Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states

Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states Presented at the Media Sociology Symposium, August 7th 2025 In the uncharted domain of cyberspace, social media platforms have stepped in and stepped up as state-like entities – social states – enacting governance structures supporting a variety of state services: security to safeguard user data, public services such as content moderation, regulations for civil behavior laid out in platform standards, and policing and sanctioning behavior. As social media has increasingly become the site for public discourse, platform policies are establishing these social media as ‘de facto regulators’ of opinion, information, and news, and how these are delivered by whom, to whom, and under what circumstances. Yet, these nascent social states are fragile. Platforms are challenged by new leadership directives, the problem of keeping up with the competing demands for content moderation, internal pressures from users, external pressures from domestic and non-domestic governments, and changing landscape of participants, external concerns, and social media features. This research adopted the a ‘social media as state’ analogy to make sense of cases, controversies, and the continuously emergent practices on social media. While the ‘social media as state’ analogy has its limits, as social media have become more pervasive and seemingly independent of nation states, the analogy encourages attending to state-like functions as they are reproduced in the social organization of each social media state. Moreover, the state analogy provided the rationale for following on the idea of fragility from the Fund For Peace Fragile States Index, using their model to derive a set of fragility indicators for social media (https://fragilestatesindex.org/indicators/). Analysis of a wide range of literature on social media led to the derivation of a set of six Social Media Fragility Indicators which will be the focus of this talk. In brief, the indicators address: technical vulnerabilities and protections, internal social pressures, fragmentation, human rights, economic conditions and external pressures.