In 2011, a fruit vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire to protest government corruption. Within weeks, dictators who had ruled for decades were fleeing their countries. The spark traveled not through traditional media or organized political parties, but through Facebook posts, tweets, and YouTube videos shared millions of times across the Arab world.

What happened next revealed something profound about power in the digital age. Social media platforms designed to help college students share party photos had become tools capable of toppling governments. But they also exposed a troubling paradox: the same technologies that could mobilize millions for revolution seemed incapable of building anything stable afterward.

The uprisings that swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria in 2011 shared a strange characteristic: they had no obvious leaders. Traditional revolutions—the French, Russian, or Cuban—centered on charismatic figures who articulated grievances and directed action. The Arab Spring worked differently. Everyone was a broadcaster.

Facebook and Twitter created what sociologists call 'horizontal networks.' Protesters could coordinate meeting points, share images of police brutality, and spread tactical information without any central organization. When Egyptian authorities arrested prominent activists, the movement continued because there was no head to cut off. This leaderless quality made the uprisings remarkably resilient in their early stages.

But the same structure that enabled rapid mobilization created a devastating weakness. Revolutions are good at tearing things down. Building institutions requires hierarchy, compromise, and sustained organization—exactly what social media discourages. Egypt cycled through military rule, brief democratic government, and back to military rule. Libya collapsed into civil war. The platforms that enabled revolution couldn't sustain the boring, difficult work of governance.

Takeaway

Networks that lack hierarchy can mobilize quickly, but building lasting institutions requires the very structures that rapid mobilization bypasses.

Social media companies discovered something their founders never anticipated: outrage is extraordinarily profitable. The algorithms that determine what appears in your feed optimize for one thing above all else—keeping you scrolling. And nothing keeps people engaged like content that makes them angry at the other side.

This isn't a conspiracy; it's economics. Facebook's internal research, leaked by whistleblowers, showed the company understood its platform was pushing users toward increasingly extreme content. The algorithm learned that inflammatory posts generate more comments, shares, and time-on-site than nuanced ones. Moderation efforts consistently lost to growth targets.

The consequences for democratic societies have been severe. Political scientists now track what they call 'affective polarization'—not just disagreeing with opponents but genuinely despising them. In the United States, the percentage of partisans who view the other party as a threat to the nation has doubled since social media became dominant. Similar patterns appear across Brazil, India, the Philippines, and much of Europe. The platforms didn't create political division, but they industrialized it.

Takeaway

When attention is the product being sold, the most reliable way to capture it is triggering emotional reactions—and anger travels faster than nuance.

When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, something historically unprecedented happened. Private companies exercised more control over a sitting head of state's communication than any government could. The platforms had become sovereign in ways that traditional political theory never anticipated.

Consider the asymmetry. Governments operate within borders and must follow constitutional constraints. Platform companies operate globally and answer primarily to shareholders. When Australia tried to force Facebook to pay news outlets for content, Facebook simply blocked all news in the country—including emergency services pages during wildfire season. The company demonstrated it had leverage over a nation-state in ways that would have seemed absurd a generation ago.

This creates a genuine dilemma with no easy answer. Platform moderation decisions affect billions of people, yet those making them aren't elected or publicly accountable. Governments trying to regulate platforms face the reality that the technical expertise and data all reside with the companies themselves. We've created information infrastructure more powerful than any in human history, then handed control to entities whose primary obligation is quarterly earnings.

Takeaway

When private companies control the infrastructure of public discourse, they exercise a form of power that doesn't fit neatly into existing frameworks of democratic accountability.

Understanding social media's political power requires thinking historically. Previous communication revolutions—the printing press, telegraph, radio, television—all reshaped political possibilities in ways contemporaries struggled to predict. We're still early in comprehending what networked digital platforms mean for how societies organize themselves.

What history does suggest is that tools themselves are neither liberating nor oppressive. The same platforms that enabled Arab Spring protests also enabled authoritarian surveillance in China and ethnic violence in Myanmar. The question isn't whether technology changes politics, but who shapes how those changes unfold.