Digital firestorms and riot escalation in multilingual democracies: algorithmic exposure and communicative mechanisms in the Makassar and Kathmandu protests

This article examines riot escalation in Indonesia and Nepal by conceptualizing urban unrest as a communicative process unfolding within hybrid media systems in multilingual and multicultural democratic contexts. Using a qualitative comparative design, the study analyzes the Makassar riots in August 2025 and the Kathmandu protests in September 2025 through a mechanism-oriented analysis of a small, purposively selected corpus of high-visibility public social media posts, contextualized by contemporaneous news coverage and official communications. Rather than treating violence as a direct outcome of grievances, repression, or platform effects, the findings show that escalation was communicatively conditioned by the interaction of polarized digital narratives, moral–emotional framing, visually salient representations of institutional destruction, platform-concentrated visibility, and limitations in institutional crisis communication. Across both cases, emotionally charged and symbolically powerful content achieved disproportionate prominence within platform-mediated attention spaces, while institutional explanations remained comparatively less visible. These dynamics shaped how legitimacy, authority, and collective action were interpreted across diverse publics during crisis moments, without implying deterministic causal links between online communication and offline violence. The study advances a communication-centered and process-oriented perspective on riot escalation and contributes to debates on digital political communication in multilingual and multicultural democracies. By clarifying how meaning-making, affect, and platform-mediated visibility interact during political crises, the article provides mechanism-based insights relevant to comparative research on contentious politics in the Global South.