In European Parliament plenary sessions this past week, several European nations voiced concerns that Russian and ISIS propaganda were influencing the spread of radicalism across their countries and called for a task force to help address these “hybrid” campaigns. The Finland, United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden and the Baltic countries have supported ideas to create a “centre of excellence” located in Helsinki that would start to address the disinformation issue being used to radicalize citizens of the EU. These countries see this propaganda as a Russian technique for controlling the outcomes of elections. Germany in particular has raised concerns about Russia tampering with election results, mirroring concerns in the U.S. that Russian hackers could have influenced election results in states with electronic polling.

In an age where social media can help spread fake news and propaganda and where foreign hackers pose a threat to the credibility of election results, it seems right that the European Union would set aside time and resources to try and address this problem. As countries like Russia and groups like ISIS continue to wage an “information war” against the EU or U.S., more vigilance will be necessary to ensure the democratic process is not being interfered with.

As the media community tries to figure out how Donald Trump won the presidential election despite the widespread conviction that Hillary Clinton would dominate the polls, one of the theories that has been circulating is that fake Facebook news played a large part in influencing America’s vote. While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied these claims, saying that Americans are more likely to vote based on experience than media exposure, it is hard to deny that social media and fake news did not influence the general public in some ways.

But America is not the only country that is influenced by fake Facebook news. In an article published by the New York Times, journalists Paul Mozur and Mark Scott discuss how countries around the world, including (but not limited to) Germany, the Philippines, and Indonesia, fake news has become a widespread issue. Richard Heydarian, a political analyst in the Philippines, criticized Facebook for reacting too slowly to curb the dissemination of fake news sources. In this specific case, protecting the citizens from faux Facebook news becomes especially important because the Philippines are one example of a country that receives most of its news from Facebook and Facebook alone. World leaders including Angela Merkel and Barack Obama have requested that the company find a means to protect users from misinformation in some way. One suggestion from Merkel was to publish the algorithm that ranks news stories so that there is more transparency within the company.

Leading up to Election Day, several world leaders expressed a distrust in presidential candidate and now President-Elect Donald Trump. Following Election Day though, several leaders set aside their ideological differences in interest of maintaining their relationship with the United States. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto didn’t offer congratulations to Trump but he did say he hopes to work together to create a strong U.S.-Mexico relationship. Other world leaders, including United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, offered advice to the American public on how to proceed. Ki-Moon reminded the American people that “it is worth recalling and reaffirming that the unity in diversity of the United States is one of the country’s greatest strengths. I encourage all Americans to stay true to that spirit.”

International media had a more visceral reaction to the election results. Political cartoonists had a field day on Wednesday, depicting Trump as a meteor, bull in a China shop, boxer that had beat up American democracy, and more in their cartoons.

As the world tries to anticipate how U.S. foreign relations will change come Jan. 20, politicians try to keep their responses measured and respectful, while the media and international citizens allow their true feelings to shine through. Whether each country’s people and leaders are pro- or anti-Trump, one thing is certain: the next four years will redefine international communications and policy in ways we can’t fully predict anymore.

Through class readings and discussions, we’ve grown to understand that the growth of the Internet (and all the other sectors that have grown because of it) has clearly not benefitted all countries and communities. In fact, in most cases, it has widened the divide between rich and poor and between powerful states and fragile ones.

Still, whether it’s through cognitive dissonance or unbridled optimism, I like to find ways in which people use new technologies in order to improve the quality of life in communities that need it most. This week I read about a couple of ways that small companies are seeking creative solutions to age old problems.

The first one is an app that connected Indonesian citizens to a network that allowed them to find resources and relief in a post-natural-disaster period. Because of Indonesia’s vulnerability to natural disaster, this kind of tool could provide a huge benefit to its residents. Another project, also funded through the international development program, Amplify, involves using tech to map slums in South Africa, giving families without an address a way to clearly place themselves and opening the door for emergency access to health care. Both of these projects use modern tech to help fill gaps when infrastructure is lacking. Although they might not end the problems that weak infrastructure has caused, they create a temporary means of relief for communities that need it most.

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.

In the first few weeks of the course, we talked a lot about how large international media companies dominate the field of international communications and media. This week,some dramatic but relatively unsurprising information was leaked about an expansion to one of the largest media companies. Qualcomm, an enormous, San Diego-based telecommunications company is in talks to acquire NXP, a Netherlands-based semiconductor company. This consolidation, which is really a vertical expansion for Qualcomm, is predicted to drastically change the semiconductor industry. Qualcomm primarily produces chips for computers and smartphones, could see it’s profits grow by 30 percent.

This is also an example of how power over telecommunications infrastructure is placed largely in the hands of huge Western corporations. There is not room in the telecommunications field for smaller, non-western companies to jump in on the profits. However, as companies like Qualcomm grow and start to integrate more and more basic infrastructure creation into their business model, they will also be able to grow their business in other countries that could use more communications infrastructure. One example of this is the Mobile Health Information System that Qualcomm is developing in Sub-Saharan Africa. As citizens, we must be critical consumers not only of the media but of the media companies themselves. Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP and subsequent growth could certainly benefit other countries, but it is crucial that we keep it in check so that large Westernized companies don’t take advantage of countries with less infrastructure.

This issue isn’t new, but it grows more and more important each day. In an article published by the Brookings Institution, global media scholar Madiha Afzal discusses the way in which the media (and as a result, the general public) are isolating Muslim Americans and Muslims around the world.

The way that media outlets cover stories about bombings in Paris, the U.S. and other Westernized countries is vastly different from the way that bombings in Pakistan and Syria are covered. Even though citizens in both sets of countries are victims to terrorism, the media tends to place less emphasis on the tragedy of deaths in countries that we “expect” to see war in. As consumers, we are also more likely to be apathetic to terrorism casualties in these countries as well, which only perpetuates the problem. By paying less attention to attacks in Muslim countries, media consumers create the impression that Muslim lives matter less than other lives. By changing our Facebook profile picture to support France after attacks last November, we unconsciously furthered this divide. And as the gap widens between Muslims (American, European, or Middle Eastern) and Western states, there is more risk that terrorist groups like ISIS will be able to recruit members that feel they have no where else to turn.

This is admittedly a hard problem to correct, but it is one that the media needs to take responsibility for and act on in order to change consumer behavior and create empathy equity.

As new media forms expand their audience to include people from around the world, the issue of equal emoji representation continues to pop up. Equal representation in emojis sounds semi-trivial, but because the small, cartoonish figures are a regular part of dialogue these days, representation through emojis is just as important as representation in other media platforms.

Recently, a young woman in Saudi Arabia, Rayouf Alhumedhi, called on the Unicode Consortium (the organization which approves keyboard standards) to add a woman wearing a hijab to the emoji keyboard. Without that emoji the 550 million Muslim women that wear hijabs throughout the world are not represented anywhere on the emoji keyboard. The hijab has been a popular topic of conversation recently, especially in Europe where debates about when and where it is acceptable to wear Muslim headscarves have arisen.

This is also not the first time the issue of emoji representation has come up though. Last March there was a widespread call for better representation of women in emoji-form. Instead of brides, dancers and princesses, several women petitioned for representations of women as doctors, businesspeople, and other professional roles.

Increasing the representation of women, different races, and different cultural practices in the emoji keyboard is a small but critical step towards more cultural acceptance and gender equality around the world.

MaryCate Most