Social Media's Role In Trade Wars
This is the first trade war in human history where the entire world is digitally connected and where social media is playing a defining role. No longer are economic conflicts confined to diplomatic cables and corporate boardrooms. It is the first trade war of the social media age. Unfolding in real-time across borders and through the screens in our pockets. Not just reshaping how nations respond, but who participates in that response.
While it is hard to say without deeper research and so early in this global economic war brought on by the President of the United States, we can hypothesise that social media is having some sort of impact.
Having conducted netnographic research into how online hate speech translates into political violence in the streets and advised corporations and governments on the impact of social media and digital technologies on geopolitics, I am seeing patterns emerge. Weak signals and early indicators.
In Canada, as the U.S. threatened and imposed tariffs, then called them off and then the president added fuel to the fire with calls for Canada to become the 51st State and called the Prime Minister "Governor", national pride grew resoundingly. The hashtag and term "Elbows Up" zipped around the nation faster than a cat on a hot tin roof. The term originates from hockey legend Gordie Howe who used his elbows to fight off opponents on the rink.
In China, a slew of different hashtags and terms spread across social media, some government generated, some by citizens. Some created memes of MAGA hat prices going up 100% with large "Made in China" stickers attached using AI and other editing tools.
So what does this mean then? What are the implications?
Social Media's Disruptive Impact on Trade War Dynamics
Prior to the current state of affairs, governments had days, sometimes weeks to frame their narratives around trade actions. Today however, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the "time signature" of international relations. The internet and thus social media, collapse time and space. They allow for rapid transmission of cultures.
Ordinary citizens are now finding themselves as active participants in shaping the narratives and influencing trade disputes which were previously largely limited to trade associations and lobbyists. Social media enables the rapid organising of protests and placing pressure on politicians. Something we've seen influencing the current Canadian federal election and in other countries where governments must now weigh citizen sentiment in how they respond nationally and diplomatically.
We are also seeing how affected groups are using social media to organise across borders, applying even greater pressure and forming counterweights to official trade policies. For now, we can't really know how effective this is.
Social media platforms and the content created, such as memes, distil complex issues into easily shareable symbols and phrases (i.e. Elbows Up, penguin memes etc.) Rallying cries that previously took weeks or months can achieve cultural saturation within days. This results in rapid symbolic condensation previously unheard of.
For businesses this can also mean that consumers become aware of price increases or potential product shortages before businesses can respond. In America, many citizens have rushed to stock up on goods before tariffs came into place.
This affects supply chains as well as the transportation networks that move goods around. There is a knock-on effect as information and disinformation flows at rapid pace. This makes it harder for governments, businesses and other organisations to navigate the infosphere. Myth-making and counter-narratives run rampant. Anyone and everyone can "flood the zone". And they are.
In a way, digital citizen solidarity movements gain autopoietic properties, becoming self-generating and self-sustaining, potentially outliving the specific policies that birthed them. The collective response thus becomes more sophisticated than any individual contribution.
These are non-linear impacts that can cascade from small actions into significant economic or diplomatic effects via the amplification afforded by social media. It is where online activism translates into civil actions in the street, both violent and non-violent.
Many governments and political parties, along with pundits, still use prior similar events, such as the 1930's as their guide to predicting outcomes and forecasting events. This is reasonable, but in large part they are still catching up to the implications of a hyper-connected world and the potential effects of social media, which is the fly in the digital soup of international affairs during a trade war such as this.
We are entering a period of long-term systemic shifts as the world order reorganises. We are in a phase transition. Trade disputes are increasingly characterised by multiple theatres of conflict (diplomatic, economic, informational), non-state actors now wielding influence and the cascading effects that cross sectors and borders in unpredictable ways.
Governments that take a forward-thinking approach that acknowledge social media not as merely a communications channel but as a fundamental component of economic statecraft will fare better in managing, to some degree, the narrative.
This is a profound shift in economic power relations. One where the traditional monopoly of state actors over international economic policy is gradually being eroded by distributed networks of digitally connected citizens.
