Restating the State?: Social Media Propaganda and the State–Non-State Nexus

Digital propaganda has evolved beyond traditional state-controlled mass media into a complex ecosystem involving governments, corporations, PR firms, activist networks, and online communities that exploit digital infrastructures for influence operations. While social media platforms appear to democratise information production, this chapter argues that the capacity to propagate content at scale remains concentrated among resource-rich actors, particularly states and Big Tech corporations. Drawing on theories of digital media power, the analysis examines how contemporary propaganda operates through deception supply chains and state-corporate partnerships. Through case studies of coordinated inauthentic behaviour and platform governance decisions, it demonstrates how algorithmic amplification, monetisation imperatives, and policy interventions shape propaganda flows on social media. The chapter reveals how the monopolisation of transnational communicative spaces by US Big Tech firms, combined with increasing government authoritarianism, recreates the centralised information control dynamics of 20th-century state broadcasting technologies – but with unprecedented global reach. Rather than dismantling hierarchical power structures, digital technologies have reconfigured them beneath a veneer of participatory democratisation.