Unmasking Uncle Sam: A Legal Test for Identifying State Media

Abstract

In December 2018, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee published a report detailing how the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the flagship federal state media agency, improperly targeted Americans with its content through social media 860 times over a two-year period. U.S. state media agencies have enormous resources, and if left unchecked, could unduly influence free public discourse and threaten the independence of the American free press. To address this growing concern, this Article proposes a new comprehensive legal test for identifying state media that incorporates existing approaches employed by the federal government and private media entities for analyzing government publications.

Keywords: state media, social media, Facebook, Twitter