I'm from Nepal. The bans are implemented in a pretty straightforward way: ISPs simply don't resolve DNS queries for these services. switch your DNS, and you're good to go. There are 26 apps that were banned: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, Pinterest, Signal, Threads, WeChat, Quora, Tumblr, Clubhouse, Mastodon, MeWe, Rumble, VK, Line, IMO, Zalo, Soul, and Hamro Patro.
I'm pretty sure they didn't do their research well. They probably think mastodon's app is the top result that comes up when mastodon is typed into google. They also decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
Blocking Signal or Reddit sounds bizarre for a civilized democratic country. What sense can that make other than denying people the right for privacy of personal communications or uncensored information access? I am very surprised Nepal goes this way.
Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.
Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.
Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.
Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.
Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.
This is not true. "Switch your DNS" hasn't worked for while. It didn't work for the TikTok ban. The ISPs are not incompetent.
If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.
And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".
TikTok complied with their regulation last year. The regulations basically requires social media platforms with > 1 million nepalese accounts to get a license to operate in Nepal.
Depends on who you ask. I'd consider it damaging but nowhere near as damaging as X in recent times. And would consider FB worse that both for sheer the hysteria it generates in the old.
I think it less like: governments see social media sites as damaging, so they ban them.
It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.
So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
as long as my ISP doesn't snitch on me, I'm fine. ISPs also have a stake in this ban because the last time a block was implemented (on TikTok), people flocked to VPNs, which drove up bandwidth costs for them. so, I think while ISPs in Nepal are technically complying with the law by blocking these services, they're doing it in a way that’s intentionally easy to bypass. Now that TikTok is unbanned, the news of DNS switching is spreading quickly in Nepal through it
That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
> That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
The move seems to not be about blocking citizens access or trying to prevent communication at all, but rather to punish those specific companies because they weren't following the law, since there are companies who weren't blocked.
What’s the justification? Only a state religion could provide the societal justification. I don’t know, I’m recently living under Trump, so a failed authoritarian state is very new to me. Can anyone explain how normalized and day-to-day news like this is over there?
For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
In general anything that has "algorytmic content ordering" that pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned and burned to the ground.
It's such an obvious poison. Social media is responsible for the destruction of civility on so many levels. It has destroyed a generations attention span. It is a drug that is more powerful and addictive than something like weed. It seems like people here are too young to remember a life before it. It has transformed society negatively in just a decade. It absolutely should go. I'm glad you did something positive on it. Or found a community. You can still do that without social media. It needs to go.
The evils of social media are not consequences of people using the internet to connect with other people, they're consequences of people using platforms where you can buy a following instead of having to earn it.
I saw a really good analogy the other day (on X, natch) that said subscribing to modern social media is like inviting a clown to come in your house every 10 minutes and scream, "It's gotten worse". I think about that a lot. Curation goes a long way, but it takes work.
Not to the same degree, but I'd argue HN has the same tendencies. Cynical, skeptical, assuming the worst intentions, a bogeyman tech giant hoping to destroy its own customers. Skepticism is, of course, healthy, but the default behavior in this community completely misses the reality that had we frozen progress, say, right near the Apple II launch, we never get HackerNews itself. :)
And if you accept my premise, it's probably not the websites, but rather the humans themselves.
It just comes down to how you use it. I use Twitter and BlueSky exclusively to follow artists, and all I see is art. If I didn't come to HN, I don't think I'd hear about any news.
I'm not a big fan of banning things like this. There's good mixed in with the bad and banning things will only lead to new social media sites rising in their place. I don't expect them to be any better.
This is basically a fight against human nature. If I could get one wish, it would be legislation that forces social media sites to explain in detail how their algorithms work. I have to believe that a company could make a profitable social media site that doesn't try all the tricks in the books to hook their users to their site and rile them up. They may not be Meta-sized, but I would think there would be a living in it.
I think this is a pretty perfect use case for banning. The harms are mostly derived from the business model. If the social media companies were banned from operating them, and the bans were evaded by DIYers, Mastodon and the like, most of the problems disappear.
When there's still money in the black market alternative, banning doesn't work well (see: narcotics).
There is immense value in the ability to share realtime events with the rest of the world. If the curation algorithm is the problem, then the solution should target only that, not "BLOW IT ALL UP". There are a few ways:
1) We can build open-source clients with user-configurable client-side recommendation algorithms.
2) We can shame the people actively working to make this problem worse, especially if they make 1) or 3) harder.
3) We can build decentralized protocols like Nostr to pry social media from the hands of tech giants altogether.
These solutions are not mutually exclusive, so we should pursue all of them.
Yes, let's give more power to the EU, the entity that's been trying to ban encryption within the EU for the last 3 years and wants to read all your messages, scan all your pictures, but pinky promise, it won't use the data to hunt down political dissidents or silence opposing views.
I am sure it's going to be swell.
Let's also require tech companies to only allow content that has been approved by the central committee for peace and tolerance (TM) while we are it!
The EU is not a single mind, it is many party democracy. Yes there are forces in it that have been pushing for "lawful interception" for some time now. And they have always failed to ban E2E-encryption.
In the USA there exist similar forces who also introduced bills with similar ideas multiple times in the last decade. One of those is currently in congress.
> pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
The opposite, actually - I remember reading that HN downranks posts that have a low favorability:engagement ratio - in its case, high comment count and comparatively low votes. The reasoning being that flamebait topics inspire a disproportionate number of angry/low-substance/pile-on comments and retort-chains compared to normal topics, without garnering a corresponding increase in top-level votes.
It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.
Agreed. If anyone in the medical community tried the stuff that Facebook and Google do, it would fail immediately at an ethics review board and/or the person would lose their medical license.
Sooo... Should we ban Google too? It is also ordering the contents of its research results with algorithms. Similarly, HN and reddit order the contents of their front page with some algorithms, and in the case of Google and Reddit, the algorithm is personalized with the user's preferences.
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
ERM, FB itself admited they made a research regarding emotional response to the content they show.
FB/X modus operandi is keep as much people for as long possible glued to the screen. The most triggering content will awaken all those "keyboard wariors" to fight.
So instead of seeing your friends and people you follow on there you would mostly see something that would affect you one way or another (hence proliferation of more and more extreme stuff).
Google is going downhill but for different reasons - they also care only about investors bottomline but being the biggest ad-provider they don't care all that much if people spend time on google.com page or not.
We can have freedom of expression with a regular chronological feed from selected followed users. There's no need for a smart feed that optimises whatever the entity owning the network wants.
Fortunately the US federal government is standing up for the interests of US tech companies, and for the principle of free speech. They won't let the EU get away with such an extreme authoritarian move.
This administration is taking a newly-formed censorship regime that was largely operated by the nepo babies of politicians running do-nothing tax-supported nonprofits, but implemented and operated by Mossad agents, and removing the nepo babies from the loop.
You can say "retard" now, but if you call somebody who executes Palestinian children a retard, you're going on a government blacklist.
edit: This post has been classified and filed, and associated with me for the rest of my life.
I'm very skeptical of EU censorship, but EU citizens can and should figure it out for themselves. There's no reason why we Americans should be telling them how to run their economies, nor do we have some intrinsic right for our companies to operate in any random market.
Can the US and ef-of and keep this civil and social enshitification to itself? The rest of the world would be very happy if the US would finally put the wall around itself and stopped meddling with every darn scrap of the world...
Could you please stop posting flamebait, ideological battle comments, etc? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> Companies were given a deadline of Wednesday to register with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation – or face shutdown.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
I don't know Nepal's political situation, but I could imagine companies not wanting to have a potential hostage that they're directly responsible for in more authoritarian countries. Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
I've read about similar requirements for physical products licensed in Europe, and my understanding is that businesses have sprung up to provide "representative as a service" to whoever needs it. So you don't need to have your own boots on the ground, just hire a local boots-provider.
Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company, for companies that want to do business there. We could say their (general hypothetical “they,” I have no idea what the laws of Nepal are like specifically) laws are bad, but apparently they are not bad enough that the social media companies aren’t willing to go there.
IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction. Countries are sovereign, not companies.
> Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
How would that work? They obviously want someone to be inside the country, having to follow the country's laws, in case the companies decide (again) to break the laws.
If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.
This tends to be the case for these sorts of regulations, so that if necessary they have a representative who can be pulled into court to answer for violations. For example, the GDPR requires an authorised European representative.
how to you prosecute a company that isn't represented in your country ? and how do you get someone, I mean a person, in front of court ?
As far as I know, Nepal can't send its police to America to arrest Facebook CEO and bring him back.
Let's just pretend for a second: Meta deliberately allows pedophiles to organize themselves and abduct Nepalese kids. Nepal government can only publicly object, eventually block Facebook access and that's all ? Nepalese wouldn't be very happy about that.
I am surprised there are even countries where these big corporations don't already have legal representation. It's not like it's expensive compared to what they earn from Nepalese.
Censors always use something superficially "reasonable", and another part you're missing: there is no way anyone reasonable would do the ban for such trivial infractions if these demands were all there is to that.
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
It’s not reasonable although it can link like it. Brazil demanded the same thing, and then ended up jailing local representatives (even lawyers) and was forcing the company agreed to implement the government’s censorship. Even though it violated their constitution to demand such censorship. Ultimately these policies are just anti free speech and are an indicator of authoritarianism.
The can't be bothered. FA*NG companies care about China and the USA because that's where the money is. They resentfully pay a little attention to the EU. Nobody at these companies has time for Nepal.
They are pretty much the same as other content moderation around the world. There is some government body that determines their own content moderation policy then requires companies to implement it. Same as the EU, Brazil, etc.
I think a lot of westerners trust the EU government to use better judgement, and maybe they are even correct, but the fundamentals of the law are pretty much the same.
The biggest difference is these large companies dont really care that much about business in Nepal.
As someone from Nepal,
Another bill was proposed in parliament that was killed due to public backlash. That bill contained language that broadly defined what counts as actionable offenses for legal proceedings. This current bill is the wolf in sheep's clothing compared to that one.Nepali politicians have always used vague language to justify their actions—like claiming TikTok "disrupts social harmony" to justify banning it. My personal understanding is this is more about control than anything else.The last mayoral election for the Kathmandu valley was won in Facebook by an outsider young candidate with no party affiliation. Legacy political parties are facing a paradigm shift they don't know how to navigate, so they want to control it. The main person overseeing this ban claims it's about tax collection we should be getting, but when last checked, companies are already paying taxes.
Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.
It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
"Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want."
It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.
As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.
If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.
Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).
By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.
The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.
The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want.
And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.
Ruling is all about balance and drawing lines. Why is alcohol and tobacco banned for people under 18? Why are heroine and cocaine banned? Aren't these two cases examples of liberties that the government is cutting?
The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.
Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.
A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.
The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.
There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.
Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)
When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.
Notice how banning social media solves none of these problems. It just makes us blind to the problems and unable to speak about them.
They banned Signal too, that's not social media.
While it's true that lines have to be drawn to maintain any semblance of order in society, I wish we'd be more critical of who's actually drawing the lines, by what means, and for what purpose.
When those foreign companies are from [western] countries where massive unequal exchange against them happens, the moral focus should be on that. Universal individualized liberalism isn’t inherently good.
Facebook and X are whatever. Nobody cares if they get blocked.
But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I do not like Facebook and X either, but this "I hate X and Y so it is OK to ban them but not Z because I like it" is a horrible argument, if you could even call it as such.
Yeah this would be the only one I sweat. Heck, I live in Canada and haven’t been on Facebook or Twiter in like 3 years. Don’t miss them. But YouTube I go on every day lol.
Many countries in the region are banning social media. In Bangladesh, they recently banned Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/asia/bangladesh-bans-what.... Of course, Bangladesh did so in an effort to suppress a national movement that actually ended up overthrowing the government. So maybe Nepal has good reasons to worry, lol.
Apart from the reasons for this block: Why do these decisions always have to be black and white. I believe it would benefit mental health if Facebook was blocked one day per week so people are forced to live a day without it.
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
> Why do these decisions always have to be black and white.
This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.
It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.
The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
Plus, if it was a 'grey' punishment like a fine... these companies have billions if not trillions, they would just pay them, OR pay their army of lawyers to stall, fight, and try to overturn the decisions. Because an army of lawyers is still cheaper than an EU scale fine.
Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).
Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
> Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
IIRC Paris has done something that in the past - you could only drive in the city on certain days depending on the registration of your car (even vs odd numbers).
The panny-D was great for that, early days saw stuff like clean air in China, India, wildlife coming into the cities, clean water in Venice, etc - and that was after only a few weeks.
We've had car-free sundays in the past a few times, but that was also due to oil crises. But also, a lot of inner cities have a ban on cars, a restriction on cars (only locals and suppliers at fixed times), or environmental zones (no older Diesel engines, some are going a step further and banning all vans and trucks, promoting electric alternatives for last-mile deliveries). They're all having a significant impact on the health and liveability of city centers.
But it makes a lot of sense too, as they're 1000 year old city centers that were never designed for cars anyway. Often the only roads that can support cars at a normal in-city speed are on the outside of where city walls used to be.
Anyway, speaking for myself, I haven't used FB in forever, I don't think a blanket pause would affect most people that much, I posit it's only a small minority that falls into the problematic FB usage category.
Agreed. These services offer a lot of valuable social infrastructure, and it would be nice to keep the good and stop the bad.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
I have personally seen a couple family members go more than a little nuts on fb, and I've been stalked there. It is poison for some.
Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.
I hadn't thought of the comparison to tobacco yet, but it's great. I wonder if social media will follow a similar trajectory, of going from the cool thing everyone picks up to a lame addicting health-destroyer. Thankfully, it's way easier to quit Facebook than smoking.
I’m a big fan of 100% anything goes free speech. But the insanity of how X has implemented this, makes me think twice. In turns out that if you allow completely free speech on a town public square, one of the most popular high engagement speech will be prejudice and hatred towards out-groups (to throw an olive branch to rightists, an outgroup can be immigrants for rightists or nazis for leftists though these days my X feed it is just anti immigrant and I don’t see much brown shirt hysteria ).
Now I’m convinced, free speech maybe works in a technocracy, where the common man has no power and could scream whatever he wants and you could ignore him. In a liberal democracy, probably speech, especially speech to the masses need to be policed, because the ideas that win to the masses are just complete insanity. And so my new leaning goes, I still can’t give up on my free speech prior, I don’t mind all the insane nonsense I see on X but I would mind if someone tries to implement that in real life and the way things go, I think that’s just a matter of time.
In complex environments there can often be more than one effective combinations of properties. One combination that is clearly best, one combination that is pretty good, one that is okay, etc. and a long tail of completely ineffective combinations.
My point is that when education is poor quality and expensive, and attention is competitively monetized, and technology enables many to many communication with attention maximizing communication prioritized, the economic cycle is on the backend, and the world power system is being shaken up, then we get problems.
The problem isn't free speech, in fact it's probably the only property worth keeping. The biggest problems are the very competitive attention economy, the late-economic-cycle deleveraging, and the very expensive and inefficient education system.
I think you have a reasonable take and kudos for re-examining your beliefs with new evidence. I also believe in personal freedoms but at the same time god damn it do us humans have a penchant for "freely choosing" things that are terrible for our wellbeing. Freedom lets us live without fear of injust incarceration, but also gave us potentially society-ending things like climate change. I'm starting to believe that many freedoms we have we'd be better off without - however the issue arises of how to implement that when it seems easy for bad actors to abuse broad controls on the masses.
Readit News
Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.
Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.
Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.
Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.
Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2024/
If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.
And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".
The bill and requirments doesn't seem unreasonable, atleast according to https://www.lawgandhi.com/social-media-bill-2081-2025/
Depends on who you ask. I'd consider it damaging but nowhere near as damaging as X in recent times. And would consider FB worse that both for sheer the hysteria it generates in the old.
It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.
So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
Except you might get a visit from the FCC equivalent.
That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
The move seems to not be about blocking citizens access or trying to prevent communication at all, but rather to punish those specific companies because they weren't following the law, since there are companies who weren't blocked.
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For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
In general anything that has "algorytmic content ordering" that pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned and burned to the ground.
The evils of social media are not consequences of people using the internet to connect with other people, they're consequences of people using platforms where you can buy a following instead of having to earn it.
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And if you accept my premise, it's probably not the websites, but rather the humans themselves.
This is basically a fight against human nature. If I could get one wish, it would be legislation that forces social media sites to explain in detail how their algorithms work. I have to believe that a company could make a profitable social media site that doesn't try all the tricks in the books to hook their users to their site and rile them up. They may not be Meta-sized, but I would think there would be a living in it.
I think this is a pretty perfect use case for banning. The harms are mostly derived from the business model. If the social media companies were banned from operating them, and the bans were evaded by DIYers, Mastodon and the like, most of the problems disappear.
When there's still money in the black market alternative, banning doesn't work well (see: narcotics).
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1) We can build open-source clients with user-configurable client-side recommendation algorithms.
2) We can shame the people actively working to make this problem worse, especially if they make 1) or 3) harder.
3) We can build decentralized protocols like Nostr to pry social media from the hands of tech giants altogether.
These solutions are not mutually exclusive, so we should pursue all of them.
I am sure it's going to be swell.
Let's also require tech companies to only allow content that has been approved by the central committee for peace and tolerance (TM) while we are it!
No risk of censorship there.
In the USA there exist similar forces who also introduced bills with similar ideas multiple times in the last decade. One of those is currently in congress.
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.
They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.
[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
FB/X modus operandi is keep as much people for as long possible glued to the screen. The most triggering content will awaken all those "keyboard wariors" to fight.
So instead of seeing your friends and people you follow on there you would mostly see something that would affect you one way or another (hence proliferation of more and more extreme stuff).
Google is going downhill but for different reasons - they also care only about investors bottomline but being the biggest ad-provider they don't care all that much if people spend time on google.com page or not.
This administration is taking a newly-formed censorship regime that was largely operated by the nepo babies of politicians running do-nothing tax-supported nonprofits, but implemented and operated by Mossad agents, and removing the nepo babies from the loop.
You can say "retard" now, but if you call somebody who executes Palestinian children a retard, you're going on a government blacklist.
edit: This post has been classified and filed, and associated with me for the rest of my life.
Indeed. You are free to praise the president or face the consequences. Some freedom.
Imagine if they stood up for the interests of citizens instead.
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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction. Countries are sovereign, not companies.
https://about.google/company-info/locations/
Same story with Facebook:
https://www.metacareers.com/locations/
How would that work? They obviously want someone to be inside the country, having to follow the country's laws, in case the companies decide (again) to break the laws.
If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.
As far as I know, Nepal can't send its police to America to arrest Facebook CEO and bring him back.
Let's just pretend for a second: Meta deliberately allows pedophiles to organize themselves and abduct Nepalese kids. Nepal government can only publicly object, eventually block Facebook access and that's all ? Nepalese wouldn't be very happy about that.
I am surprised there are even countries where these big corporations don't already have legal representation. It's not like it's expensive compared to what they earn from Nepalese.
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
That's the interesting thing to me. They seem quite similar fundamentally but there are a couple key differences in the dynamic.
1) Nepal is a small country so these large companies just dont have to care so much
2) People on Hackernews probably have a higher opinion of the EU's governance
But fundamentally, the laws themself seem extremely similar.
I think a lot of westerners trust the EU government to use better judgement, and maybe they are even correct, but the fundamentals of the law are pretty much the same.
The biggest difference is these large companies dont really care that much about business in Nepal.
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Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.
Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.
It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.
Hopefully Nepal is not going this far.
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I recently created YouTube algo booster (open source) that allows to take this control back a little bit: https://github.com/ro31337/youtube-algo-booster
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
Perhaps we can think about YouTube or Facebook this way (Instagram - obviously). But I don't think Signal controls anybody yet they block it as well.
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It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.
As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.
If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.
Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).
By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.
The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.
The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.
And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.
[1] Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...
[2] Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.
Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.
A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.
The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.
There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.
Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)
When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.
But why?
Misaligned corporate incentives? State-backed influence campaigns? Unenlightened masses?
Notice how banning social media solves none of these problems. It just makes us blind to the problems and unable to speak about them.
They banned Signal too, that's not social media.
While it's true that lines have to be drawn to maintain any semblance of order in society, I wish we'd be more critical of who's actually drawing the lines, by what means, and for what purpose.
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But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.
It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.
The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
(Gets blocked)
These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).
Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
The net result in São Paulo (Brazil) for (something that approaches) this is that people end up buying a second vehicle.
We've had car-free sundays in the past a few times, but that was also due to oil crises. But also, a lot of inner cities have a ban on cars, a restriction on cars (only locals and suppliers at fixed times), or environmental zones (no older Diesel engines, some are going a step further and banning all vans and trucks, promoting electric alternatives for last-mile deliveries). They're all having a significant impact on the health and liveability of city centers.
But it makes a lot of sense too, as they're 1000 year old city centers that were never designed for cars anyway. Often the only roads that can support cars at a normal in-city speed are on the outside of where city walls used to be.
Anyway, speaking for myself, I haven't used FB in forever, I don't think a blanket pause would affect most people that much, I posit it's only a small minority that falls into the problematic FB usage category.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.
Repulsive addictive product.
Now I’m convinced, free speech maybe works in a technocracy, where the common man has no power and could scream whatever he wants and you could ignore him. In a liberal democracy, probably speech, especially speech to the masses need to be policed, because the ideas that win to the masses are just complete insanity. And so my new leaning goes, I still can’t give up on my free speech prior, I don’t mind all the insane nonsense I see on X but I would mind if someone tries to implement that in real life and the way things go, I think that’s just a matter of time.
My point is that when education is poor quality and expensive, and attention is competitively monetized, and technology enables many to many communication with attention maximizing communication prioritized, the economic cycle is on the backend, and the world power system is being shaken up, then we get problems.
The problem isn't free speech, in fact it's probably the only property worth keeping. The biggest problems are the very competitive attention economy, the late-economic-cycle deleveraging, and the very expensive and inefficient education system.
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You confuse “freedom of speech” and “freedom from the consequences of speech”
As usual for the JAQing kind off poster here on hackynews