Social Media and Political Stability in Developing States

February 2026 · Case studies: Tunisia and Myanmar

Political stability in developing countries has historically depended on a combination of consensus among elites, economic legitimacy, and the state’s ability to control or manage information flows. Social media has disrupted each of these pillars. Platforms such as Facebook and X, and more private messaging services such as Telegram and WhatsApp, allow political narratives to spread horizontally rather than vertically, bypassing traditional state and media gatekeepers entirely, and expeditiously.

In environments where trust in institutions is already low, social media introduces speed without verification, scale without accountability, and emotional engagement without moderation. These characteristics do not inherently destabilize states, but they amplify volatility when underlying grievances already exist. Conversely, they can be utilized, or weaponized, to create grievances that may not widely exist.

Case study I: Tunisia

Tunisia has been cited as the most successful political outcome of the Arab Spring, yet its trajectory over the decade since demonstrates the long-term destabilizing potential of digitally driven political mobilization. In the early 2010s, social media was not nearly as central to society as it is today; the devolution in Tunisia has run in parallel with the growing prominence of social media’s role in the world.

I would argue the Arab Spring might not have been effective at driving change without social media. During the 2010–2011 revolution, Facebook and Twitter played a critical role in organizing protests, disseminating videos of state violence, and coordinating demonstrations across regions. The rapid spread of information allowed activists to outpace security forces, who coordinated through conventional means, and undermined the state’s control of the narrative.

In the years after the revolution, social media continued to shape Tunisia’s politics in subtler ways. Fragmentation of political discourse online mirrored, and arguably accelerated, the fragmentation of Tunisia’s party system. Disinformation campaigns, amplified by foreign and domestic actors, contributed to declining trust in political institutions and the electoral process. By the late 2010s, public frustration expressed online increasingly targeted democratic institutions themselves, culminating in the 2021 suspension of parliament. Social media did not cause Tunisia’s democratic backsliding, but it normalized narratives of institutional failure and provided constant reinforcement of public dissatisfaction.

Case study II: Myanmar

Myanmar presents a more severe example of social media’s destabilizing potential when paired with weak institutions and ethnic division. Facebook became the dominant information platform in Myanmar during the 2010s, effectively functioning as the internet for much of the population. Limited digital literacy, combined with minimal content moderation across dozens of Burmese languages, allowed extremist narratives to spread with little resistance.

Between 2016 and 2018, military-linked actors and nationalist groups used Facebook to disseminate anti-Rohingya propaganda, framing the minority population as a security threat. These narratives contributed to widespread public support, and passive acceptance, of military operations that resulted in mass displacement and violence.

Following the 2021 military coup, social media once again became central to political mobilization, this time enabling resistance networks and protest coordinators to communicate in ways arguably more efficient than the provisional government’s. The same platforms that previously amplified state narratives now facilitated decentralized opposition, contributing to prolonged instability and civil conflict.

Analysis

Across both cases, several patterns emerge. First, social media dramatically reduces the time between grievance formation and mass mobilization. Second, it weakens the traditional intermediaries that many in developed nations take for granted, political parties, petitions, unions, organized press, civil society, allowing direct emotional engagement with less scripting. Third, algorithms reward polarizing content over nuanced debate, making compromise politically costly. Social media’s greatest impact on the political stability equation lies not in creating unrest, but in accelerating it.

Tunisia and Myanmar demonstrate that social media is not a root cause of political instability in developing states, but a force multiplier that accelerates existing weaknesses. Where institutions are trusted and adaptive, social media can support accountability and civic participation. Where institutions are fragile or exclusionary, it compresses political timelines and amplifies grievances faster than governments can respond.

For policymakers, the challenge is mitigating the destabilizing effects without undermining civil liberties or reinforcing authoritarian control. Heavy-handed censorship may produce short-term calm but deepens long-term legitimacy deficits and pushes opposition into channels that are harder to monitor. Neglecting platform governance, meanwhile, allows domestic and foreign actors to shape political narratives at scale with little accountability.

Three conclusions follow. Digital literacy and information resilience are now core components of political stability. Platforms must account for local language and cultural context, because failures there carry national-security consequences. And early indicators of instability increasingly appear in online discourse, where shifts in sentiment and the normalization of institutional distrust often precede political rupture.

It is tempting for readers in developed democracies to treat Tunisia and Myanmar as cautionary tales about other places. I think that reading is too comfortable. The same mechanics, grievance amplified faster than institutions can answer it, intermediaries hollowed out, algorithms that pay better for anger than for accuracy, operate everywhere the platforms do. Developing states simply ran the experiment first, with thinner institutional armor. They are not a different story. They are an early chapter of the same one.

The honest bottom line is that no government has solved this, and the ones that claim to have solved it have usually just relocated the problem somewhere less visible. What separates the states that bend from the states that break is not their censorship policy. It is the underlying credibility of their institutions, built slowly, spent quickly, and very hard to rebuild once the feed has convinced enough people that nothing official can be trusted. That is the real lesson of both case studies, and it is one worth learning while the choice still exists.