Social Media Platforms Operate More As Independent States, Not Their Proxies

An independent watchdog journalism organization recently published a report that alleged that a team within Facebook attempted to influence Nicaragua’s presidential election. Facebook deleted the accounts of the country’s “top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom who supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government.” Facebook, and social media writ large, has been consistently under the microscope since hostile actors used those platforms to help sow discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Even an after-action U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment found that influence operations, disinformation, and fake news were actively distributed via these social media channels, calling attention to how responsible these companies should be for the information created and passed on their platforms.