During times of health emergencies, authorities across the globe have enacted sweeping measures that rarely receive parliamentary scrutiny. In some cases, massive investments were approved with a risk of misallocation or corruption; procurement processes became opaque, and even the most basic competition safeguards were often sidelined. In this climate, brokers, opportunists, and sometimes relatives of politicians found it easy to maneuver and profit.
Parliamentary oversight was curtailed by urgent circumstances, and the press, with a few notable exceptions, reduced its watchdog role. A contributing factor was financial strain from the crisis itself, which pushed media outlets to lean more heavily on corporate advertising or state support. The combination of stronger executive power and weaker media has left democracies more vulnerable to erosion and manipulation.
Meanwhile, the public discourse has grown increasingly polarized worldwide. Social networks and their underlying algorithms amplify this divide, producing higher tensions and clashing narratives. Political life is shifting rapidly in many places, with new positions clustering around the extremes of the spectrum rather than the center.
At a congress in Santo Domingo titled “Challenges for Digital Society and Public Law,” the Dominican Ombudsman and organizer Pablo Ulloa gathered judges, lawyers, academics, journalists, and military representatives to diagnose the grave challenges facing governance and cybersecurity in the digital era. The discussions referenced the so‑called “new knowledge feudal lords” and the so‑called “four horsemen of the apocalypse” who dominate today’s information landscape: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google. Professor Antonio Troncoso, opening the congress, pointed to episodes like the Brexit crisis where a company such as Cambridge Analytica processed citizens’ personal data without consent, highlighting the gap between data abundance and governmental access. The panelists emphasized that “big data” is ubiquitous, yet there is a clear warning not to surrender to algorithmic authority. Critics and scholars alike reminded audiences that human beings retain the capacity to contextualize and organize information in the face of vast datasets and artificial intelligence. Understanding today’s world demands grasping the structural context in which it unfolds. The takeaway underscored the need for ongoing, structured dialogue—an opportunity that Congress convenes every two years as a reference point for policymakers and society at large.