• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, September 29, 2025

I’ve been attending events at the UN General Assembly for years, but this September felt different. The speeches, the security barricades, the overlapping crises—they were familiar. What stood out was how the conversation about power is shifting.

It wasn’t just the talk of wars or climate threats. It was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stark line that cut through the usual diplomatic fog: “Weapons change over time… the most important ones are the social media.”

He wasn’t talking about nukes, tanks, or cyberattacks. He was talking about TikTok. More precisely, the looming shift in who owns one of the most powerful platforms shaping global youth culture, politics, and identity.

Think about that for a moment. A world leader at the UNGA, surrounded by presidents and prime ministers, naming a phone app as the most important weapon of our age.

It’s not hyperbole. Social platforms decide what billions of people see, how they interpret events, and what emotions get amplified. Rage, fear, hope—each is engineered, packaged, and served up in endless scrolls.

The change in TikTok’s ownership isn’t just a business headline. It’s a shift in the balance of narrative power. Will the next viral campaign inflame violence or inspire peace? Will the voices amplified belong to democratic activists or authoritarian propagandists? Those decisions are made not in the Security Council, but in the opaque layers of code that run our feeds.

UNGA is supposed to be about nations negotiating their future. But increasingly, the battles that shape democracy, public health, even war itself, aren’t happening in Geneva or New York. They’re happening on platforms owned by corporations—sometimes with interests aligned with authoritarian states, sometimes with private investors chasing profit, rarely with citizens or democracy in mind.

That’s what Netanyahu’s warning means: The frontline isn’t tanks on borders—it’s narratives in feeds.

So here’s the challenge: if social media is the most important weapon, who should be trusted to control it? Governments? Billionaires? Or can we imagine a system where the public has some agency, where truth and safety are part of the architecture rather than afterthoughts?

TikTok’s ownership change is one moment in a larger story. But it’s a reminder that the future of global security isn’t just negotiated at UNGA—it’s coded into the platforms we use every day.

That realization stayed with me as I crossed town a few days later for a very different gathering. The Clinton Global Initiative, invitation-only, tucked away from the diplomatic chaos, hosted a session on “Truth and Information.” The room was smaller, quieter, stripped of the ceremony of flags and translators. But the conversation felt even more urgent. Journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa led it. And if Netanyahu’s line at UNGA was a warning, Ressa’s remarks were a siren.

She spoke without notes, urgent, insistent, describing what she calls our “information Armageddon.” First the battle for facts, where AI systems and algorithm-driven feeds distort truth faster than it can be checked. Then the battle for agency, as our biology itself is hijacked by anger and fear pumped into us by platforms designed to addict. And finally the battle for the future—whether humanity will be in charge, or whether the machines and the corporations that run them will continue to dictate the terms.

Her point was stark: Big Tech impunity has to end. We can’t keep pretending the platforms will fix themselves. We can’t rely on half steps, trust-and-safety offices that get quietly defunded, or voluntary codes of conduct that evaporate under shareholder pressure. We need real rules, real accountability, and public-interest digital infrastructures built with democracy in mind. “No action, talk only is no longer an option,” she said.

Sitting in that room, I thought back to Netanyahu’s podium. A head of state declaring social media the most important weapons of our time. And now a journalist, who has risked her freedom to expose how those weapons are deployed, telling us the window for action is closing.

The symmetry was striking. The same week, two very different leaders, from two very different vantage points, saying essentially the same thing: Power has shifted. The battlefield is digital.

I left CGI unsettled but also clear-eyed. If we keep treating social media as entertainment, as a business story, or as something kids will eventually outgrow, we’re missing the plot. These are not toys. They are not neutral platforms. They are weapons of mass persuasion, shaping elections, fueling violence, distorting reality itself. And until we answer the question of who gets to govern them—and on what terms—we are fighting wars we don’t even realize we’re in.

Watch Maria Ressa’s “Truth and Information" presentation here.