Companies stay largely passive during such unrest; their reluctance to deploy technological workarounds or challenge government orders shows the tension between profit motives and digital rights

While the insurrection in Nepal -- which ousted the K.P. Sharma 'Oli' government after two days and descended into widespread violence and mob behaviour -- raises important questions about the country's political future, it should also raise concerns about the conduct of social media (SM) companies. In the immediate sense, the protests began after the Sharma government banned access to 26 SM platforms, but a zoomed-out view reveals a new instance of a more familiar pattern.

Specifically, the companies whose services became the spark offered little more than boilerplate statements about respecting digital rights and calls for dialogue. For the millions of people suddenly finding themselves cut off, that passivity could have heightened the abandonment they were already experiencing at the hands of their government.

This 'strategy' isn't unique to Nepal, however. In Russia in 2018, Telegram fought its ban through technical evasions but offered little political solidarity to users who faced arrest for circumventing state orders. During the 2021 coup in Myanmar, a Facebook ban severed access to news and organising tools for protestors. In Nigeria in the same year, Twitter (now X.com) remained largely silent when the government suspended its operations for months, costing the economy roughly $26 million a day and pushing many businesses to alternative platforms. In Iran in 2022, Instagram and WhatsApp issued generic appeals while millions of small businesses that depended on them collapsed.

All these instances recall the fact that platforms are multinational corporations whose interests are commercial, not civic. They fear government reprisal in profitable markets, yet they trade on the image of empowering free expression. When confronted with authoritarian restrictions, they have attempted to split the difference, issuing statements while avoiding meaningful confrontation. Ultimately, however, the users have borne the risk while the platforms have continued to profit.

Technological solutions

The reluctance to act is only partly explained by jurisdiction. These companies operate at the pleasure of host states and their executives may face legal or even personal jeopardy if they openly encourage citizens to defy local law. However, there's an equally (if not more) pressing moral stake: when governments impose sweeping shutdowns or demand opaque surveillance, they're not enforcing neutral regulations but attacking the basic infrastructure of civic life. And when platforms stay passive, they can become complicit in that attack.

International norms already recognise access to digital spaces as a right rather than a privilege. In 2016, the UN Human Rights Council declared internet shutdowns to be violations of international law. Civil society groups have since advanced the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, which call for companies to disclose government demands and justify their responses. Big Social firms like Meta and Google often sign on to these frameworks in principle, yet their actual conduct in markets facing repression has maintained a gulf between rhetoric and compliance.

There's an important technological dimension here. Companies have the capacity to provide workarounds in the form of decentralised infrastructure, redundancy across services, and active support for circumvention tools -- yet rarely deploy them for fear of provoking government retaliation. Even when a company offers them, they tend to be limited and the company withdraws them quietly once the relevant crisis has passed.

Most of the Big Social platforms are designed as centralised services in which requests are routed through data centres under company control. As a result, they're vulnerable to blunt government orders to, say, block a handful of IP ranges. These companies can make a technical as well as political choice by switching to a decentralised architecture that will make it difficult to enforce bans. For example, Tor and I2P networks route traffic across volunteer nodes. Mastodon uses federated servers rather than a single server that also becomes a choke point in the event of a blocking order. Signal has experimented with proxy relays that allow volunteers to keep traffic moving even when direct access has been blocked. Mainstream companies like Meta or Google could, in principle, design fallback modes that lean on decentralisation.

Google does have its Outline VPN toolkit and YouTube has content delivery networks that can disguise traffic -- but these are exceptions. Generally, decentralisation and redundancy have been underdeveloped because companies don't want to be seen as actively undermining sovereign regulation and governments.

Fortunes of Big Social

Big Social's selective restraint is also stark in comparison with other industries. Telecom companies are often compelled to shut down networks immediately after a government order, yet unlike them, SM firms market themselves as defenders of voice and participation. Financial companies have also shown more willingness to take explicit political stands. PayPal and Visa curtailed services in Russia after the Ukraine invasion, citing ethical concerns. Even Wikipedia fought a multi-year legal battle against Turkey's ban (and Indian litigants' attempts to do so), eventually winning out. These examples suggest neutrality is not preordained but a corporate choice.

Many Big Social firms also own multiple platforms -- e.g., Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and Google operates YouTube, Gmail, and so on. Technologies exist to allow them to fail-over messages from one app to another or to automatically route traffic through less visible protocols when one channel is blocked. For example, WhatsApp could piggyback on HTTPS traffic in ways that are harder to filter.

SM bans in recent history have all tended to fail because they always lead to less, not more, state control. When a ban kicks in, many users respond by shopping for workarounds and almost always succeed, using circumvention tools like VPNs and proxies like Psiphon or Snowflake. But instead of letting them fend for themselves, platforms could integrate such tools directly -- e.g., by offering an in-app VPN or proxy mode -- or subsidise the use of such services in affected regions. Signal's partnership with volunteers to host proxies in Iran in 2022 is one precedent.

The under-deployment of circumvention tools is also about profit. Decentralised or proxy-based systems complicate moderation, reduce the precision of data collection, and thus cut into advertising revenue. Federated networks such as Mastodon and volunteer relay models like Tor thrive because they aren't beholden to ad-driven monetisation. Mainstream platforms avoid such architectures not because they're technically infeasible but because they disrupt the business model of targeted advertising and centralised control. The technological debate is thus inseparable from the economic logic of surveillance capitalism.

The passivity of Big Social is also striking in another dimension: some of these firms command annual revenues larger than the GDP of the very states that move to restrict them. In 2023, Meta's revenues exceeded $134 billion -- more than the entire national budgets of countries like Nepal or Nigeria. Google's parent Alphabet reported more than $300 billion, putting it ahead of most economies in the Global South. These figures suggest the claim of being "helpless" before sovereign diktats is not strictly financial. These firms wield capital, lobbying power, and technical expertise on a scale that many governments can't match. Yet in moments of crisis, they rarely leverage this power to defend the citizens who sustain their markets.

Even when companies experiment with workarounds, they're often withdrawn soon after. Facebook once tested "Free Basics" and similar initiatives for low-bandwidth access but dropped them amid political controversies.

Equally significant are the inequities that shutdowns create. Wealthier, more technically savvy users can usually find workarounds through VPNs, but poorer citizens are left offline. In such contexts, the withdrawal of mainstream platforms doesn't reduce risks but multiplies them: people drift to insecure alternatives, become more vulnerable to scams, and lose access to trusted sources of information. The result is a digital divide that widens precisely when a society faces a great civic emergency.

Political economy of dependence

Technological restraint is not because solutions are infeasible but because deploying them amounts to taking sides, which in turn carries business risks such as market exclusion, fines, and perhaps even arrests. Most firms are unwilling to absorb these costs.

To its advantage, however, the Global South provides some of the fastest-growing user bases and advertising markets for Big Social. India alone accounts for more than 400 million Facebook users, and Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil are all among the top 10 markets. That exposure gives governments significant leverage because companies fear being locked out of billion-dollar ad markets more than they fear reputational harm abroad. As a result they avoid confrontation in regions where their market share is greatest while projecting a bolder stance in the U.S. or Europe.

The Nepal case thus also serves a reminder that countries should make stronger demands of companies. For example, companies must prepare technical contingencies to keep communications alive during politically motivated shutdowns -- whether through redundancy, encrypted alternatives or partnerships with circumvention tools. They should also adopt clearer policies on when and how they will resist demands for censorship and should disclose these decisions promptly. And at the political level, rather than claim to be neutral in the face of political turmoil, they should lend weight to international pressure by speaking up when people's rights are curtailed.

One way forward could be to make transparency and resilience non-negotiable. Companies should be required to publish, in real time, the shutdown orders they receive, their legal justifications, and their corporate responses.

Industry-wide agreements could set minimum standards for technical contingencies, such as in-app proxy modes or fallback networks, like how financial regulators subject banks to stress tests. Regional blocs such as the African Union and SAARC could also negotiate common demands, making it harder for firms to play one government against another.

Conduct of social media companies during political unrest