In the long run for sustainable virality, an anchor state with background Intel agencies working in concert is a necessary precondition because of the architecture of convential social media platforms - Arab Spring & Iran's Green Movement relied on external tech orgs as partners.

Virality in this context,wl especially after COVID and the social media revolution becomes a holistic cognitive bioweapon deployed to acheive certain ends and so far it seems online virality is inherently deconstructive because of its primary use as sabotage.

The Arab Spring and Green Movement were an interesting episode of experimentation between local grassroots actors & large tech firms in democratic engineering that ultimately faded because virality is inherently more volatile as an anti-trust force that acts as cog war weaponery.

The Chinese particularly under Xi in the 2010s understood this and accelerated splinternet formation that was a firewall to protect the integrity of its national projects away from inherently malignant and malicious forms of virality injected by external actors and rivals.

In India, virality for Modi-ism did deliver electoral short term gains but another issue with this type of politics that is addicted to virality is the production of idiocratic subjects that no longer have the ability to reason that has ripple effects in democratic regimes.

Rich authoritarian states ride out virality by gaming algorithmic feeds to other domains that seem to have inherently more powerful viral properties - see sportswashing, fashion and entertainment in the GCC.

The drawback for all these experiments (although the data from China is conflicting) is the problem of mental health contagion and cognitive decay.