It comes back to the 90% vs 10% vs 1% effect.
Online populations w.r.t developing countries are heavily skewed to those that have time surplus in the 10% and 1%.....especially for communicating in English....and the specific drivers within that time surplus sociopolitically/security in reductive gladiator arena format.
This means an incredible number are able to put on airs and be very haughty about matters to begin with.....as they have a certain distillation to seek out online for discussion to begin with....forming mobs, loyal groups, skirmishing "fun" etc.
Regd the 90% sentiments (that dont have such time surplus for the online realm), it is very early days to crunch qualitative numbers there.....i.e their activities and impressions under a political blanket (how much they know/care and put aside or dont put aside regd that w.r.t larger overall impression of a country/people etc)..
This survey for example (given pre covid, visits from BD citizens to India was around 1.9 million per year and will rebound to that level and surpass it soon:
It was interesting to note the overall rating of facilities, host population attitude among the 3 or so sample strata (benapole, maitree rail, dum dum airport combinations etc).
It gave larger sense than say cpl instagram groups I have been following w.r.t say Dr. Shetty hospital in BLR and Bangladesh medical tourists, which again would be skewed very differently to say social media "english conversant 10% vs 10%" groupings...given basic context of the "why"/needs governing the interactions.
I also have followed from time various travel blogs/vlogs both directions too to get a sense of the person-person interactions and their perceptions/reactions etc as they travel in respective otherside host populations. Where frictions arise inevitably, but general positive sense prevails when witness to 90% bulk population that are getting through day to day life with the interesting local curiosities and geniality both ways.
In any case, broadly past IN-BD, language plays an immense role.
When I go to/live in Quebec, there are spots simply put you are treated differently if you can only speak English. You speak French, it can often be completely different arc of receptiveness. Basically language makes the cultural bound....there are immense number of Quebecers that harbour a grudge towards English Canadians to begin with....dispossesing them of the French Canada arc that "could have been".... it can only be bypassed if you know fluent enough French to have any chance of breaching that regional defensiveness/hostility/barrier.
Same thing in China, you will be surprised just how different the host population treats you, even if you different on outside, if you illustrate to them you learned the language and thus know the culture (and their way of thinking) to a high degree.
The small talk and social graces are so important.....this is also why an incredible amount gets "lost in translation" when it comes to China to begin with....and the very Chinese distaste towards English having become the international language. Its why "foreign people speaking chinese vlogs in China" videos are their own large genre.
i.e you are going to get a skew (both ways) if you interact with mainland Chinese on political matters etc... using English....even if subject headers are exact same as you get a variant of 1% speaking to 1% (and what gets focused reductively in the 1% for discussion and prestige/ego etc....that forms backlog of interactions others may perceive to simply apply en masse, which is often untrue).
What I'm trying to say is English - English social media interaction among non-english speaking populations (especially developing populations with all kinds of axes and voids and hot take reductive perceptions to grind in political favouritism, social discourse etc...) basically skews a huge amount of what the toxicity norms even are, as you are removing from the middle of the bell curve of more normalised population-population....and then applying some insularity/self-referential (i.e perception you are the middle, rather than approaching an edge) only to adjudge the larger bulk which is in most cases quite different.
No easy way around all of this, the system governing mass communication is always going to be skewed towards the top and the ivory towers there.....but just worth keeping in mind.
