We can now evaluate how this technology affects politics and the public sphere. More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together.

Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately. In the midst of a democratic transition and still reeling from a decades-long civil war, the Sri Lankan government’s main priorities were parliamentary reform and reconciliation with the Tamil minority. But Western social media enabled an alternative narrative to capture citizens’ attention. With their monopoly on truth gone, the state and the media have been unable to address the issue of whether or not there is a Muslim plot to sterilize and destroy Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. (There isn’t.) Cameroon, Myanmar and other countries dealing with ethnic conflict have similarly seen misinformation and social-media-fueled rumors drive violence.

Of course, it hasn’t been only these countries that have seen the Palo Alto Consensus upset their politics by promoting conflict based on misinformation. The main reason this conversation is happening with such urgency in the United States is that the consequences of the Palo Alto Consensus have been felt here as well.

What’s becoming clear is that there is no single optimal digital communication hardware and software for the entire world, just as there is no single optimal set of economic reforms. But there may be an optimal arrangement for each country, fit to its specific political, cultural and economic context.

If the West had supplied basic internet technology and allowed local, domestic competition, social media would be more diverse and more culturally sensitive than it is today. That diversity would give scholars and policymakers a variety of concurrent experiments. The Palo Alto Consensus entailed running the same yearslong experiment in dozens of countries. We’re seeing consistently negative results for this particular arrangement, but the lack of diversity gives us less information about what exactly should be different.

At minimum, country-specific social networks would ensure that companies actually employ moderators who speak the same language as their users. For example, in 2018, after anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka stoked on Facebook, the company’s public policy director for South Asia “conceded that Facebook did not have enough Sinhalese moderators, pledging to hire more,” according to New York Times reporting. Had Facebook expanded more slowly and built genuine partnerships that allowed for better tailoring to local conditions, this problem — and many others — could have been avoided.

At this point, intellectuals on both the right and the left see the Palo Alto Consensus as abhorrent. Conservatives bemoan the conceit of technologists who expect to design universal systems; progressives bridle over the concentration of power in corporate hands. Both groups fret that this new power transcends mere economics to encompass social relationships that had previously been shielded from market logic. And even Mr. Zuckerberg now agrees that we are in a bad situation.