Introduction
Blog post 136 argued that the Digital Services Coordinator faces a structural epistemic problem. Its understanding of systemic risks is necessarily reconstructed through proxies: platform reports, researcher access, trusted flaggers, complaints, audits, and other mediated sources. These sources are indispensable, but each provides only a partial view of the social reality with which systemic risks interact.
Interdemocracy was proposed as a way of addressing this epistemic gap by providing an independent societal evidence layer. A Resilience Council can provide the institutional interface through which this evidence enters the DSC’s process of self-correction.
If this is the purpose of the proposed mechanism, the question then becomes: whose reality should first be tapped into?
Minors
Minors seem an obvious starting point. They are among the populations most directly affected by the design and governance of digital platforms, yet their perspectives are only marginally incorporated into the public decision-making processes that shape these environments. Recent debates on smartphone restrictions, social media bans, and earlier public-health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that policies with profound consequences for minors can be developed without a systematic procedure for eliciting and integrating their experiences. This creates both a democratic and an epistemic deficit. From a democratic perspective, children have a recognized right to express their views on matters affecting them. From an epistemic perspective, excluding a highly relevant population experiencing platform-mediated risks deprives the DSC of an important source of evidence about those risks.
The invisible reality of minors
The problem is particularly pronounced because minors inhabit digital environments that many adults do not directly experience. Their online lives emerge through changing combinations of social media platforms, messaging applications, gaming environments, recommendation systems, creator cultures, and peer networks. These environments can change faster than institutional structures can follow.
Institutions currently depend heavily on indirect representations of young people’s experiences. Parents, teachers, researchers, journalists, advocacy groups, and platforms provide valuable information. Yet none of these actors occupies the position of the young people themselves.
This does not make adult observations, scientific research, or platform data less valuable. It means that they represent reality from positions other than that of the minors experiencing it.
The DSC faces, in relation to minors, the problem identified in blog post 136 - how can an institution remain connected to a reality that it cannot directly observe? - in an even more pronounced form.
A suitable first implementation
Minors are not merely a socially desirable population with which to begin. They combine several properties that make them particularly suitable as a first group through which the Saufex mechanisms can be implemented. First, they are directly affected by the digital environments whose systemic risks the DSC is expected to assess and are explicitly recognized in the DSA as a vulnerable population requiring particular consideration. Second, their experiences are insufficiently represented in existing institutional processes. Their exclusion therefore creates an epistemic deficit as well as a democratic one. Third, minors constitute a particularly suitable population for implementing Interdemocracy. Educational institutions can present favourable conditions for generating independently formulated perspectives at scale as discussed, for instance, in blog post 27.
Conclusion
Minors therefore constitute a particularly strong starting point for reducing the DSC’s epistemic distance from society. That is why the first Resilience Council supporting the DSC should be a Youth Resilience Council (see also: blog post 100).