Geopolitics and Social Media’s Future

Social media’s fragmentation mirrors geopolitical divides, while innovators will build bridges across new information borders.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

It’s March of 2027, Guillermo had been working on his briefing of the situation in Peru that he wanted to share with his network around the world, all experienced foreign policy professionals. He often published via a Signals and WhatsApp group. But they’d had to geofence those apps a year back. He couldn’t send those messages beyond a few Latin American countries. His friend and former UK diplomat Amy would take it via USB and later upload it to a decentralised platform that would get it beyond his network of countries when she travelled to Wales.

To say we’re living in interesting times might be a bit of understatement. A rapidly changing re-alignment of geopolitical power dynamics, growing wealth inequality and a rising tension between democracies and autocracies. Playing a key role in how we’re telling stories to one another at this time is of course, social media.

As I’ve recently written, these shifts could present new challenges in the flow of data, such as data tariffs and taxes. The physical cutting of data pipelines under the oceans. The war of the chips and to some degree, the balkanisation of Artificial Intelligence along ideological lines.

So how might all this impact social media globally? Could potential outcomes result in better social media platforms? Could this be the moment for decentralised technologies like blockchain?

It’s hard to imagine that platforms like Facebook, Twitter (X) or even WhatsApp and Signal or Telegram could become so fractured, or in geopolitical terms, balkanised. But they could.

In fact, we can already see this in varying degrees and approaches. China has it’s Great Firewall and foreign apps must comply with Chinese regulations to operate. Under strict rules. This is selective platform banning. North Korea has its own infrastructure, Kwangmyong they call it. Russia has strict data residency laws. The EU’s GDPR creates a sort of European data space.

The most common workaround to these laws and approaches have been VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and within more local areas, the use of mesh networks. Social engineering type of approaches are known as steganopgraphic techniques; hiding information in seemingly boring content. Humans have been using tactic this going back centuries.

For major social media platforms, this may mean setting up data centres in specific countries to serve a single nation or group of aligned nations. But to do so would require that country or group of countries to be profitable to the platform. As they’d likely also have to comply with information and privacy laws. A nightmare. Many would leave or not bother.

This could result in a massive fracturing of social media platforms. The success of the major social media platforms, indeed most tech giants, has been sufficient enough access to as many countries as possible to drive aggressive growth. While the business model can be critiqued and is by many, a benefit to humanity has been cultural transmission and citizen to citizen engagement.

If social media platforms become fragmented and geofenced, cultural transmission slows significantly. Which means ideas slow, there’s less opportunity to understand each other and innovation flows slow or stop.

This would also contribute to friction in global commerce, especially if payment systems can no longer function, reducing the movement of capital to just a few channels. We may see the rise of region-specific platforms, further closing digital borders.

Decentralised tools like blockchain, federated networks like ActivityPub and DAOs could become valuable approaches that enable communication and preserve dialogue. The challenge will be the ability to get through digital barriers, firewalls. Humans will. We always find workarounds to governments and organisations that try to control or stop the flow of information.

Throughout human history since we started to cooperate in social groups, when a large enough number has decided it doesn’t like the way a society is run or rules imposed, they’ve always found workarounds and new ways of exchanging information and ideas.

A key component to our survival as a species is our ability to communicate. When we don’t communicate, when we can’t find a means to understand one another, is when we form ideas in isolation and create myths about “others” which turn into narratives. It’s ripe for authoritarians to reshape a nation’s narrative about its place in the world.

Eventually, the current approach to isolationism and nationalism will fade away and the world will open up again, probably in very interesting and beneficial ways for humanity. Much of that will be the result of the actions of groups and organisations opposing isolationism and populism.

In the short term (could be a decade or two) we may see the use of social media platforms and how they have to operate, change drastically. As we are also likely to see changes in various economic models such as late-stage capitalism, this will also impact how social media platforms operate when the world sorts its current mess and opens up again.

A likely result will be a consolidation of platforms, but we may not see a global social media platform rise for sometime. During an extended period of digital isolation, cultures will form new internal solidarities and customs, including trust building mechanisms, that aren’t really compatible anymore with other culture. This will mean we have to sort of learn about each other again? Or will we?

Humans are social creatures. We love to talk to one another. As I said before, we always find workarounds to talk and organise. We prefer trading with one another more than fighting one another.

So it is more likely that the citizenry of various countries will seek to connect again. Also considering the vast amounts of diaspora communities around the world today. Social media enable these connections with friends and family.

So we may well see a fundamental shift in how social media platforms work, one that is not compatible with today’s form of surveillance capitalism or even technofeudalism. This all of course, depends on how the world reshapes itself with new power dynamics.