Oscar Pérez de la Fuente

IVR World Congress of the Association of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Istanbul, 28 June-3 July 2026

Special Workshop “Democracy, free speech, disinformation and digital literacy”

Democracy rests on a single, fragile premise: citizens can access reliable information, debate it freely, and then make reasoned choices. Free speech is therefore not a decorative luxury; it is the circulatory system of self-government. Without it, voters become disconnected from reality, and power flows to whoever controls the loudest megaphone.

Yet the digital age has broken the old filters that once separated signal from noise. In the pre-internet era, professional gatekeepers—editors, broadcasters, and fact-checkers—were imperfect, often biased, and sometimes captured by vested interests, but they operated under legal accountability, reputation costs, and shared norms. Today, any individual or state actor can reach millions instantly, anonymously, and at almost zero marginal cost. The result is an information environment in which deliberate disinformation spreads faster than truth because it is engineered to do so: emotionally charged, identity-affirming, and algorithmically boosted.

This is not an argument for censorship. State or corporate control of speech is the historic fast track to tyranny; the cure is almost always worse than the disease. The 20th century is littered with regimes that promised to “protect democracy” by silencing dissent and ended up destroying both. Once governments or unaccountable tech platforms are granted the power to decide what counts as “disinformation”, that power will inevitably be turned against political minorities, whistle-blowers, and legitimate controversy.

The only sustainable answer is mass digital literacy—taught early, reinforced often, and treated as a core civic duty comparable to jury service or voting itself. Citizens must learn to recognise motivated reasoning in themselves and others, to check primary sources, to distinguish between disagreeable opinion and verifiable falsehood, and to demand transparency from both platforms and officials. Schools that graduate functionally illiterate readers of charts, statistics, and metadata are failing democracy as surely as if they stopped teaching history.

Ultimately, democracy in the digital age will survive not because we found the perfect referee, but because enough citizens refuse to be passive consumers of weaponised narratives. Instead of this, they need to develop skills and habits to learn how to interpret the complexity of today’s world.

Participation and publication:

This workshop is open to those scholars interested in democracy, free speech, disinformation and digital literacy from different perspectives. Please write an email to oscar.perez@uc3m.es with a title and an abstract (300-400 words) of your paper, your affiliation and a short bio by 20 March 2026.  

We expect to publish a good selection of presented papers in a collective book with a prominent publisher, such as Routledge, or in a special issue of a well-indexed Journal.

Link to the IVR World Congress Istanbul 2026 workshop website:

https://ivr2026istanbul.org/special-workshop/sw11-democracy-free-speech-disinformation-and-digital-literacy-oscar-perez-de-la-fuente/

Accepted abtracts:

Digitally Mediated Intersubjectivities and the Public Sphere:
Ambivalent Democratic and Authoritarian Effects

Ricardo Gonçalves

Freie Universität Berlin

The digital transformation is reshaping the public sphere and raising critical questions about the prospects for sustaining and deepening democracy. Recent literature, inspired by the Habermasian conception of the public sphere, argues that this process has inaugurated a new structural transformation, characterized by the proliferation of multiple semi-public and semi-private spaces, fragmented and marked by centrifugal tendencies and dispersion. Much of this scholarship, however, emphasizes the interplay between technological and economic processes and the decline of the traditional media. This work seeks to broaden the debate by connecting the hypothesis of a new structural transformation to recent cultural and sociological diagnoses. Drawing on Andreas Reckwitz’s notion of singularities and Felix Stalder’s concept of digital condition, this article examines how digital transformation reshapes human interaction as well as individual and collective forms of self-expression and social recognition, thereby reconfiguring the public sphere from within, through shifts in the constitution of subjectivities and in the patterns of intersubjectivity. Finally, it argues that by intensifying the tensions between singularization and universalization, and between fragmentation and social cohesion, the contemporary digital condition produces ambivalent political effects, oscillating between democratic promises and increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Such tensions create new obstacles to the construction of horizons of common interests and deliberation – central elements of democracy and its fundamental link with the public sphere.

On epistemic perfectionism

Oscar Pérez de la Fuente

Carlos III University of Madrid

Perfectionism is the view that the State can, or should, promote valuable conceptions of the good life and discourage conceptions that are worthless or bad. The opposite view, liberalism, defends the separation between the right and the good, and the core principle of individual autonomy. However, Raz defends a version of perfectionism compatible with pluralism and autonomy. Virtues, which are habits or dispositions associated with models of excellence within a human practice, have a central role in many perfectionist perspectives.

A relatively unexplored topic, compared to epistemic paternalism, is the notion of epistemic perfectionism. Few philosophical pragmatists have used this term to refer to requirements for democracy, such as dispositions or habits, including dialogue and other epistemic virtues. So, the State should not remain neutral on this; it should ensure that citizens cultivate those epistemic virtues for the success of the democratic process.

In the post-truth era, where disinformation and fake news are easily spread, public institutions should develop some strategies to aid their citizens attain truth from open-mindedness, prudence, impartiality, attentiveness, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage. The well-known arguments of the controversy of perfectionism should be elaborated again from epistemic terms. The Orwellian totalitarian Ministry of Truth is one such excess. However, complete State neutrality from ignorance and epistemic vices of those who decide would make democratic elections more contentious than desirable.

Knowledge for Sale? Research Firms, Consultancy Power, and Democratic Distortion

Alex Saltout

This paper examines the role of private research and expert network firms in shaping public policy outcomes through their close relationship with global consultancy firms and, indirectly, democratic governments. Drawing inspiration from When McKinsey Comes to Town, the research explores how ostensibly neutral data production increasingly operates within market-driven incentive structures that privilege speed, influence, and client alignment over epistemic rigor. The central argument is that democracy is not only challenged at the level of political representation, but also at the epistemic level: when governments outsource knowledge production to consultancies relying on opaque research supply chains, democratic decision-making becomes vulnerable to distorted, selectively framed, or insufficiently verified information. This phenomenon is amplified when policy narratives derived from consultancy reports are further disseminated through digital platforms and social media, acquiring public legitimacy without democratic scrutiny. The paper situates this dynamic within theories of deliberative democracy and democratic accountability, arguing that the privatization of expertise undermines citizens’ capacity to evaluate policy choices meaningfully. Methodologically, the research combines qualitative analysis of consultancy-driven policy cases with insider insights from the expert network industry, highlighting structural risks such as conflicts of interest, regulatory gaps, and the commodification of expertise. Ultimately, the paper asks whether contemporary democracies can remain epistemically resilient when knowledge itself is increasingly intermediated by profit-oriented actors. It concludes by outlining normative and regulatory pathways aimed at restoring transparency, accountability, and democratic control over policy-relevant knowledge production.

The Erosion of Epistemic Trust: The True Danger of Misinformation for Democratic Quality

Ramon Ruiz Ruiz

University of Jaén

The transition from the traditional vertical communication model to a horizontal and multidirectional digital ecosystem has democratized access to information, but it has also facilitated the massive circulation of misinformation. This communication aims to analyze how the impact of fake news transcends the mere manipulation of electoral results to position itself in a deeper dimension: the crisis of epistemic trust among the citizenry.

The study argues that democracy requires not only formal institutions but also a robust deliberative infrastructure based on a shared factual framework. However, the online information frequently fosters cognitive biases, echo chambers, and affective polarization. This environment replaces rational debate with emotional «noise,» giving rise to the phenomenon of post-truth, where objective facts are subordinated to political identity and «tribal epistemologies» are consolidated. In this context, the intermediary role of traditional journalism is bypassed, leaving the public sphere vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation.

The fundamental danger for democratic systems lies in the destruction of epistemic interdependence. Democracy presupposes that citizens are capable of making informed decisions and, crucially, that their fellow citizens are rational interlocutors. When misinformation generates a widespread perception that truth is unattainable or that the «other» has been manipulated, the mutual trust necessary to grant moral legitimacy to laws and collective decisions is broken. This leads to a fragmentation of reality where common ground disappears.

I conclude that the current challenge is eminently epistemological: if consensus on the factual is lost, the citizenry may come to consider not only the result of a specific vote but the democratic system in its totality to be morally unjustified. Therefore, protecting democracy requires a structural reinforcement of the epistemic conditions that make public Reason possible in the digital age.

CVs of the IVR workshop’s participants:

 Ricardo Gonçalves

He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and at CEBRAP – Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Legal Theory from the University of São Paulo Faculty of Law, where he was awarded a full research scholarship by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). He has published papers and book chapters, with a particular focus on critical theory, the public sphere, theories of recognition, the crisis of democracy, normative orders, and multinormativity. 

Oscar Pérez de la Fuente

Associate Professor (accredited as Full Professor) of Philosophy of Law and Political Philosophy at Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain. He has written several books and articles on cultural diversity, human rights and judicial interpretation in specialised scientific journals. Coordinator of the Cultural Pluralism and Minorities Permanent Seminar.

Recent publications:

-Pérez de la Fuente, Oscar, Tsesis,Alexander, Skrzypczak, Jędrzej (eds.), Minorities, Free Speech and the Internet, Routledge, 2023;

-Jedrzej Skrzypczak, Oscar Pérez de la Fuente (eds.), Lessons for Implementing Human Rights from COVID-19. How the Pandemic Has Changed the World, Routledge, 2025;

-Pérez de la Fuente, Oscar, Skrzypczak, Jędrzej (eds.), Bridging the Digital Divide. Perspectives on Inequality and Discrimination in the Digital Age, Palgrave, 2025.

Alex Saltout

He is a PhD candidate in Advanced Human Rights at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds multiple postgraduate degrees in Public Administration, International Affairs, and European Law. His research focuses on democracy, expertise, consultancy power, and governance. He has published peer-reviewed articles and policy analyses on expert networks and international decision-making. Professionally, he has worked with global expert network and strategic intelligence firms supporting consultancies and public-sector clients. He regularly contributes to think tanks and academic conferences on governance, security, and democratic accountability.

Ramón Ruiz Ruiz

He is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Jaén. His research focuses on three primary areas: civic republicanism, popular constitutionalism, and human rights. His scholarly contributions include approximately fifty publications, including four specialized monographs.

He has conducted research stays and served as a visiting professor at prestigious international institutions, such as Paris Nanterre University (Paris X), Cardozo School of Law, Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Sapienza University of Rome, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the University of York.

Professor Ruiz Ruiz has participated in numerous research projects, most notably the Consolider Ingenio 2010 «The Time of Rights» macro-project. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the University of Jaén group within the European project «Media Literacy for Democracy». In addition to supervising four PhD theses, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the international peer-reviewed journal The Age of Human Rights Journal.