In this time of health crisis and in the name of the exceptional nature of the situation, governments of all kinds have taken very important decisions that are almost never discussed in parliament. Extraordinary investments have been sanctioned in some cases with the risk of corruption; Uncontrolled material procurement tenders were given and the most basic rules of competition were generally forgotten. In this exceptional case, partly justified, brokers, opportunists, and often relatives of politicians swam with pleasure.
With parliament’s control stifled by circumstances, the media, with honorable exceptions, resigned from their monitoring work. In part, it was because the pandemic brought them closer to bankruptcy and they relied more than ever on corporate advertising or any form of public assistance. The combination of the two phenomena (stronger governments and weaker media) has made democracies more fragile.
Added to this is the unstoppable polarization of public opinion around the world. The social networks themselves and the algorithms that govern them lead to this polarization, which creates a lot of tension. The world of politics today is changing more and more everywhere, and emerging positions tend to coincide with the most radical proposals from both ends of the ideological spectrum.
At the congress on “Challenges for digital society and public law” held in Santo Domingo at the initiative of the Dominican Ombudsman, Pablo Ulloa, judges, lawyers, academics, journalists and the military agreed on the diagnosis of special gravity affecting democratic health. of the digital society with obvious risks in the field of Governance and Cybersecurity. The so-called “new knowledge feudal lords” or the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” have been repeatedly accused of dominating the world in today’s digital society: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google. Professor Antonio Troncoso, who opened the congress, said, “For example, in the Brexit crisis, a company like Cambridge Analytica handled citizens’ personal data without their consent, this data was not even provided to governments.” The interventions stressed that “everything is big data”, but “we must not surrender to the algorithm”. After all, the philosopher mentioned there, Daniel Innenarity, reminds us that human beings have the ability to “contextualize, organize” in the face of big data and artificial intelligence. And understanding the current world, which is so complex, is directly related to understanding the framework, the context, in which we find ourselves. We retain the ability to interpret the barrage of data that overwhelms us. The opportunity is Congress every two years. Reference.