A Historical Inversion of Concerns in Communication Governance: A Comparative Analysis of the Core Themes of the New World Information and Communication Order and the TikTok Congressional Hearing in the United States

This study conducts a comparative-historical analysis of communication-governance themes across two landmark episodes: documents associated with the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) from the 1970s and 1980s, and the 2023 U.S. congressional hearing examining TikTok. Employing qualitative thematic analysis, the study traces how structural anxieties over infrastructural autonomy and communicative power migrate across distinct geopolitical and technological configurations. While NWICO debates, articulated from the Global South, contested Western media dominance and unilateral information flows through demands for structural equity and the right to communicate, the TikTok proceedings reveal an institutional realignment: the United States, historically the foremost champion of the unrestricted flow of information, now frames a non-Western platform through the imperatives of digital sovereignty, data containment, algorithmic accountability, and adolescent well-being. This conceptual shift is theorized as a “historical inversion of communication-governance concerns.” Crucially, the empirical material demonstrates a robust bipartisan consensus: rather than reflecting partisan ideological cleavages, technical governance inquiries and geopolitical security anxieties functioned as mutually reinforcing registers within a unified institutional diagnosis of platform vulnerability. The study concludes that the NWICO legacy provides a critical historical grammar for interrogating contemporary tensions of data sovereignty and platform governance in an era characterized by algorithmic dependencies.