Actress Rose McGowan was blocked from her Twitter account. Credit:AP Her violation pales in comparison to the daily violations of the terms of service by one Donald J Trump, who bullies, lies, threatens and spreads disinformation on the platform. After Twitter came under pressure from the public for not taking action on Trump's tweeted claim that in light of North Korea's nuclear sabre-rattling, Kim Jong-un "won't be around much longer!" the company trotted out this distinction: "We hold all accounts to the same rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules," the company said. "Among the considerations is 'newsworthiness' and whether a Tweet is of public interest."' Newsworthiness. Voila!

Thumbs down on Facebook's slowmotion response to political influence crisis. New problem. New rule. In the same thread, Twitter explained: "This has long been internal policy and we'll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will." Ah, the internal policy. What is more troubling is Twitter's seemingly cavalier attitude to being used as a playground for bots and trolls that are daily used to amplify divisions in democracy.

Despite Twitter's knowledge of this huge vulnerability to the US, when they testified to the Senate Intelligence committee, Senator Mark Warner said the company: "showed an enormous lack of understanding…of how serious this issue is" and "the threat it poses to democratic institutions." If Twitter's reaction seems languid, consider something else that happened very recently in the social media world. At about the same tine McGowan was being struck from Twitter, Facebook took an action that has all the appearance of frustrating outside research on the role it played in helping Russia influence the election. The company made changes to a social media tool it owns, which in effect stopped access to a handful of the 470 identified Russian-controlled pages and accounts known to the public. That, in turn, made it hard for researchers outside Facebook to understand what happened in 2016.

The researcher who extracted the information, Jonathan Albright said: "This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle." Facebook attributed loss of data access to a bug-fix. Notice: Twitter was proactive on McGowan – a small target, with a specific legal risk. On the world-changing event of the US election, Facebook is reactive, defensive, evasive. The industry's double standard underscores the power of these companies not only to shape our reality, but the public's understanding of their political and legal role in our society. While social media giants generally act quickly on terrorism and child pornography, they have had a strangely sluggish and vague response on these emerging issues of national sovereignty and geopolitics.

So much of the story of technological innovation is that it outpaces legal framework. That's clear. But when rule of law and by extension, democratic institutions finally do catch up with industry, Silicon Valley need to apply some brain power to the problem. There also seems to be a wilful confusion about what exactly is at stake. Consider this tweet from Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos's personal account discussing the issue: "If you call for some type of speech to be controlled, then think long and hard of how those rules/systems can be abused both here and abroad." The issue is not about controlling speech but restricting actions: in this case, a foreign actor trying to sway the election of a sovereign nation.

Chances are the leaders of the social media companies never considered this possibility when writing the code. If they did, they never thought such an outcome would affect their own lives. Or if they did imagine that possibly, they figured that, like in years past, they could squint at the issue and wave the magic wand of free-speech talk for it to go away. But it's not that simple. The world knows it. Loading