Apple and Google sit at the center of today’s misinformation crisis, and Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine should focus there if they want real change.
Together, they control the app stores that determine which platforms can exist on billions of phones. Access to iOS and Android is existential. A platform cannot function at scale without app store distribution.
Apple and Google claim sweeping authority over their marketplaces. They argue in court that strict app store control is necessary for safety, privacy, and user trust. Their written policies prohibit abuse, nonconsensual sexual content, impersonation, and harm to minors. Yet those rules are enforced unevenly. Smaller apps are removed quickly while large, politically powerful platforms are given latitude, even when violations are visible, repeated, and well documented.
This is a choice and as long as Apple and Google decline to consistently enforce their own standards, social media companies have little incentive to seriously address fake accounts, coordinated harassment, deepfakes, or the spread of obvious falsehoods. The incentives are backward. Abuse is cheaper than accountability and engagement is rewarded, even when it is artificial or malicious.
Focusing oversight on Apple and Google does not mean regulating speech. It means demanding that two private companies enforce the rules they already wrote and publicly defend. It avoids First Amendment traps while directly addressing the scale problem that makes online harm so difficult to contain.
This argument is not theoretical for us, when RVA Magazine published our recent reporting on the killing of Renee Nicole Good, an Old Dominion University alum fatally shot during an ICE enforcement encounter in Minneapolis, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Alongside legitimate readers engaging with a difficult and important story came a flood of fake accounts and automated trolls. Many were clearly not real people, operating in coordinated patterns that were obvious to anyone watching.
And there was nothing we could do to stop it in real time. The platforms hosting the attacks did little. Reporting tools and moderation lagged behind the abuse. This experience will be familiar to anyone who publishes journalism that touches power, policing, immigration, or politics. What stood out was not just the volume of manipulation, but how visible it was and how little recourse existed to address it.
And this is where the conversation about social media keeps going wrong.
For years, lawmakers have chased individual platforms like Meta, X, TikTok, and YouTube. Hearings are held, executives testify and promises are made. Meanwhile, fake accounts multiply, trolling grows more coordinated, deepfakes become more convincing, and outright lies spread faster than ever. The problem is not a lack of concern from our representatives. It is that Congress keeps targeting the wrong layer of the system and is lagging behind the game.
This is where Senators Warner and Kaine can act immediately and Virginia is well positioned to lead this shift.
Senator Warner has long focused on technology policy and national security. Senator Kaine understands the legal frameworks required to govern effectively without overreach. Together, they can redirect congressional attention away from performative platform hearings and toward the gatekeepers whose inaction allows the system to remain broken.
A meaningful first step would be a joint Senate inquiry and public hearing focused specifically on app store enforcement, not social media content moderation. Apple and Google should be required to explain, on the record, how they apply their safety rules, why enforcement differs between small and large platforms, and what measurable standards exist for identifying and responding to coordinated manipulation, fake accounts, and AI-enabled abuse. Transparency alone would change behavior downstream because app store enforcement shapes platform incentives.
Additionally, Congress should require Apple and Google to publish regular, auditable reports detailing how often major social platforms violate app store policies, what enforcement actions are taken, and why exceptions are granted. If app stores are the gatekeepers they claim to be, that power should come with public accountability.
This approach does not require new speech laws and it does not rewrite the Constitution. It simply demands consistency from companies that already insist they are the arbiters of safety on the modern internet.
Recent commentary, including a sharply worded column in The Verge, has rightly pointed out that Apple and Google’s inaction is not neutral. It is enabling. That critique aligns with what journalists, publishers, and communities experience every day when coordinated manipulation overwhelms real discourse.
Continuing to play whack a mole with individual social media companies guarantees more outrage and the same results. Holding Apple and Google to their own standards is how real accountability begins.
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