THESE days, where one country ends and the other begins is a largely settled matter, but the Internet’s boundaries remain fair game. Even as governments increasingly erect walls around digital content, Internet users themselves are voluntarily withdrawing into smaller and more fragmented spaces.

Last year, young users spent a global average of 112 minutes a day on TikTok. Yet if governments everywhere took a cue from the United States or India and made their shores inhospitable to TikTok, all this newly freed-up time would be unlikely to accrue to centralised social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (now known as X).

Instead, those 112 minutes would likely be atomised down the myriad maws of other kinds of platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and Discord.