One of the most pressing concerns for civil society in the next few years is the issue of social media and communication technology. So much of our civic and public life is conducted online, yet sometimes we forget that the platforms we use are private and profit-driven. The limitations of relying on businesses to serve society have become clear in recent years. We need more avenues of communication that aren’t owned by a small number of individuals. The question becomes: how do we create a platform that can serve the needs of everyone? Is it too late to escape the profit-driven model? How can communications technology be democratised/re-democratised?

As well as reining in our worst excesses on social media, we need to start thinking about how communications technology can be used for good. Various outlets have seized on forums that seem, if only briefly, to offer a vision of an alternative discourse – the ‘last pure place on the Internet’. They tend to struggle with scalability, content moderation, and trolling – the same problems that can be seen everywhere in the world.

One potential vision for the future can be seen already in Taiwan. Small and relatively isolated on the world stage, Taiwan has been praised for its coronavirus response, which has seen just 27 deaths and no lockdowns or community transmission. This extraordinary success, one of the best in the world, has been attributed to Taiwan’s experience during SaRS in 2003, or its relative isolation, but that isn’t the real story. Without the level of digital infrastructure already in place, this level of success would not have been possible.

Taiwan’s broader digital strategy offers lessons for the UK in civic participation. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first ever digital minister, was originally part of a group called g0v (pronounced ‘gov zero’) which takes a participatory approach to citizenship, encouraging its members to think about and work on potential improvements on existing government systems. Following the 2014 Sunflower Movement, one of the hackers, Jaclyn Tsai, asked the group how they could contribute to government processes and invited them to be involved in designing better systems. In 2016, vTaiwan was born, an online consultation process where citizens can discuss contentious issues in law-making. The platform used for consultations is called Pol.is. Rather than promoting divisive and inflammatory content, the algorithm prioritises statements with which the majority agree, highlighting previously unknown areas of agreement between conflicting stakeholders, which can improve civic participation and build consensus. The software also displays each conversation as a clustered network of individuals, showing the relative positions of individuals and groups in each debate.