Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube

Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them.

As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?

Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.

Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.

Social media algorithms are tuned to maximize engagements and this is easily done by keeping the user happy. This creates echo chambers and ends up polarizing users. Not everyone gets polarized but a vast majority of users become victims of confirmation bias, which leads to an increasingly fragmented and divisive society. Am I wrong?

I don’t think it’s a coincedence that both social media and conservatism thrive on viral fear and outrage. The two are most certainly connected.

The world would probably be a very different place today if instead hope and joy were the bread and butter of Twitter, Reddit, etc.

In the specific context of Nepal, because it is clearly the next step in consolidation of power and move to authoritarianism.

The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.

It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.

It's because the rest of the world has realised how deeply tied Western and Chinese BigTech are deeply tied to US and Chinese intelligence agencies, respectively (surveillance capitalism). The active lobbying made by the US government against data privacy laws (especially to store data locally and not share it with foreign entities) is just one example of a red flag that has lead to this.

(I fully support this move - there is absolutely no way any foreign government should have control and influence over your - communication platform and your media platforms.)

you don’t really need a lot of collusion. Control of the media and communication channels is a natural impulse of authoritarian goverments.

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People in the west are also incredibly naive about issues around speech, and even more naive about the effects of propaganda, which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.

For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.

If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?

Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.

This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens

If free speech in America goes away, the rest of the world will suffer for it as well.

People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.

The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.

Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.

Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.

Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government blocking them is akin to blocking free speech in the legal right itself.

Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?

> They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is great, but not if its used by your neighbours to stir up trouble. (the civil war was long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War)

One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.

Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.

> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat

Yup, because it is a threat.

see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.

The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.

I thought this [1] New Yorker profile of the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court was a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of how tech giants interact with less-powerful countries. Surely we all agree that free speech is not absolute (e.g. we could probably agree that there should exist some boundary with respect to libel, threats/violent speech acts, national security, corporations as legal persons with free speech rights, the right or duty of platforms to regulate content, influence of money in politics...) and that therefore states have a legitimate interest in regulating free speech.

The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/the-brazilian-...

and the governments of the west are most supportive of authoritarian and military regimes. Why are they silent over what is happening in Pakistan? Pakistan election was stollen by Pakistan army in day light robbery. And what happened before the election is another story. Pakistan is going through worst form of its human right/freedom of speech/democratic abuses since its independence and west seems to be careless. Just because people of Pakistan support a person who is nationalist. So, for them a dictator is better than him.

Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)

Did the UK banning RT.com improve my quality of life?

And equally, we in the west are so used to genuine free expression of ideas we assume everyone who speaks is real and genuine. Meanwhile, outside actors are weaponising social media to divide us, errode trust and spread conspiracies. There are worse things that banning American media platforms - look at what they are doing to America.

It's almost like it's a country of 300 million people with a diverse set of views.

The group that outright wants social media banned in the US, talks down Zuckerberg, etc, by and large will be perfectly fine with other countries banning it if not celebrate it. You have built a strawman.

The "free speech" cohort is largely anti-banning. They want platforms like X, where anything goes, and are often quite militant about their views on this subject.

Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.

I was just thinking the same thing. This looks like a healthy dose of intervention. I am biased however in that I believe smaller groups of people should run their own forums and chat servers to slightly minimize the Corporatocracy social manipulation especially before AI gets a strong foothold. Most have a few geeks in their own social circle that can run a tiny forum and chat server. Less birds of a feather [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][documentary][44 mins]

These platforms themselves don't support free speech. On top of that everything is now heavily algorithmically driven. Everyone is pushed to consume the same type of content while thinking they have free will in their choice not realising they are being subtly manipulated right below their ability to recognise it.

At this point, YouTube probably has a better idea what you will consume next than you yourself do.

Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, say, Fox News an acceptable use of free speech. Plenty of countries where the regulator would find Fox News unacceptable rank higher than the USA on freedom & democracy indices, so there was always going to be pushback from other countries if the USA attempted to impose the Fox-Newsification of social media on others.

I'm conflicted.

On the one hand, curtailing free speech is a problem and a lot of governments have started doing it to a massive degree.

On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.

In that regard I do believe that banning them is a net benefit to society, but I fear that for the most part it is done out of the wrong intentions with more sinister goals.

this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.

Ironic to read about free speech here where a bunch of stuff gets "[flagged]" when it does not agree with the hive mind.

Social media is cancer. Let’s go back to expressing free speech in the old fashioned way- at town squares and leaflets.

True, which is why I am somewhat conflicted.

So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. Obviously a bad thing.

At the same time, a 2 year old law that still hasn't convinced the companies with valuations higher than my countries GDP to throw like $10k to set up an office here and maintain it with less than $5k a month to keep their services running. It doesn't feel right to fight to keep them around either.

PS: The previous paragraphs might have portrayed the current government in a (deservingly) negative light. I wonder if I'll have to start browsing hackernews with a VPN in the future.