Digital Services Coordinators operate at the intersection of technology, information, society, and democracy. Their task is not merely regulatory. Increasingly, they are expected to assess risks to public discourse, democratic processes, social cohesion, and fundamental rights. This creates a challenge that existing administrative structures struggle to address.
The question
The Digital Services Act provides procedures, obligations, and enforcement mechanisms. It creates safeguards against abuse and establishes channels for cooperation with platforms, researchers, and public authorities. Yet none of these mechanisms fully answer a more fundamental question: How does a public institution remain connected to the realities experienced by citizens?
Different approaches to reality
Contemporary societies are characterized by growing epistemic fragmentation. Citizens encounter different information environments, different experiences, and different interpretations of reality. Institutions face the opposite problem. In order to function, they must simplify complexity through procedures, indicators, legal frameworks, expert assessments, and organizational routines. Both processes are necessary. Yet both create distance.
The challenge
Citizens increasingly experience institutions as detached from everyday reality. Institutions increasingly struggle to distinguish between isolated incidents, vocal minorities, organized campaigns, emerging social trends, and genuine societal concerns. The result is a growing risk of mutual misrecognition.
This challenge cannot be solved through more data alone. Nor can it be solved through greater responsiveness to the loudest voices. Social media already amplifies visibility. Visibility is not the same as representativeness. Public administrations therefore face a double risk: becoming detached from lived reality or becoming captive to highly visible fragments of reality.
Resilience Council
A Resilience Council addresses this problem by creating a structured mechanism of reciprocal correction. Unlike traditional stakeholder consultations, a Resilience Council is not primarily designed to collect opinions. Nor is it intended to replace expertise. Its function is to maintain continuous contact between institutional perspectives and the diverse realities experienced throughout society.
Advantages
This creates several advantages. First, it broadens institutional perception. Civil society organizations, educators, researchers, practitioners, and citizens often detect emerging social dynamics before they become visible through formal indicators.
Second, it strengthens legitimacy. Decisions are more likely to be perceived as fair when people recognize that their experiences have been considered, even when those experiences do not determine the final outcome.
Third, it improves resilience. Institutions become less vulnerable to both technocratic insulation and populist overreaction because they gain access to a wider range of corrective feedback.
Most importantly, a Resilience Council helps preserve the capacity for democratic self-correction.
Conclusion
The long-term challenge facing democratic societies is not merely the presence of disinformation, polarization, or extremism. It is the risk that institutions gradually lose contact with the realities they are intended to govern. Once that contact weakens, errors become harder to detect and trust becomes harder to restore.
A Resilience Council should therefore be understood not as an advisory body attached to a Digital Services Coordinator, but as a democratic infrastructure for maintaining reality contact. The Digital Services Act provides guardrails. A Resilience Council helps ensure that those guardrails remain connected to the society they are designed to protect.