The optimism surrounding tech’s potential for spreading freedom and democracy was hard-wired into the Arab Spring. In its early weeks and months, talk of technology and revolution were inseparable. On February 11, 2011, the day that Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt after 30 years in power, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Wael Ghonim, one of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution, “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?”

“Ask Facebook,” Ghonim replied. In the same interview he gave Blitzer a recipe for revolution: “If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.”

Today things look rather different. With few exceptions, repression has returned to the Middle East and North Africa, as dictatorial regimes have learned to master digital technology. Other authoritarian countries—notably Russia and China—have learned valuable lessons from the Arab Spring and are now closely monitoring and censoring social media platforms. In the United States, we’ve spent the last 16 months trying to understand a Russian disinformation campaign that used omnipresent platforms—Google, Facebook, Twitter—to undermine the presidential election.

And on Monday, United Nations investigators revealed that Facebook has played a “determining role” in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The announcement felt like the final nail in the narrative that the spread of internet technology and social media is inherently democratic.

Ghonim’s response summed up the thinking about tech in 2011. The budding consensus was that if you provided free access to information, freedom will follow. (This was not unlike its corollary in places like China, which equated access to the market with inevitable political reforms.) Give people Facebook and they will organize themselves, this thinking went. Eventually, they will topple dictators.