Democracy Reporting International

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25 Nov 2024

Welcome to #Bluesky! Big thank you to everyone who followed us. We truly appreciate the support! Here's a little token of gratitude 🎁 👀 We created a starter pack featuring old and new accounts of democracy-support organisations and experts. Follow them all in one click! 👇

Democracy Reporting International reposted

⚖️🇵🇱 Within 24 hours, we've gone from a Venice Commission opinion on the appointment of the judges of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal to clashes in front of the Tribunal's building. What did the mild-mannered Council of Europe advisory body do to trigger such an outcome?

The AI industry just asked to be regulated. What? 🤔 Tech companies usually spend millions fighting regulation. They paint regulators as bureaucrats who stifle growth. Now changed their tune. Is this a legislator's dream? 🧵

And on AI risk, the EU has some very unlikely allies: Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon and Pope Leo XIV. When voices this diverse line up behind the direction of EU regulation, there's political space for urgent action.

euobserver.comThe Pope, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon just handed Brussels a mandate to rein in AIWhen Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon take the stage together to call for responsible AI development, and Pope Leo XIV does so in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, all aligning with the direction of ...

As our Michael Meyer-Resende puts it: "Looking the other way because we do not like Big Tech would be irresponsible." Read his full column in EUobserver 👇 euobserver.com/237542/the-p... Cynic, pessimist, or something else? What do you think?

The danger isn't AI turning evil. It's that these models are too complex to ever fully align with human values or security standards, argue authors Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Even Amodei admits this: "We still only understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models."

Trump won't act. Europe can. 🇪🇺 The #AIAct already requires providers of the most powerful AI models to assess systemic risks and report serious incidents. Brussels needs to focus on enforcement and increase its visibility.

With this move, Anthropic might be after: → Regulatory capture, which is locking competitors into standards Anthropic itself helped shape → A vibe shift. Is the industry preparing for a post-Trump world, where responsibility is back in fashion?

2️⃣ The pessimist view Amodei's proposals are the bare minimum. Take the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI agents were given tasks they couldn't solve. They built a secret channel to coordinate and broke into the servers of Hugging Face, a hub for AI researchers. At first, OpenAI didn't notice…

So what does this mean? There are two schools of thought: 1️⃣ The cynical view 2️⃣ The pessimist view Let's take them more closely 👇

1️⃣ The cynical view AI giants realise they won't earn back their massive investments any time soon. So instead of admitting "this tech is less profitable than we thought," they say "it's so groundbreaking, we need to slow down." Some cynics go further 👇

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for: → Independent evaluators inside AI companies → Coordination among frontier labs in democracies → Eventually, an international deal that includes China He and OpenAI's Sam Altman have both committed to the first measure.

Democracy Reporting International reposted

re:constitution

@reconeurope.bsky.social

22 Sept

💡Shedding light to the unpredictable future of rule of law at the ERoL Talks 2026 in Brussels! We are proud to see speakers and moderators from our re:constitution community and other experts contributing to debates on RoL regarding: 🛡️ Defense spending 🇪🇺 Enlargement 💶 Budget conditionality 🤖 AI use

Can you bend the rule of law to save the rule of law? 🗯️

Alongside our other Rule of Law work in 2025: - Our report got non-implementation of EU court rulings onto the European Parliament's agenda - We helped shape Ukraine's democratic reform roadmap for EU accession - A Tunisia outreach campaign brought administrative justice to millions ...and more!

Read more in our Annual Report now 👇 bit.ly/4gSLcRp

bit.lybit.ly

Can you bend the rule of law to save the rule of law? 🗯️

But then, in 2025, Karol Nawrocki was elected president and has been vetoing the reform proposals ever since. The government that invited us into these consultations is now stuck and unable to pass the very repairs it asked civil society to help design.

Regardless, alongside the technical work, our research and commentary reached wider audiences, through media outlets and podcasts, to help citizens and journalists understand it all.

Can you bend the rule of law to save the rule of law? 🗯️

Our proposals on neo-judges and judicial reform fed directly into the Polish government's comprehensive judiciary reform plan, resulting in actual legislation on the table.

At the World Justice Project Rule of Law Congress in Warsaw, we even convened a panel to ask the question underneath the whole debate: "Can a democratic government bend the rule of law to save the rule of law?" We were working on addressing exactly this.

Can you bend the rule of law to save the rule of law? 🗯️

As early as 2024 and throughout 2025, DRI was one of the few organisations invited into expert meetings convened by Poland's Minister of Justice, Adam Bodnar, and the Office of the Prime Minister.

Alongside judges, academics, and lawyers, we gave specific, concrete recommendations on what to do about the neo-judges; and how to rebuild a compromised judiciary without breaking the rule of law in the process.

Can you bend the rule of law to save the rule of law? 🗯️

Poland's courts were compromised. Under the previous government, judicial appointments became politically driven, resulting in so-called neo-judges. These were officials appointed by a politically captured National Council of the Judiciary.

When a new government came to power in 2023, it had to figure out a way to undo this.

2025 set a precedent, 2026 delivered the win 👏🏽 Ahead of Germany's 2025 federal elections, we needed publicly available data to study disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behaviour before the vote. We asked every major platform for research access. Every one said yes. Except X.

In 2025, our digital democracy work also: 💶Informed the EU's €120 million DSA fine against X 📜Got four of our recommendations into the EU's Delegated Act on Data Access :tiktok3: Led TikTok to remove 184+ inauthentic accounts flagged around German and Romanian elections

Every case study in our 2025 Annual Report shows the same thing: we must support democracy in a tangible ways. Whether it's achieved through a court ruling, a coalition, or a policy that gets reconsidered or rewritten. Read the full report now: bit.ly/4gSLcRp

We didn't get the data. But the ruling made it clear that Article 40(12) has teeth. Without this case, researchers challenging platforms would face a simple, expensive dead end: file in Ireland, or don't file at all. Now, there’s a practical legal recourse.

Fast forward to 2026. We filed another lawsuit against X. This time to study Hungary's elections. We won. X granted access. The precedent we built while "losing" in 2025 is what made that win possible. This case also didn't happen in isolation.

But the ruling did something bigger than give us data. The Court made two clarifications that will outlast this one case: 1. Civil society organisations do have a legal right to platform data under the DSA. 2. That right can be enforced in local courts, not just where a company is headquartered.

For X, HQ is Dublin. For everyone without extensive financial and legal resources, the costs of suing there would be prohibitive.

So we filed an urgent lawsuit, with support from the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, in Berlin's Regional Court, right as the election clock was ticking.

A first judge sided with us: an injunction ordering X to grant access. But X appealed and the injunction was overturned. By the time the final ruling came, the German elections had already passed. Our urgent claim was rejected.

So we said: see you in court. Under Article 40(12) of the EU's Digital Services Act, large platforms must grant researchers, including civil society organisations like us, access to public data to study systemic risks. But X wasn't complying.

Democracy Reporting International reposted

notesfrompoland.comPolish NGOs urge PM's "right-hand man" to withdraw constitutional court candidacy

24 Aug

🇵🇱⚖️ The degree of hate that renowned Polish NGOs such as the Stefan Batory Foundation or Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights have received from xcore supporters of Tusk (the so-called "#strongetogether", in particular) has been absolutely disgraceful.

Notes from Poland @notesfrompoland.bsky.social

Polish NGOs have urged Tusk's "right-hand man" to withdraw his Constitutional Tribunal candidacy, warning his political ties could undermine efforts to restore the court’s independence. The nomination has also exposed tensions within the ruling coalition.

Democracy Reporting International reposted

19 Aug

🇺🇸💵🇪🇺 The US State Dept "CERV programme but evil" gets expanded to support civil society action on yet another civilisational danger to the World of White People: mass migration, and to help NGOs *checks notes* defend US Big Tech from regulation. 1/

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7 Aug

Goran Buldioski has joined our Board! 🙌 Goran brings ample leadership experience from his time at the @open-society.bsky.social. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the @hertieschool.bsky.social. We are confident that Goran will help us advance DRI’s mission. Welcome! 🔗 bit.ly/3TY7uYX

We identified a network of 19 inauthentic #Telegram channels posing as independent news outlets. No newsroom. No editorial process. Just automated posting, purchased subscribers, and amplification of Kremlin-aligned disinformation. What does this say about the EU's regulation of Telegram? 👇

Our Ognjen Karadzic and Daniela Alvarado Rincón explain how they uncovered the network, and why size-based thresholds can miss real threats. Read their analysis for @techpolicypress.bsky.social here: www.techpolicy.press/what-a-growi...

And if you’d like to learn more about the network we discovered, here's the link to our brief: democracy-reporting.org/en/office/gl...

visegradinsight.bsky.social

On most platforms, coordinated manipulation at this scale would count as a systemic risk, potentially triggering mitigation measures. Not on Telegram. Telegram officially falls short of the 45M active-user threshold that triggers the DSA's strictest rules. But fewer users doesn't mean less risk...

Democracy Reporting International reposted

@visegradinsight.bsky.social

24 July

Magyar's removal of the President and the head of Constitutional Court is a drastic move. Yet, it does not leave the best impression of conduct by a majority that vowed to hew close to the ideals of the rule of law while reforming the country, writes @jakubjaraczewski.bsky.social: shorturl.at/MuAdU

shorturl.atMagyar's Rule of Law Chainsaw Risks Cutting Down the RootsPrime Minister's dismissal of Tamás Sulyok and Péter Polt is a perilous but necessary adventure for the rule of law in Hungary.

bit.lyNets4Dem enters new phase of European collaboration in democratic innovation - Nets4DemTwo years after its launch, Nets4Dem – the Network of...

27 July

How can we balance independence, accountability, and democratic legitimacy in Europe's judiciary councils? Follow our @arnisatepelija.bsky.social for more analysis on the rule of law 👀 👇

arnisatepelija.bsky.social@arnisatepelija.bsky.social

Have the post-1990 European standards on judicial councils reached their limits? Judicial self-governance, largely shaped by Western European constitutional experience and later promoted across Central and Eastern Europe as a rule-of-law benchmark, is beginning to face new questions from within.

Democracy Reporting International reposted

Nets4Dem

@nets4dem.eu

24 July

Replying to @nets4dem.eu

Governments want citizen participation but many still lack the tools, evidence or peers to do it well. That's the gap Nets4Dem 2.0 closes. Read more 👉 bit.ly/4bafzj5

Democracy Reporting International reposted

Nets4Dem

@nets4dem.eu

24 July

Nets4Dem is entering its next phase 👏 Over the last three years, Nets4Dem has grown into a connected community of practitioners, researchers and institutions across Europe.

Democracy Reporting International reposted