Territory Without Borders

Most people don’t realise it, but our daily digital habits now sit inside foreign political systems.

We are used to thinking of territory as physical (land, borders, airspace, and seas), a space we inhabit. That how we usually define territory in law & politics, but the concept does not always fit neatly within media studies. In digital age, media territory destabilises traditional assumptions about where politics “happens.” States no longer need to occupy land to influence populations. They can govern communicative environments, curate affective climates, and discipline speech through code.

Territory ceases to be an object of geography and becomes a function of communication. This kind of territory is less visible but no less powerful. It is the space where information circulates, where communities are shaped, and where control over data becomes a form of leverage and a battle of influence.

TikTok and WeChat, for example, represent the next historical iteration of this territorial logic. Algorithms, data infrastructures, and surveillance protocols function as digital cartographies, mapping not land but populations, cognitive, and behaviours. These ideas aren’t abstract. They are already playing out across the region at subtle but alarming pace.

Let’s begin with TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance has become increasingly entangled with political processes beyond borders. In September 2023, TikTok signed a memorandum of agreement with Indonesia’s Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) to help moderate content ahead of the 2024 general election that brought Prabowo Subianto to power. According to Freedom House, this collaboration involved aligning TikTok’s community guidelines with Bawaslu’s priorities, a level of regulatory intimacy that should raise eyebrows. For years, scholars of Indonesian media have traced sprawling networks of digital propaganda linked to paid pro-government influencers supporting both Prabowo and his predecessor Joko Widodo, often compared to China’s “fifty-cent army”. Prabowo’s own campaign benefited even more directly. His playful dancing videos went viral on TikTok, washing his image from a former general accused of human rights abuses into a harmless cuddly grandpa.

This is digital authoritarianism through AI-powered whitewashing. Not because TikTok is inherently authoritarian, but because this “space” or “territory” makes political image-laundering extraordinarily easy. And this playbook has precedents. China’s paid “fifty-cent” commentators and Russia’s troll factories in Olgino pioneered this model, but the new frontier is subtler: what Gregory Asmolov calls participatory propaganda, where audiences willingly co-produce narratives that support the state. Or digital populism, when it relies on “buzzers” (paid coordinated online armies) like those in Indonesia. And the influence of these digital territories does not stop at national borders. What happens on level of control of this “territory” in Indonesia, Russia, or China inevitably leaves traces in Australia too.

During Australia’s 2022 election cycle, PM Scott Morrison’s official WeChat account was unexpectedly lost, severing his direct link with Chinese-speaking voters. Although the account bore his name and had been used to engage diaspora communities, it was not owned by his office but registered through a Chinese citizen, which made it vulnerable to third-party control. Just imagine if you have an account, but that’s not really yours. This is because foreign politicians are ineligible for official WeChat public accounts, Morrison could not re-register through an approved channel, leaving him exposed in this grey area of the platform’s policy. It’s interesting but also alarming that calls to regulate WeChat and similar Chinese platforms have gained some attention in parliamentary inquiries and committee reports, but have yet to result in decisive legislative action, even as American platforms like Facebook face new obligations under Australia’s online safety and misinformation laws.

The cases of WeChat and TikTok should make us pause. These platforms are not just tools for communication or entertainment, but territorial actors and para-sovereign systems. Their networks, rules, and algorithms function like borders and jurisdictions, defining who can speak, what can circulate, and which publics remain visible. They carry with them political logics and surveillance capacities. Through WeChat, Beijing can engage diaspora communities directly in Australia or anywhere else in the world, shaping their information environment, bypassing host-country institutions. Through TikTok, vast stores of data are gathered in ways that make user behaviour (and potentially national security) vulnerable. They mediate the reach of the Chinese state, reshape diasporic identity, and redefine where “China” exists, not on a map, but in communicative space. It means that the struggle over information flows is no longer peripheral to geopolitics. It is geopolitics.

All those examples illustrate a structural shift of territory without border and how power is exercised more subtly. Now, data collection replaces cartographic surveying, and algorithmic governance extends border enforcement. If maps once made land governable, algorithms make populations legible.

Law, especially international law, conceptualises territory and sovereignty in terms of jurisdiction over physical space. It’s codified through treaties, borders, and cartography. While international relations and law have long provided robust frameworks for understanding power and sovereignty, both fields have tended to approach media as instrumental (a vehicle for diplomacy or soft power) rather than as a structural condition shaping international order itself.

The critical point is that media territory blurs the line between domestic and foreign, public and private. When citizens use these platforms, they are not just participating in cultural exchange. They are entering a domain shaped by another state’s political and economic priorities. For policymakers, the challenge is not only regulatory (how to secure data, ensure transparency, and protect users), but also democratic: how to sustain open societies when the infrastructures of communication themselves are tied to competing political agendas.

This means media is often treated instrumentally, as a messenger of politics rather than a medium that makes politics possible. The assumption is: politics happens somewhere (in the UN, in parliaments, at borders), and media merely reports it. But in the digital age, media itself is where politics happens. Understanding territorial without borders will fundamentally alter how we pursue other issues, like territorial disputes, sovereignty, power, and even migration.

Recognising media territory as part of geopolitical space means regional cooperation on data governance, data sovereignty and information resilience must now be treated as strategic priorities, not afterthoughts.

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This article, written by Lupita Wijaya, Research Fellow at La Trobe Asia, where she manages the Southeast Asia Maritime Media Visits Program (2025-2027) under the Blue Security initiative supported by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Her expertise spans maritime issues, non-traditional security, and Southeast Asia-Australia relations. Her most recent interview with GMA News Philippines (2 November 2025) commented on alliance-building between Southeast Asia and Australia, and her latest research article, Navigating the Roles of Primary Definers in the South China Sea Conflict, was published in January 2025.