In 2010, the world saw the rise of social media activism when Twitter erupted during the Arab Spring. Then last April, Facebook unrolled a new Facebook Live feature, adding a new multimedia element to the crowd-sourced journalism mix. This tool, like Twitter, can be used for more than just activism of course. At any one time, viewers can watch a concert in India, a videogame tutorial in Vietnam, or a church festival in Ghana – connecting local cultures instantaneously.

The power of this live interactive media showed itself this week when Native American protestors at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota demonstrated their message to 26 thousand people worldwide. This is especially significant because this small, relatively accessible piece of technology allowed a marginalized group to have a global voice. Social media like this is empowering, bringing the community that will be effected by government policy into the decision making process and into the eyes of the public. Although traditional news media were able to cover the story as well, the citizen journalism seen here was extremely effective.

As communities like this one start to utilize this new medium, local cultures and will continue to grow their international presence in policy-making.

Political rivalries aren’t contained to the battlefield anymore, especially during an age of where international communication and commerce are essential to economic success. According to the New York Times, India and Pakistan have taken their battle to the silver screen. Following an attack on the Indian Army that India says came from Pakistan, top Bollywood film directors have decided not to include Pakistani actors in their films. As a result of those decisions, Pakistan has retaliated by banning all Indian shows on its top TV and radio networks, starting today.

For two cultures that have become intertwined especially in the entertainment arts, this break is damaging not only to the industry but also to the public relationship between the two countries. As hostility spreads even in the entertainment industry, a kind of nationalist witch-hunt is ignited. When Indian actor Om Puri spoke out against the ban, the other industry leaders and the public rebuked his statements, forcing him into an apology.

This reaction, of course, is also indicative of Indian citizens’ growing frustration with their government’s inability to prevent military attacks from Pakistan. In some ways, this kind of cultural band sends as much a signal to India’s government as it does to the Pakistani film industry. Until the conflict between the two countries blows over, the integration of cultural communications will cease to exist.

When huge international communications networks are created, one of the most common problems that needs to be addressed is privacy. Just last week, several American “Tech Giants” made moves to ensure that their international clients are protected in this sense. Amazon and Google both recently announced that they would create data centers and expand cloud-computing infrastructure in European countries like France, Britain and the Netherlands. Part of the reason for this is due to pressure from the European Union, which has expressed concerns that Silicon Valley companies are using and abusing their citizen’s digital information. The answer to this conflict is to move data and cloud-computing centers to Europe; when EU citizens’ digital information is in their own backyard, it allows those countries to have more control over their own data.

The EU has done a lot of negotiating over the past few years as it develops higher privacy standards to protect its citizens. As scandals involving the NSA arise, leading Americans and Europeans to question whether their personal information is being monitored online, European countries have cracked down on privacy policies involving U.S. companies.

As communications infrastructures grow in countries throughout Europe, U.S. companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will continue in their path towards international dominance. In conclusion, it will take some fine tuning to make sure that data centers and cloud-computing providers comply with the restrictions that the EU has set forth, but in the end, these American companies have far more to gain.