Maybe this would be a good opportunity for university students over there to test out a network like Freenet for communicating? FMS, Frost, or Freemail could be used for messaging back and forth in place of e-mails and social networks. A couple people could build a jSite for news stories/pictures/videos. I don't think groups of students would have that hard of a time adding each other as peers under darknet mode. The docs make it pretty easy to switch over [1].

If they can't talk freely to one-another over emails or popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter... maybe they shouldn't use them.

[1] https://freenetproject.org/documentation.html