Few problems in digital governance are as stubborn as this one: how do democracies counter online hate speech without eroding the freedom of expression and democratic participation they exist to protect? Regulate too little, and digital spaces become hostile to the very groups democracy depends on hearing. Regulate too much, and the cure begins to resemble the disease.
That tension was the explicit brief of the Council of Europe's 2026 Democracy Hackathon, held in Strasbourg from 17 to 19 June alongside No Hate Speech Week. Ayisha Piotti, served on the jury alongside Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset; Rareș Voicu, President of the European Youth Forum; and Lisa Yasko, Chair of the Parliamentary Assembly's Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact for Europe. Over three days, young innovators, technologists, civil society representatives, policymakers, and democracy practitioners built working answers to a question most institutions still approach with position papers.
What the Teams Understood That Policy Often Misses
The most striking feature of the projects which ranged from platform design and digital literacy initiatives to AI-enabled tools and community-driven interventions was not their technical ingenuity, though there was plenty. It was their instinctive grasp of the problem's social, ethical, and democratic dimensions. The teams did not treat hate speech as a content-classification task to be optimised. They treated it as a civic problem with a technical component which is precisely what it is.
Purely technical responses to online harms filters, classifiers, takedowns tend to be brittle, easy to game, and prone to over-removal that silences legitimate speech. The solutions that endure combine tools with literacy, community norms, and institutional accountability.
Youth as Co-Authors of Digital Governance
The hackathon reinforced a lesson that deserves repeating in every policy forum: technology alone will not fix our online environments, and neither will any single generation. Sustainable answers require collaboration across generations, sectors, and disciplines, and young people, who inhabit these digital spaces most fully, must be co-authors of their governance rather than subjects of it.
There is also an institutional insight worth noting. By convening a hackathon, a format borrowed from the technology world held inside one of Europe's oldest human rights institutions, the Council of Europe modelled something governance bodies everywhere should consider, i.e. meeting innovation on its own terms, while anchoring it firmly in democratic values and human rights. It is the same conviction that runs through the Council's Framework Convention on AI, and through RegHorizon's own work that the point of governing technology is not to slow it down, but to point it somewhere worth going.