What began as an innovative way to stay connected with friends and family across long distances, to showcase your personality online in increasingly creative ways, and to marvel at an interconnected world, has now taken on a far more sinister character. The innocent charm and novelty of social media have faded. Today, its immense power over billions of people worldwide has turned it into a tool for oppression, espionage, and government control.

Globally, social media is increasingly seen as both a weapon and a threat, depending on one’s perspective. Governments are beginning to classify different platforms accordingly. It is high time the world wakes up to the reality of what social media has become and seeks to establish universal guidelines for its proper use, much as we have attempted to regulate the use of advanced weaponry—whether those rules are successful or not.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has now become a propaganda machine for the right wing, stoking racial tensions, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and spreading misinformation across continents as a matter of policy.Twitter is being used to further U.S. foreign policy by discrediting Venezuela’s Maduro while censoring criticism of Israel. Similarly, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, is actively collaborating with Israel, providing information that has enabled it to carry out its genocide more effectively while also engaging in censorship at the behest of governments. The arrest of Telegram’s founder in France is yet another facet of this emerging trend; it’s refusal to cooperate with Western governments led to its founder’s arrest.

Perhaps the nation that has shown the most foresight in its approach to social media is China, which has isolated itself from Western platforms and maintained its own national networks, governed by its own policies. The world may be moving toward an era where social media ceases to exist as a unified international force, instead becoming nationalized and fragmented in pursuit of foreign policy objectives.