By Dario Fabbri, geopolitical analyst and director of Domino magazine.
The internet virtually reflects the power dynamics that exist on Earth today. It’s mainly controlled by the United States, with the exception of countries such as China and Russia (in addition to occasional censorship imposed by other regimes opposed to Washington).
Born within the Pentagon’s realm, the global network remains primarily under the influence of Washington, but opposing powers limit its sovereignty, both in controlling underwater cabling and in draining the data that users leave online.
This strategic point of the network lies in governments’ ability to appropriate information from billions of users by directly accessing social network servers. Therefore, Washington, Beijing, or Moscow only allow ‘indigenous’ social networks to operate within their territories, establishing direct dependence. Some well-known examples include social networks like WeChat, Weibo, Tencent and TikTok in China, and VKontakte in Russia.
Draining data from social networks falls within the realm of Intelligence, which decades ago was an extremely dangerous and costly profession. Nowadays, however, information is offered voluntarily and freely by users and then sifted through by artificial intelligence. Machines comb through an immense amount of data that would be impossible for the human mind to analyse.
Through this data, the American, Chinese or Russian governments can attempt to understand the direction in which a community is moving, posing important questions such as: “Are the general population inclined to have children?”, “Are they ready to go to war?”, “How do they treat foreigners?”, “Do they prioritise quality of life or raw power?”.
The case of TikTok is peculiar, being the only Chinese social network widely used in the West, especially in the United States, primarily by the younger generation. Through the data it gathers, the communist government aims to study the American generation that may one day stand against the People’s Republic. Specifically, the generation currently aged 16 or 17. Hence, the recurring request from the U.S. administration for TikTok to divest its local branch.
The amount of information collected by these social networks is something that various governments could never obtain directly, not even through hundreds of censuses. Instead, social networks make this intrusive digging appear benign, something that the population would hardly consent to with awareness.
Social networks still hold a captivating allure, with some more than others being wrapped in an attractive veneer that can’t be compared to the information gathering capabilities of a state or an intelligence agency. Moreover, social networks portray themselves as bastions of freedom of expression, immune to manipulative power games. Our dependence on sharing personal data makes their otherwise complicated work much easier.
The governments of major powers retrieve data directly from social network servers or email accounts, albeit using different methods. In America, the Federal State holds the balance of power. However, figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates did not come up with the technologies they use to collect and process this vast amount of data. The internet itself, like Siri, is an example of this. Therefore, the big fear for Big Tech companies is to be excluded from the next wave of inventions produced by the Pentagon.
Furthermore, the captains of social networks and other Big Tech companies are American citizens either by birth or naturalisation, which is a crucial characteristic in the United States. Americans impose significant self-censorship, typical of an empire. They know full well the boundaries they must stay within and the risks of challenging the State. The situation is different in China or Russia, where the rule of law in the Western sense is absent, and local regimes directly impose their will on social networks without excluding them from future technological advances, which have so far been absent.
These seemingly secondary dynamics, inherent in the web and social networks, inform the competition between powers for global hegemony.
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