There are benefits and drawbacks to social media/everyone has a voice. On a benign level, the NYTimes released a story misinforming its readership that Apple was proactively promoting its own apps. This was cleared up on Twitter by @drbarnard whose view was promoted via Stratechary.

I realize there is a lot more complexity to nation-states creating false narratives around China or Hong Kong protests, but on a basic level, I believe social media allows a quicker iteration cycle to correct misinformed views with the drawback of initial misinformation traveling at a greater velocity.

In many ways, you can get a more informed and accurate view of the situation in Hong Kong today if you have the propensity to avoid overreacting to the first piece of information and developing a skillset for finding the right person to listen to.

To me that signals they have less 'control' of the distribution of information on their own platform. It's debatable who could wield more social influence, Google or Facebook. On me, it'd certainly be Google, since I use about a dozen google products (Chrome, Gmail, Search, Mesh, Calendar, Analytics, Voice, Android, Scholar, Cloud, Maps, etc.), and zero Facebook products.