The State Department's X Directive and the End of Platform Independence

[erronis]

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-state-department-s-x-directive-and-the-end-of-platform-independence
Kate Klonick - Lawfare

A cable endorsing a social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy and military psychological operations would have been unthinkable -- until recently.

The US government might as well use Putin's Newspeakboro.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a cable this week directing U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda. The cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk's X as an "innovative" tool for the effort and instructs U.S. diplomatic posts to align their work with the Pentagon's Military Information Support Operations (MISO), known as Psyop, the military's psychological operations unit. Rubio identifies five operational goals--countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and "telling America's story"--and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.

The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy--let alone military psychological operations--would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.

What makes this cable remarkable is the extent to which it represents a departure from how U.S. technology platforms have historically interacted with state power--including with the U.S. government. For decades, U.S.-based social media companies operated as something closer to institutional rivals of government control over online speech, foreign or domestic. Google famously clashed with the Chinese government over censorsing its search engine and ultimately redirected its Chinese operations to Hong Kong rather than comply with censorship demands. Facebook and Twitter both resisted Brazilian court orders to remove content and to identify users. Twitter--before its acquisition--went to court to resist government data requests, publishing regular transparency reports and fighting national security letters that came with gag orders. These companies were imperfect actors, but their general posture was to resist governments that sought to use their platforms as instruments of state messaging.

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