, examining high-risk domains, including the military, alongside the broader societal consequences of generative AI and the implications of its risk-based regulatory framework. As highlighted by the volume editors, the contributing scholars in this section share a unified perspective: generative AI systems should be regarded not as unavoidable technological destinies, but as flexible constructs shaped by politics and open to negotiation (pp. 19-20). It is the EU AI Act that would provide such a framework for democratic oversight and control of digital systems.

The third and last section of the volume focuses on "the negotiation of norms and values in specific digital environments". As commented by the section's authors (Zeng & van Es), "the critical issue to consider is who holds the authority to define these values? Additionally, does this authority allow the existence of diverse values within a society?" (p. 178). While conducting a comparative analysis of ChatGPT and ErnieBot as contrasting case studies in the global landscape of large language models, the opening chapter of the section investigates moral agency as a dual construct – simultaneously technological and political – exposing the deeply contested character of determining morality and immorality, a process profoundly influenced by power struggles among diverse societal actors – a vision shared also by the volume editors (p. 21). The following chapters adopt a critical neo-Marxist perspective, asserting that the impact of datafication and AI disadvantages citizens by favoring a select few and exacerbating systemic discrimination based on race or gender. But such approach, especially in the chapter analyzing the Rotterdam welfare fraud algorithm case, exhibits multiple empirical, methodological, logical, and practical failures: from empirical overreach (historical norms ≠ algorithmic bias, the study confuses correlation with causation and retrofits history to explain a technical failure; the Rotterdam algorithm (as revealed by Lighthouse Reports and follow-up investigations) was biased due to flawed data pipelines, not ideological design); to methodological flaw – category analysis without code or data access (researchers never accessed the algorithm's source code, training data, or feature weights, Rotterdam refused to release them); logical error: conflating disparate impact with
discriminatory intent (*predictive models optimize for accuracy, not fairness; if fraud is slightly higher in certain groups* (due to poverty, reporting gaps, etc.), *the model will learn that pattern – not because it “believes” in racial inferiority*); to finally ignoring the real problem: bad engineering, not ideology.

However, despite its (ideological) limitations, this volume presents a selection of several valuable interdisciplinary studies, anchored primarily in Dutch (and EU) realities, that can be used for further academic references in the field of critical analyses of digital platforms, social media, and datafication.

All links were verified by the editors and found to be functioning before the publication of this text in 2025.

## DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

## FUNDING

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper.

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