Social media and other digital information tools have had a chilling effect on democracy in some troubled parts of the world, according to a panel of public diplomacy experts speaking at the Aspen Institute as part of the Hurst Lecture Series.

Of the world’s seven billion people, about 2.4 billion have access, in some way, to the Internet. The ability to connect many-to-many has led to some remarkable events and phenomena in recent years. The tools did not cause the Arab Spring, but they did allow for better organizing, amplification of messages, and the ability to show the world what was happening minute-by-minute, tweet-by-tweet. A self-immolation in Tunisia went pretty much unnoticed when only 28,000 of the country’s population subscribed to Facebook, but it was entirely different when that number was close to two million.