In recent years, the governments of Russia and China have employed diplomacy, trade, coercion, and subterfuge to undermine democratic norms and practices in countries around the globe. In many cases, these strategies have been facilitated by the rise of social media and efforts to leverage these tools to wreak havoc in democratic states. Such threats to democracy are the subject of David L. Sloss’s Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare. Sloss’s two-part argument centers on the rise of “information warfare,” which he defines as “the use of social media by state agents to conduct foreign influence operations” (p. ix). In part I (“Diagnosis”), Sloss provides a well-packaged analysis of the threats posed by Russia and China to democratic governance around the world. Part II (“Prescription”) then proposes a set of regulatory and political responses to this threat. The main pillar of this prescription is an “Alliance of Democracies” that agrees to an international program of internet registration that would deny bad actors access to Western social media platforms. Although this ambitious book does not hit all its marks, Tyrants on Twitter is a trenchant addition to the growing literature on digital authoritarianism and social media information warfare.
Sloss presents a convincing diagnosis of the threat to liberal democracies from foreign influence operations. In lawyerly fashion, Part I lays out the evidence for and implications of Russian and Chinese information warfare in the United States and around the world. Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 US presidential campaign have been well documented, including through reports originating in the US intelligence community (the ICA Report), Oxford University (the Oxford Report), and of course the US Department of Justice investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller (the Mueller Report). Sloss uses these sources to explain the two main components of Russia’s information warfare strategy in the election. First, Russian intelligence operatives succeeded in “hacking and dumping” embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, partnering with WikiLeaks and other outlets to spread the information as widely as possible. Alongside this effort, private Russian “cyber troops” (p. 33) at the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—a company with close ties to the Putin government—embarked on a social media campaign that used thousands of fake Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram accounts to spread disinformation and sow chaos among the US electorate. Although we will never know whether these efforts had a determinative effect on the election—most analyses suggest probably not—Russian strategies in 2016 and since to promote polarization and undermine confidence in US political institutions have undeniably helped weaken American democracy.
Russia’s information warfare has not been limited to the United States. Sloss reports that, since 2014, “Russia has conducted foreign influence operations in at least twenty-one countries that are members of NATO, the European Union (EU), or both” (p. 47). In addition to its hacking and social media strategies, the Russian government has promoted pro-Russia propaganda through its media networks RT and Sputnik and pursued political and economic ties with pro-Russia politicians and parties throughout Europe. Sloss quotes Russia expert Alina Polyakova to explain these efforts: “The long-term goal is to upend the Western liberal order by turning Western virtues of openness and plurality into vulnerabilities to be exploited” (p. 47). Short case studies of Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the 2017 French presidential election, and the 2018 Swedish national elections show the expansive ambitions of this strategy.
China also deploys a range of strategies to promote antidemocratic interests around the world. In addition to its state-supported propaganda and social media programs, China has sought out markets for its internet and surveillance technologies among autocratic states, contributing to the spread of “digital authoritarianism” (p. 85). In Sloss’s account, such overt forms of Chinese political and economic influence are far more prominent than the narrow social media strategies that are the main focus of his overall argument. He does provide two examples of China’s “extensive use of covert operations on social media to support foreign influence operations” (p. 92): the Hong Kong protests in 2019 and the COVID pandemic in 2020. Compared with Russia’s many covert initiatives across Europe and North America, however, these cases suggest that such tactics have been a relatively minor part of China’s antidemocratic toolkit.
The limited nature of China’s social media strategy is the first indication that the prescription presented in part II of Tyrants on Twitter may not match the diagnosis from part I. Most of the Chinese activities outlined in the first part do not fit Sloss’s own definition of social media “information warfare,” even if they may be equally challenging to democratic norms and practices. As such, the central element of Sloss’s proposed solution—a rigorous internet registration system that would exclude Russian and Chinese state agents from Western social media platforms—would do little to address the threats he describes. A second weakness arises from the proposal’s focus on state agents. As Sloss notes in part I, most of the Russian social media activity in 2016 was conducted by a private company, the IRA, and not by registered agents of the Russian government. He presents some ideas for protecting against fake accounts and covert agents posing as civilians—such as requiring any Chinese and Russian national to prove that they are not a state agent when registering for social media access (p. 161)—but these seem unlikely to prevent well-resourced information warfare efforts such as those described in part I.
In addition to the technical challenges of excluding determined foreign agents, Tyrants on Twitter’s core recommendation—a “transnational regulatory system” for social media—would require a broad and complex set of political bargains to enact. For example, creating the proposed Alliance for Democracy, made up of “stable, liberal democracies” with “competent, professional government bureaucracies” (p. 154)—about 40 countries in Sloss’s estimation—would demand an escalation of anti-China and anti-Russia rhetoric on the part of many states that have historically resisted such us-versus-them diplomacy. Moreover, these countries would need to reach consensus about the degree and nature of social media’s threat to democracy, despite their diverse approaches to business regulation and beliefs about free speech and civil liberties. The US electorate, for one, has shown little appetite for the sort of invasive social media regulation proposed here, and this attitude seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Without a more complete understanding of how we can get from here to there politically, it is hard to see how the proposed Alliance for Democracy comes together.
These flaws do not erase the many contributions found in Tyrants on Twitter, and I encourage anyone invested in the future of global democracy to read this book. David L. Sloss has provided a careful diagnosis of the challenge posed to democracies by antagonistic governments leveraging unregulated social media for information warfare. Even for those who find his proposed solutions impracticable, the lucid and systematic presentation of his argument adds a much-needed perspective to debates about global competition, democratic decline, and the role of social media in society.
