Governments have always understood that political authority rests on more than the ability to enforce laws. It also depends on the ability to shape how events are understood. For much of the twentieth century, that power was concentrated in the hands of the state and the institutions around it. Governments controlled broadcasting licences, influenced the press and issued the official account of events that citizens had limited means to contest. Dissent existed, but it moved slowly. Before it could reach scale, it usually had to pass through a gatekeeper.
The internet has changed that arrangement.
The state has not lost its police, bureaucracy, or institutional authority. What it has lost is something less visible but politically consequential: the monopoly over the first version of a story. A citizen can now record an event and distribute it almost instantly, without waiting for an editor, broadcaster, or official spokesperson to decide whether it deserves public attention.
That does not mean every viral video produces a political crisis. Nor does the internet manufacture public anger from nothing. But it has changed the relationship between grievance and visibility. A local injustice can now become a national concern before a government has decided how to respond to it.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether the internet can destabilise a state. Recent events in Bangladesh, Nepal and India suggest that it can. The more important question is how a digital network moves from being a space where people complain to a force capable of producing genuine political pressure.
Bangladesh
Bangladesh’s 2024 student uprising offers one of the clearest examples.
The immediate grievance was specific: the restoration of a quota reserving 30 per cent of government jobs for descendants of veterans of the 1971 Liberation War. For students competing for a limited number of public sector jobs, the policy was widely viewed as unfair. Yet the scale of the crisis cannot be explained by the quota alone. The quota was the trigger. Beneath it lay broader frustrations over inequality, political exclusion and the perceived inability of ordinary citizens to influence the system.
What digital networks changed was the speed at which those frustrations could become collective.
Videos of demonstrations, clashes and the experiences of students circulated through social media and messaging networks. People in different parts of the country could see the same images and encounter the same accounts of events without waiting for a single traditional media organisation to establish the dominant narrative. When authorities imposed a nationwide internet shutdown during the unrest, the attempt to restrict information became part of the crisis itself.
The lesson is not that social media caused Bangladesh’s political upheaval. It did something more subtle and, in some ways, more important. It compressed the distance between individual grievance and collective recognition. People who might otherwise have experienced their frustrations separately could suddenly see them as part of the same national story.
Nepal
Nepal in September 2025 revealed a different side of the same phenomenon.
The government blocked 26 major social media platforms after they failed to comply with registration requirements. The official justification was regulatory. But for many young Nepalis, the ban became something larger: evidence of a government increasingly willing to restrict the space in which citizens communicated, organised and expressed dissatisfaction.
The resulting protests quickly moved beyond the ban itself. Long-standing anger over corruption, nepotism and political instability merged with opposition to the restrictions. The government had attempted to close a digital space. Instead, the closure became the issue around which wider political grievances gathered.
That is the paradox governments often underestimate. A restriction intended to reduce the circulation of dissent can sometimes provide dissent with a clearer target.
The ban did not create Nepal’s underlying frustrations. It gave them a common symbol.
India
India’s recent crisis surrounding the NEET UG examination offers the most revealing example of what happens when a grievance acquires not only visibility but a political identity.
The examination is a high-stakes event for millions of Indian students competing for a limited number of medical places. When the National Testing Agency cancelled the 2026 examination after concerns over a question paper leak, the issue immediately became more than an administrative controversy. For students and families who had invested years of preparation, the cancellation represented a profound crisis of trust.
The initial grievance was familiar: an examination system that many students believed had failed them. What happened next was different.
The internet gave the grievance a face, a language and eventually a political identity.
Families and students were able to share their experiences directly. Images, testimonies and accounts of the crisis circulated outside the traditional media cycle. The anger was not simply reported to the public. It was produced and distributed by the people experiencing it.
Then came the unexpected political form of the movement.
A satirical campaign built around the idea of the “Cockroach Janta Party” turned an insult associated with a courtroom controversy into a symbol of collective identity for frustrated young Indians. Led by Abhijeet Dipke, the movement used humour, online communication and political satire to convert a specific education crisis into a broader expression of youth dissatisfaction. It was not a conventional political party in the traditional sense. Its significance lay precisely in the fact that it could acquire recognition and reach before possessing the organisational structure normally required to build a national political movement.
That is the new political possibility created by digital networks.
A traditional party spends years building branches, recruiting workers and developing a public identity. A digital movement can begin with a grievance, a symbol or even a joke. If it resonates with a wider frustration, it can acquire political meaning at extraordinary speed.
The NEET crisis also demonstrated the limits of state control over narrative. The government could issue statements and implement administrative measures. But it could not easily determine what millions of students and families were showing one another on their phones. The official narrative was no longer the only narrative available.
This is where the internet’s political power truly lies.
It does not replace institutions. It does not automatically create revolutions. It can spread misinformation as rapidly as it spreads truth, amplify outrage as easily as legitimate grievances, and turn complex events into simplistic narratives. Digital visibility is not the same as political legitimacy.
But the balance has nevertheless shifted.
In Bangladesh, digital networks helped amplify a movement. In Nepal, an attempt to restrict digital communication helped intensify one. In India, digital platforms helped transform a specific grievance into a wider political identity.
The common thread is not that the internet caused these crises. It is that the internet changed their speed, scale and visibility.
A government may still control the machinery of power. Citizens, however, increasingly control the speed at which information moves.
That distinction matters. A state can restrict access to a network. It can block an account. It can issue an official statement. What it cannot easily do is make people unsee what they have already seen, unhear what they have already heard, or forget the moment they discovered that thousands or millions of others shared the same grievance.
The internet turns against a state not because it becomes a government itself, but because it weakens the state’s traditional monopoly over information.
And once citizens discover that the official version of events is no longer the only version available, controlling the narrative becomes far more difficult.
A government may be able to shut down the network. It cannot so easily shut down the political reality the network has already revealed.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Taha Ikram is a writer and researcher with an academic background in International
Relations. His interests include geopolitics, digital politics, international affairs, media and
the changing relationship between technology and political power. He writes on
contemporary political and social developments, with a particular focus on how emerging
technologies are reshaping societies and global affairs.
