Platforms, Sanctions, and Unrecognized Regimes

The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise to power of the Taliban in the summer of 2021 presented social media platforms with an unprecedented problem: Numerous official Afghan government accounts and pages routinely used to communicate with the Afghan public were now under the control of a heavily sanctioned terrorist group that claimed to be and often acted as the country’s new government, but was not recognized as such by the international community. The diverse and evolving approach that social media platforms have adopted toward both Afghan institutions and the Taliban in the ensuing years underscores the difficult questions such a scenario presents, which often implicate competing humanitarian and national security concerns. 

This report outlines a novel strategy—called the “de facto authorities rule”—for addressing such scenarios that would have social media platforms (and potentially other private actors) align the services they provide to regimes like the Taliban with the ex-tent to which they qualify as local de facto authorities under international law. Doing so would strike a better balance between these competing concerns, in a matter that is both rooted in international and domestic legal practice and can be substantially reconciled with national and international sanctions obligations.

You can read the paper here or below: