Recent developments highlight the complexity of digital sovereignty and the increasing power of platforms in shaping democratic processes. Decisions by U.S.-based tech giants—such as Google's removal of fact-checking in the EU (Axios, 2025) and Meta’s plan to eliminate fact-checking on Facebook (Al Jazeera, 2025)—demonstrate how these corporations bypass national regulatory frameworks and exert global influence over information flows. This asymmetry of power challenges state sovereignty, reinforcing digital dependencies and deepening global inequalities.

In this context, this panel brings together perspectives from researchers from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, India, and Mexico to examine various aspects of digital sovereignty and its intersections with platform governance on different case studies. The Brazilian cases highlight the direct confrontations between governments and platforms, including an examination of the political rhetoric of tech leaders, as well as politics of fact-checking. The Argentine case explores the region’s lack of a strategic response to digital dependency, while the Mexican study underscores how AI governance reinforces structural inequalities. The Indian case demonstrates how social media governance is deeply entangled with pre-existing structures of caste, religion, and gender-based hierarchies, as seen in online misogyny and religious nationalism and how this must be taken into account on social media research.

This panel argues that digital sovereignty should not be seen merely as a legal or regulatory issue, but rather as a geopolitical, economic, social and historical struggle. By addressing these challenges from diverse regional perspectives, problems and cases, this discussion offers an intersectional and comparative approach to rethinking sovereignty in the digital age.