Over the last three years, the general public discourse educational researchers and institutions have been discussing the potentials, and effects of so-called artificial intelligence systems (Seldon et al. 2020; Shah 2023). Generative AI has already been used to craft disinformation – text-based or visual content – and as a destructive influence on democratic online and media discourses (McQuillan 2022; Williamson 2024; Mansell et al. 2025). The European Union devised the Digital Services Act (DSA) to provide the public and technology users with some transparency, regulation, and guidelines for using very large online platforms, and to counter online hate speech or disinformation (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065). Globally, radical-right populism seems to be the predominant actor in the spreading of misinformation by political parties. With Donald Trump taking over the US presidency in 2025 for the second time, most CEOs of big tech corporations are either in Trump’s team or following the authoritarian drift against potent content moderation, measures against hateful content, disinformation and other anti-democratic strategies on their social media platforms (Verge Staff 2025).

This development includes corporations that have pushed into the European educational market with their edtech products. The ’education-industrial complex’ (Picciano/Spring 2013) is evolving into an education-industrial-authoritarian complex. In this sense, educational actors and institutions, while being addressed with ‘charting the way forward’ (cf. CfP ECER 2025), are under pressure to, on the one hand, use commercial and potentially harmful or even ‘violent’ educational technologies and, on the other hand, provide learners, youth and adults alike, with opportunities for developing critical, reflective, alternative perspectives and capabilities to use or not use, to learn or unlearn digital infrastructures for educational and/or democratic purposes.

These shifts in digital technologies and cultures, in the role of the state and the political sphere, as well as in the field of education and educational research - culminating in the potential rise of an ‘education-industrial-authoritarian complex’ - raises questions around the relationships and interferences between these three societal actors. The panorama sketched out above positions educational researchers and institutions as well as media education as a profession and discipline with responsibility to respond accordingly. The symposium aims to tackle these broad questions with the following questions and trajectories:

-          How can media education research understand the shift from a predominant neoliberal educational technology regime to authoritarian tendencies in big tech?

-          How does this understanding shape the means and ends of media education? What role could the intersection between civic or political education and media education play and how can it be specified?

-          What digital infrastructures can and should be used in educational settings and what arguments can be mobilized to reason for or against it? What alternative digital infrastructures can be designed, developed and used and how can required funding be provided? What qualities of edtech make it desirable for the ‘common good’: e.g. non-commercial, non-datafying, non-commodifying, open learning-based, FLOSS-based, interoperable etc.?

-          What ethical considerations are important in this context and with regard to automating learning, algorithmic education and the use of robots in classrooms?

-          What research on the intersection between authoritarian tendencies in (digital) politics, digital capitalist infrastructures, and the education system is needed and what methods are most promising for profound analyses and (generative) critique?

Mansell, R., Durach, F., Kettemann, M. C., Lenoir, T., Procter, R., Tripathi, G., & Tucker, E. (2025). Information ecosystem and troubled democracy, A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on News Media, AI and Data Governance. Observatory on Information and Democracy (OID). https://observatory.informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/rapport_forum_information_democracy_2025.pdf McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti‑Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Picciano, A.G.; Spring, J. H. (2013): The great American education-industrial complex: ideology, technology, and profit. New York: Routledge Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng Seldon, A.; Metcalf, T.; Abidoye, O. (2020). The Fourth Education Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Enrich or Diminish Humanity? Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press Shah, P. (2023). AI and the Future of Education: Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Verge Staff (2025). Tech’s shift to Trump: all the companies and execs kissing the ring. https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/16/24345174/tech-leaders-companies-support-donald-trump-presidency Williamson, B. (2024). The Social life of AI in Education. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 34(1), 97–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-023-00342-5