The Normative Foundations of Platforms is an invitation-only working meeting at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, 14–16 December 2026. It brings together 27 researchers from philosophy, political science, law, psychology, sociology, media studies and computer science, and platform builders.
We start from what platforms should be. We are interested in building social media on philosophical foundations, as infrastructure for collective action and collective intelligence. Interest in alternatives to US platforms is growing, and now is a good time to ask what they should look like.
The meeting runs on debate rather than presentations. We want to map where we disagree about what platforms are for and what they owe, and what each position means for how platforms are built.
