From S.P.A.R.K. to CIVIC IMMUNITY to DEBATE: a behind-the-scenes account of building projects for a democracy that has changed shape.
We thought we were designing a project about youth participation.
Then the question changed.
Because once you ask who gets to participate in democracy, another question appears almost immediately: participate in what kind of public space? A space where citizens can deliberate, disagree, and influence decisions, or a space where attention is manipulated, outrage is amplified, and trust is quietly dismantled before the conversation even begins?
This is the story of how three project ideas began to form a single line of inquiry inside REDefine’s work. The first, S.P.A.R.K., asked how young people can participate meaningfully in public life beyond elections. The second, CIVIC IMMUNITY, asked how citizens can recognise, resist, and respond to disinformation and foreign information manipulation. The third, DEBATE, is still at inception stage, and it asks the question now becoming impossible to avoid: what if the future of media literacy depends not only on what citizens know, but on how they feel, react, trust, share, withdraw, and behave inside algorithmic systems?
These projects are not the same. They have different calls, different architectures, different partners, and different levels of maturity. Two have already been submitted. The third is only beginning to take shape. But together, they reveal something important about the direction of our work.
We started with youth participation.
We ended up confronting the architecture of democratic life itself.
1. The First Question Was Simple: Who Gets to Participate?
Democracy is often discussed as if participation begins when citizens are invited into a room.
But a room can be open and still not be reachable.
This was one of the first tensions behind S.P.A.R.K. The project began from a problem that looks familiar on the surface: young people should be more involved in democratic life beyond elections. This is the kind of sentence that appears in strategies, speeches, youth policy documents, and funding priorities. It is true, but by itself it is not yet useful. The harder question is not whether young people should participate. The harder question is what makes participation possible, credible, and consequential for young people who do not begin from the same social position.
Some young people enter public life with the invisible equipment democracy quietly rewards: confidence, time, mobility, language, digital access, institutional familiarity, family support, educational capital, and the assumption that someone will listen. Others enter with fewer of those advantages, or with obstacles that compound each other: socio-economic precarity, rural or peripheral location, migrant or minority background, disability, discrimination, gendered expectations, displacement, weaker access to information, or a long history of institutions feeling distant, procedural, or unresponsive.
When participation depends on already having the confidence, contacts, and vocabulary to participate, democracy reproduces the very inequalities it claims to correct.
This is why S.P.A.R.K. was never only about “giving young people a voice.” That phrase is well-intentioned, but it can become dangerously soft. Young people already have voices. The issue is whether democratic systems create pathways where those voices can become visible, organised, deliberative, and connected to decisions.
The data supports this distinction. The 2024 Flash Eurobarometer on Youth and Democracy showed that young Europeans are not simply apathetic. Nearly half reported that they had taken action in the previous year to change something in society. At the same time, familiarity with formal ways of engaging with the EU remains uneven. This matters because civic energy and civic access are not the same thing. A young person may care deeply about climate, housing, discrimination, war, education, mental health, or democratic rights, and still not know where that concern can go beyond a post, a protest, a conversation, or a brief burst of frustration.
That gap between civic willingness and democratic pathway became the centre of S.P.A.R.K.
The project’s core idea is simple but demanding: participation beyond elections must be structured, inclusive, deliberative, and visibly connected to public decision-making. Not symbolic. Not decorative. Not a one-day consultation where young people are asked to speak, thanked, photographed, and then quietly disconnected from what happens next.
S.P.A.R.K. was designed around a different chain. Young people identify participation barriers from lived experience. They deliberate together. They compare local and national realities. They move from barriers to priorities, and from priorities to proposals. They engage directly with public bodies. They contribute to youth-led recommendations and to a transferable framework that civil society organisations and public authorities can adapt in other contexts.
This matters because participation cannot be reduced to expression. Expression is important, but democracy needs more than expression. It needs translation: from experience into language, from language into proposals, from proposals into dialogue, from dialogue into public responsibility.
The project also begins from an intersectional diagnosis. Youth participation is not blocked by one barrier alone. A young person’s access to civic life can be shaped by income, geography, disability, gender, ethnicity, migration history, institutional trust, digital access, educational background, and, in the case of Ukraine, war and displacement. Eurostat data on young people not in employment, education, or training, and on populations at risk of poverty or social exclusion, gives this issue a material basis. Participation is shaped by time, stability, confidence, transport, information, and whether public life feels like a place where one belongs.
This was the first design lesson: if we want young people to participate meaningfully, we cannot only ask them to care more. We have to redesign the conditions under which caring becomes democratic agency.
S.P.A.R.K. is our answer to that first question.
But as the project developed, another question began to press against it.
Because even if young people participate, even if citizens deliberate, even if institutions listen — what happens when the public sphere itself becomes harder to read?
2. Then Came the Harder Question: What If the Debate Itself Is Being Manipulated?
Participation assumes a public space.
It assumes that citizens can encounter information, evaluate claims, listen to others, disagree, deliberate, and make sense of competing arguments. It assumes that public debate, however imperfect, still has enough shared reality to function.
But what if that assumption is becoming fragile?
This was the question that moved us from S.P.A.R.K. toward CIVIC IMMUNITY. If S.P.A.R.K. asks how citizens enter democratic life, CIVIC IMMUNITY asks what happens when the room they enter has already been flooded with noise.
Disinformation is often described too narrowly, as if the main problem is a false claim waiting to be corrected. But contemporary manipulation is rarely only about whether one sentence is true or false. It works through repetition, emotional framing, identity threat, artificial amplification, false authenticity, synthetic media, fake grassroots legitimacy, narrative laundering, and the strategic exploitation of distrust.
It does not only misinform. It disorients.
That distinction matters. A citizen can be confused by a false claim, but a community can be weakened by a sustained attack on trust. When disinformation and foreign information manipulation interfere with public debate, they affect much more than knowledge. They can distort public priorities, discourage participation, delegitimise independent media, intensify hostility between groups, deepen cynicism toward institutions, and make democratic disagreement feel like existential threat.
This is why CIVIC IMMUNITY treats disinformation and FIMI as democratic stressors, not only as media problems.
The evidence is difficult to ignore. The European External Action Service’s recent work on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference maps a threat environment that is coordinated, cross-border, and infrastructural. Its third FIMI report and related public communication describe hundreds of observed FIMI incidents across 2024, spread across many countries and platforms, involving tens of thousands of accounts and targeting hundreds of organisations. The point is not that every citizen must become an intelligence analyst. The point is that manipulation has become part of the environment in which democratic life now happens.
At the same time, citizens are increasingly encountering political and social information through platform systems they do not fully control or understand. The European Parliament’s 2025 Social Media Survey found that more than three quarters of respondents sometimes come across social or political information on social media by chance, even when they were not actively looking for it. That is a quiet but profound democratic fact. Citizens are not only choosing their public sphere. They are being delivered into one.
This is where the democratic problem becomes sharper. If participation requires informed citizens, and information exposure is increasingly shaped by algorithmic visibility, emotional engagement, and opaque platform logics, then participation itself requires new forms of literacy and resilience.
Digital presence is not the same as digital preparedness. Eurostat reported that in 2023 only a little over half of EU citizens aged 16 to 74 had at least basic digital skills, far below the EU’s 2030 Digital Decade target. But even that figure does not fully capture the new challenge. Basic digital skills do not necessarily mean that someone understands recommender systems, synthetic content, coordinated amplification, AI-generated personas, misleading context, or why certain narratives repeatedly appear in their feed at precisely the moment they are emotionally primed to react.
CIVIC IMMUNITY emerged from this gap.
The project does not reject fact-checking. Fact-checking remains essential. Journalism remains essential. Media literacy remains essential. But the project begins from the recognition that democratic resilience cannot depend only on correcting falsehoods after they have circulated. By then, the damage may already have moved through emotion, trust, identity, and group dynamics.
So the project asks: what would it mean to prepare citizens before exposure, strengthen recognition during manipulation, and support democratic response after harm has occurred?
This is where the metaphor of civic immunity became useful. Immunity is not panic. It is not paranoia. It is not the fantasy of becoming invulnerable. Immunity is preparation, recognition, response, and recovery. A healthy democratic society does not avoid all harmful information. It develops reflexes, shared language, trust relationships, repair mechanisms, and the capacity to respond without becoming more polarised in the process.
CIVIC IMMUNITY therefore became a project about civic reflexes. How do citizens recognise manipulation without retreating into cynicism? How do communities discuss distrust without deepening it? How do journalists and citizens rebuild dialogue? How do educators teach disinformation without merely repeating harmful narratives? How do vulnerable groups become part of resilience work without being framed as gullible or deficient? How do immersive simulations help people rehearse democratic pressure before it happens in real life?
That was the moment the work changed again.
Because if participation was the first layer, and civic immunity was the second, a third question was waiting underneath both:
What if citizens can identify false information and still be moved by it?
What if the next frontier is not only what people know but how they feel, react, share, withdraw, trust, and behave under algorithmic pressure?
The public argument is this: democracy now needs participation infrastructure and civic immunity.
The studio question is harder: how do we actually design that? How do we turn a civic concern into a project architecture? How do we avoid tokenism, panic, jargon, techno-solutionism, and beautiful ideas that cannot survive a funding form?
This is the part that usually remains invisible.
Continue reading inside the Inner Circle.
The full essay goes behind the scenes of three REDefine projects — from youth participation to civic immunity against disinformation, and into a new Horizon concept on emotion, AI, algorithms, and democratic behaviour. Subscribe to access the complete article and future civic imagination essays.
