Given the global nature of the Internet, corporate giants like Google and Microsoft are forced to define borders, often contending with demands from governments. The result? One’s view of certain countries’ borders is often dependent on the physical location from which one accesses Google or Bing maps. In other cases—such as that of the Western Sahara—jurisdiction is a determining factor. Microsoft, which has offices in Morocco, takes its cue from Rabat in determining the territory’s borders, while Google—which does not—draws a dotted line between Morocco and the Western Sahara, demarcating the disputed border.

Although maps are perhaps the most well-known and obvious example of how social-media companies define boundaries, they are not the only one. Conduct a Google search for something with a definitive answer—such as “how long do cats live?” or “what is four plus four?”—and the company will present you with a boxed answer; that is, an “official” response pulled from third-party data and framed in a box above other search results. Google has thus far been opaque about where the data that fills the boxes comes from.

This lack of transparency becomes an issue when the question is not “what is four plus four?” but “What time is it in Ramallah?” Two years ago, the answer to this query was returned in a Google box that stated it was 2:00 p.m. in “Ramallah, Israel.” While Apple and other companies have faced controversy for their labeling of disputed Jerusalem, the location of Ramallah is hardly disputed: The city is the home of the Palestinian Authority, and situated in the West Bank, in what is referred to by most of the world (including the United States) as the occupied territories. When prompted, Google fixed the situation by removing any reference to country—responses to queries about time in Ramallah now place the city outside of national territory, as do queries about time in other disputed locales such as Dakhla (in Western Sahara, under Moroccan control) and Sevastopol (in Crimea, under Russian control).

Google and Microsoft aren’t the only companies to get caught up in geopolitical conflict. In May 2014, the porn actress Belle Knox was surprised to hear that Twitter had agreed to block her photos in Pakistan, citing a legal request they’d received from Pakistan’s telecommunications authority.

The decision to block the content was in accordance with a policy that the company introduced in 2012 in an effort to comply with government regulations on speech. Rather than remove content entirely as other companies do, Twitter created a system whereby content would be “withheld” from users in a given country. Users are notified that the content in question has been withheld due to a legal request from a government. In addition to Pakistan, the tool has been used in numerous countries, including France, Brazil, and Russia.