32 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL WAR Engage with Companies Implicated in the Infrastructure of Digital Transnational Repression y Legislate transparency into how social media companies respond to government requests to remove online content from their platforms or requests for user information. Social media companies may end up facilitating acts of digital transnational repression by, for example, closing activists’ social media pages pursuant to a request from state or state-related actors. Ensuring greater transparency into how such decisions are made and what their outcomes are provides a potential mechanism for accountability. y Engage with social media companies to understand how they currently identify and address digital transnational repression on their platforms and evaluate what mechanisms (for example, regulatory) might be suitable to ensure that social media companies act appropriately in response to this threat.116 In particular, there are concrete measures that social media companies can take to invest in the account security of their users and mitigate the threat of digital transnational repression, such as: ƒ Facilitate and support the use of two-factor authentication and implement it as default for new accounts. ƒ Undertake research on threats to activists and dissidents on their platforms and ensure sufficient resources and skills to understand and track these threats (e.g., sufficient language skills and awareness of political contexts). ƒ Publicly report on the number of estimated cases of digital transnational repression on the platforms, along with how cases have been addressed and outcomes. ƒ Provide warnings/notifications to users identified by platforms as being targeted by digital transnational repression and provide understandable and easily actionable advice. Such work should be done in partnership with community organizations to ensure that individuals receive the follow-up support they need. ƒ Ensure language-localized security resources and guides for high-risk individuals in how to secure their accounts and engage with community and resettlement support organizations to make it easy for these organizations to refer urgent cases of digital transnational repression to platforms so that they can be assessed and addressed. 116 In assessing the potential regulation of social media companies, caution must be exercised not to make the problem worse. Such regulatory measures should only be taken after careful, public, and exhaustive consultation with civil society and human rights organizations. See Cynthia Koo, Lex Gill, and Christopher Parsons (2021), “Comments on the Federal Government’s Proposed Approach to Address Harmful Content Online,” Citizen Lab <https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/comments-on-thefederal-governments-proposed-approach-to-address-harmful-content-online/>.