You had a lot of people saying, well, Taliban is using Twitter strategically to coordinate its

forces, to recruit, to do all sorts of other things that are malign. And because they're not

complying with U.S. sanctions, they're using it for all these malign purposes that are bad. And

it's effectively strengthening the Taliban more than they would otherwise. And that's exactly

what sanctions are supposed to stop. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate professor of law at the University of

Minnesota, and senior editor at Lawfare. Today, I'm talking to Scott Anderson, Lawfare

Senior Editor and a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, about a new report

he's written on how social media platforms should handle unrecognized regimes like the Taliban.

If you don't accept them as the general de facto regime, that doesn't mean you can't accept that they actually are serving certain core public functions.

And you lean into this definition of what it means to be a local de facto authority.

We discussed the dilemma that the Taliban's 2021 takeover of Afghanistan created for platforms

and Scott's proposed framework rooted in international law's treatment of de facto authorities

that could help platforms strike a better balance between sanctions compliance and serving civilian populations under these regimes.

So Scott, let's start with the problem your paper addresses,

in a particular case study that you start off with,

which is in the summer of 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

This obviously had enormous geopolitical ramifications,

but it also presented a very specific problem

for America's social media companies.

Describe what that problem is and how they dealt with it.

Yeah, it's reflective of a broader problem set, of which this kind of one unique expression of

that got a lot of attention and particularly the months after the collapse of the government

...