ANTIGONE

ANTIGONE aims to rethink how societies can support meaningful disagreement online without undermining democratic values. It does so by:

• Diagnosing how online speech leads to exclusion and antagonism;
• Tracing how disinformation spreads across platforms and borders;
• Identifying practices that support healthy digital disagreement;
• Developing tools and frameworks to help design better digital spaces.

Drawing on the concept of agonistic democracy, ANTIGONE approaches disagreement not as a threat to democratic life but as its foundation, arguing that digital communication systems must be designed to host conflict constructively rather than simply detect or delete harmful content. Combining insights from media studies, law, computer science and democratic theory, the project develops a framework and practical tools to distinguish harmful disinformation from necessary disagreement, and to encourage productive contestation over symbolic exclusion among relevant stakeholders operating under conditions of public mistrust and contested platform rules.