While social media are sufficiently new, and coups sufficiently infrequent to assess this claim, there's another way to look at the link between coups and access to information. In a series of papers and an ongoing book project, we examine the relationship between political instability and government disclosures of credible economic information — the type of information members of the public might use both to evaluate the performance of the government and to gauge the level of discontent of their fellows.