Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare

David Sloss — a Santa Clara University law professor specialising in international law and constitutional law — develops a legal framework for compelling social media platforms to protect democratic processes from foreign authoritarian influence operations. His argument turns on the First Amendment: while the Constitution protects domestic political speech, it does not protect foreign government propaganda — and social media platforms' publication of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-sponsored content is not constitutionally mandated. Sloss proposes specific regulatory mechanisms that would require platforms to identify and label state-sponsored foreign content without unconstitutionally restricting domestic speech.

The legal argument is carefully constructed and engages seriously with the constitutional objections that have blocked previous regulatory proposals. For practitioners advising clients on the governance dimensions of platform-enabled influence operations, the book provides the most detailed available account of how legal frameworks for platform accountability might be designed in a way that is constitutionally sustainable. The practical proposals — mandatory disclosure of state-sponsored content, liability for platforms that knowingly publish foreign government propaganda targeting elections — are specific enough to serve as a starting point for actual policy development.