It was absolutely not just social media ban, it was mostly youth protesting against the corrupt government and unfairness, social media ban was one element that was against the freedom of speech, but it was right around the time where everyone was documenting the rich politicians, their business connections and their families that have been living lavishly and just inheriting the election seats from generation to generation and spinning beurocracy to their sides.
I was there a few hours ago. It was a class struggle, but it was bound to be spun up as "kids don't get facebook and throw tantrum".
The corruption is simply incredible. About fifteen years ago I found myself in Kathmandu after getting altitude sickness. The team's fixer brought me to lunch with some government officials. The topic of discussion? How to steal from a hydroelectric project. One of his guests outright asked, "should we be talking about this in front of this guy?" The fixer shrugged it off saying "he's a Westerner, what is he going to do about it?" And, well, he was right. It wasn't like I could go report it to the police.
You don't know how incredible the corruption is. It goes from all levels. From president and prime minster to all the way down to a lowly clerk in your local government office. Nothing works without bribes. The big heads are raking out millions. I left the country only a few years ago. It is the sole reason I never want to be back there.
The desperation from the youth is so heart breaking when there is no jobs creation, no industry. Depending on their ability they go and work in middle east doing all those dangerous work in the desert heat. The country is empty of youth. If you go to the airport you will see thousands leaving the country each day. Coffins of workers who died in middle east.
The political parties? They are profiting for everything. In the last 10-15 years there were basically 3 guys who would become the prime minister in round robin always blame opposition when in government and always blame government when in opposition. Its like 1984 but without the surveillience but that also caught up with the ban of social media.
I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'. Amusingly they were all on one side of the plane too, the side that can see Mount Everest during the flight.
I think its quite something that we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice; this is the only division that matters. Those who are trying to follow the rules and make the nation better, and those that are only active for their self-interest.
Reminscient of Sri Lanka in 2022 (I was there). The lack of petrol and powercuts were the straw that broke the back of a camel that had been overburdend for several decades. Foreign "experts" and "analysts" trying to make sense of these events often sound either hilarious or condescending to locals who are living through them.
I was thinking exactly the same. I was not there at the time, but I have family there and have lived there.
It was amazing how many people who were not usually politically active joined the protests, and that they attracted support across racial divisions.
I think one of the problem with outside experts is that they try to reframe it in terms of the issues in their countries. For example, I have read articles trying to use Sri Lanka's excessive borrowing as a warning against modern monetary theory, which is either dishonest or incompetent - and I very much doubt the govt were even thinking in terms of MMT.
BTW I have probably met you at some point. I know Gehan from when i worked at Millennium (I was only there about an year).
Quite similar corruption is happening here in America! Donald trump made over $3.8B since getting into office this year, while tanking farming, jobs market, and foreign relations.
Fellow Nepali here. Corruption has always been blatant in Nepal, but in the past it was mostly limited to the monarchs and a small circle around them. With democracy, however, it feels like everyone in power has become corrupt. It’s reached a point where corruption is so normalized that people compare leaders based on the degree of their corruption, rather than whether they are corrupt at all. On top of that, the children of these politicians and officials openly flaunt their Gucci, LV, and Ferraris on social media—in a country where just one of their bags costs more than what an average Nepali earns in a whole year.
The open plotting happens in western countries too, my friend. I have personally been witness to it. The irony is that the same reasons that were give for not "reporting" things is also similar to why things in the west are not "reported", albeit due to far more sophisticated and complicated reasons. Must I remind you of all the examples of "whistleblowers" who were not protected, not lauded and championed, sometimes not even respected by the public they were acting in the name of. I have personal knowledge of very similar types of circumstances where people have "whistleblown" and at best, as Snowden back then indicated, even the most gross violations simply just fall on "def" ears, which is more like simply inaction; with you only having identified yourself as someone moral or principled in a system that is inherently immoral and unprincipled.
Just take a look at the whole Epstein files situation. Not to be too acute about it, but how is it wild to you that plotting would happen in the "third world" when it happens right in your face in the heart of the world empire, openly defying all of the most core Constitutionally enshrined principles, and even daring you to do something about it and also proving how powerless you/everyone is to even look the cabal that control the world in the eyes, let alone depose them.
Maybe what is even worse in a way, is the state of many developed countries where all the coruption is well documented in media, everyone knows what is going on and yet it does not really move people. I guess until you are in "good enough" state you are not forced to really fight.
China and India are meddling in this. Nothing in Nepali politics happens without either China or India's hands or implicit blessing. Heck, regional Nepali politicans will literally vie for Nitish Kumar or Lalu Prasad Yadav's (the two perpetual CMs of Bihar) backing.
Even the Armed Forces(pro-India) and the Armed Police Force (pro-China) are at each others throats.
Whenever India feels Nepal is getting too close to China, a crisis happens. When China feels Nepal is getting to close to India, a crisis happens as well.
It's like how Iraqi and Lebanese politics is always meddled in by Saudi and Iran.
Also, the social media ban is extremely damaging.
Most students use Google and YouTube to study, and WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other and getting job offers.
Classic removal of agency from real revolutions to avoid thinking critically about the real problems a country has, and instead blame a foreign boogeyman.
A favorite tactic of authoritarian regimes and the tankies that love them.
It very much sounds like it; "grooming" and instrumentalizing the local younger generation's innate and legitimate frustrations for western (read: Israeli, British, and US "intelligence" cabal clowns) interests to foment instability and/or installing a more usable and pliable government. It smells of not only every moralizing "color revolution", but it is also an on-the-nose wedge between China and India (read: BRICS) called Nepal, if you look at the map.
The recent appearance of William van Wagenen on the Scott Horton Show was rather eye opening to me on some matters, even though I have been very well aware of these types of operations for many years now. For example, the "Arab Spring" that most people at the time thought was an organic citizen protest/uprising, but was clearly a clown cabal operation, has even deeper roots with position papers for many years prior clearly outlining the exact progression for how things would end up unfolding during the "Arab Spring".
It's definitely worth a listen, even if it may sound bewildering to people who have no real context for that world outside of the mainstream.
> It was absolutely not just social media ban, it was mostly youth protesting against the corrupt government and unfairness, social media ban was one element that was against the freedom of speech, but it was right around the time where everyone was documenting the rich politicians, their business connections and their families that have been living lavishly and just inheriting the election seats from generation to generation and spinning beurocracy to their sides.
You just gave a definition of "democracy". Thank you. /s
But you cannot ignore that aspect - addicts do get aggressive, even violent, when they don't get their fix. So they are indeed vulnerable and politically susceptible.
Young people also like to see if there is a way to have a better world, old people tend to keep the status quo.
While I'm sure the connection to technology and the Internet as a whole plays a role, but much more-so the gross and clearly corrupt government is the reason why they demonstrated.
No one is willing to die so they can just post on social media.
People go out of their way to control information.
Michael Shellenberger's site was blocked in Europe by the European Parliament after posting information for "The Twitter Files - France" which he's schedule to be testifying about to the House Foreign Affairs committee tomorrow.
Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.
I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. There are countries where millions of people have protested, but in time the protests always fizzle or are stamped out, and things continue on the same trajectory.
We recently had a record-sized protest in Taiwan and major political movements as a result. The recall movement was also unprecedented, though it ostensibly failed. However the KMT has failed in its coupe so there's still a positive outcome.
It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
It might not be on the national level, but we’re fighting over here in California to maintain/take back our gun rights. A court recently ruled that the state cannot require a background check for ammunition, we also got rid of the one gun a month rule recently as well. This progress gives me hope we still have so much more work to do re. privacy, property rights and freedom of speech!
Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late.
---
The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion.
You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others.
Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, our country now having a right majority with a Nazi party in the mix, makes me really sad.
How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.
Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
I fear that your observations speaks more to protest being an inefficient catalyst for regime change more than it speaks to the efforts and initiatives to preserve freedom.
The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.
Protests are rarely effectual, they serve more to gauge interest of others and provide connections.
In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.
As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
Hard agree. I’m always trying to get my fellow young Americans to understand this and it seems to go right over their heads a lot of times. My parents lived through multiple oppressive dictatorships before emigrating to America. Once I understood everything that they and their families experienced (e.g., family members being kidnapped, disappeared, and eventually murdered simply due their political views), I gained a much deeper appreciation for our Constitution (in particular, our Bill of Rights).
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
I actually don’t know if I agree with the last part. A chunk of the Rwandan genocide was a radio station instigating and advocating for the mass slaughter of a people. Atrocities in Myanmar also were originally advocated for in Facebook. On more personal levels, domestic abuse is also psychological torture and the wearing down of a person with words and it should be in someone’s right to file a restraining order to stop being contacted by their abuser even if the abuser doesn’t perform physical violence.
That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.
Even the memories are no antidote. In the Philippines the memory of Marcos didn't stop autocrats from rising to power. Even in Europe, countries with relatively recent memories of autocracy and fascism, such as Portugal and Spain, have far-right parties with >20% seats in Parliament, just like in France or Germany.
It is not a question of what, but a question of why.
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state
Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything
I think Westerners and perhaps especially Americans think it has intrinsic power because they have a strong rule of law and effective independent courts so they are used to their Constitution being well inforced.
However, in a country where this is not the case the Constitution is just a piece of paper...
I am perfectly fine living in a society where you are not free to assault/storm government buildings and personally believe that the Jan 6th riots should have been met with more violent force than what occurred to protect the congressional proceedings.
> The demonstration turned violent when some protesters entered the Parliament complex, prompting police to resort to baton charges, tear gas shells and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, eyewitnesses said.
14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
Rubber bullets have been shown time and time again to be lethal. Just because they don't kill you every time doesn't mean they aren't lethal. You can survive a gun shot too. Immense shame should be poured on every media outlet that licks the boot of authoritarians when they repeat this lie.
Also note the phrasing. The content is "the police killed 14 people". But the form is "the situation turned violent as a result of the protester's actions".
Also, it’s literally a war crime to use tear gas on the battlefield, yet it’s somehow OK to use it on civilians. (I understand part of the reason is to prevent a slippery slope from tear gas to chlorine, but it’s still telling.)
It reads like: citizens have been protesting the government using social media, government desperate to curb dissent bans social media, dissent is now on the streets..
Or maybe it's as straightforward as the media has been reporting.
Just a random tourist caught up in all of this in Nepal right now, but what I gathered was that corruption and anti-government sentiment was the reason, but the social networks ban tipped people over the edge to start protesting.
Nepal government made the classic mistake of not realizing if you let people scream into the ether on whatever the youth use as twitter, they won't meet up with their friends to scream on the street or even worse.
It shows that the Nepalese have a higher civic response compared to many in the West, just look at the Brits, where in effect there is a social media ban on lots and lots of things that affect day-to-day life.
Let’s not pretend the level of ban is equivalent, or the effect it has on people’s lives. More should be done, but there are levels of severity. UK citizens can and do still log on to many services daily that are not accessible in Nepal.
Because people in the West have been indoctrinated to trust their governments far too much to an unhealthy degree to actually think that maybe their government doesn't have their best interest at heart and to start protesting.
And also because they're in the trap of a government provided cushy lifestyle which the government can terminate at will without violence (de-banking, de-pensioning, de-uneployment, de-social housing, etc) if they're caught protesting. People in underdeveloped countries don't have anything more to loose anyway but their chains.
Then there's also the normal US style limits (fighting words are banned, speech which harms big companies is banned, "obscenity" is restricted or banned, death threats to the president are banned (the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president)
It also seems reasonable that companies have to follow local laws to operate there. Corporations superseding states seems just as dystopian as state repression of dissent. Granted, there is either confusion or misrepresentation as Mastodon is also banned.
The reporting seems pretty meagre; even strictly with these events, how are so many dying from batons and rubber bullets? Sure these can kill, but fourteen people?
It's awkward isn't it, because following local laws could mean being a helping hand of the oppressor... For an extreme example, an email company that is forced by a new law to reveal all emails of citizens of country X, or a payment app that has to upload all transactions to the government (and where the supreme court has ruled in favour of the surveillance state). The "moral" company would probably rather shut their operations, but even trillion-dollar companies relent... And who has the last word on what's moral?
- Local law meant to censor heavily any dissent
- several pro corruption measures passed in the last few years
- the people have been angry for long
- social media just meant people now have to come on the streets
lazily pasting one of my comments from yesterday
"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. "
The count is 19. And it's mostly students, few of who were still in their school uniform. Many head injuries, and death by bullets on the head. This is the darkest day in Nepal!
Edit: And the protest was against corrupt politicians, not social media ban.
The count's gone up. I didn't go to the protest but the friends that went say they're probably under-counting considering how many shots were fired right in front of them.
In the meantime, Russia erected a copy of the great Chinese firewall with DPI and everything - blocking YouTube, foreign news, most voice chat apps, most vpn traffic, and even actively dropping ssh connections when too much bidirectional sustained traffic is being detected.
> The prime minister said the party is not against social media, “but what cannot be accepted is those doing business in Nepal, making money, and yet not complying with the law”.
I accept that there is corruption and manipulation by the government, but experience tells us also that these companies may be avoiding taxes towards zero.
They have all registered with Nepal's revenue office and are paying VAT [0]
The issue is the government in Nepal wants every social media holding company to have a designated person in Nepal who they can directly communicate with for takedowns without going through the traditional process, and if the company does not flllow through, hold that person legally liable.
It's a blatant censorship ploy because protests and dissatisfaction against the KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda musical chairs along with various constant corruption scandals are pushing Nepalis to ask for an alternative.
Readit News
(reposting as a top level comment, thanks to original poster)
I was there a few hours ago. It was a class struggle, but it was bound to be spun up as "kids don't get facebook and throw tantrum".
Years later the fixer was finally jailed for gold smuggling. https://english.khabarhub.com/2022/16/232667/
Edit: add link
The desperation from the youth is so heart breaking when there is no jobs creation, no industry. Depending on their ability they go and work in middle east doing all those dangerous work in the desert heat. The country is empty of youth. If you go to the airport you will see thousands leaving the country each day. Coffins of workers who died in middle east.
The political parties? They are profiting for everything. In the last 10-15 years there were basically 3 guys who would become the prime minister in round robin always blame opposition when in government and always blame government when in opposition. Its like 1984 but without the surveillience but that also caught up with the ban of social media.
I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'. Amusingly they were all on one side of the plane too, the side that can see Mount Everest during the flight.
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It was amazing how many people who were not usually politically active joined the protests, and that they attracted support across racial divisions.
I think one of the problem with outside experts is that they try to reframe it in terms of the issues in their countries. For example, I have read articles trying to use Sri Lanka's excessive borrowing as a warning against modern monetary theory, which is either dishonest or incompetent - and I very much doubt the govt were even thinking in terms of MMT.
BTW I have probably met you at some point. I know Gehan from when i worked at Millennium (I was only there about an year).
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How on earth you call that "corruption"?
Are you even aware of what the word means?
[1] https://mytravel.state.gov/s/step
Just take a look at the whole Epstein files situation. Not to be too acute about it, but how is it wild to you that plotting would happen in the "third world" when it happens right in your face in the heart of the world empire, openly defying all of the most core Constitutionally enshrined principles, and even daring you to do something about it and also proving how powerless you/everyone is to even look the cabal that control the world in the eyes, let alone depose them.
Even the Armed Forces(pro-India) and the Armed Police Force (pro-China) are at each others throats.
Whenever India feels Nepal is getting too close to China, a crisis happens. When China feels Nepal is getting to close to India, a crisis happens as well.
It's like how Iraqi and Lebanese politics is always meddled in by Saudi and Iran.
Also, the social media ban is extremely damaging.
Most students use Google and YouTube to study, and WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other and getting job offers.
A favorite tactic of authoritarian regimes and the tankies that love them.
The recent appearance of William van Wagenen on the Scott Horton Show was rather eye opening to me on some matters, even though I have been very well aware of these types of operations for many years now. For example, the "Arab Spring" that most people at the time thought was an organic citizen protest/uprising, but was clearly a clown cabal operation, has even deeper roots with position papers for many years prior clearly outlining the exact progression for how things would end up unfolding during the "Arab Spring".
It's definitely worth a listen, even if it may sound bewildering to people who have no real context for that world outside of the mainstream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJa1sbAqylE
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As George Washington said in Hamilton: "Ah, winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."
You just gave a definition of "democracy". Thank you. /s
Dead Comment
But you cannot ignore that aspect - addicts do get aggressive, even violent, when they don't get their fix. So they are indeed vulnerable and politically susceptible.
While I'm sure the connection to technology and the Internet as a whole plays a role, but much more-so the gross and clearly corrupt government is the reason why they demonstrated.
No one is willing to die so they can just post on social media.
Michael Shellenberger's site was blocked in Europe by the European Parliament after posting information for "The Twitter Files - France" which he's schedule to be testifying about to the House Foreign Affairs committee tomorrow.
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1963951509928079384
This is all so disheartening.
It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
Protests succeed, and they crown (usually conservative) authoritarians as the new king. Arab spring & Bangladesh are the 2 recent examples.
Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late.
---
The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion.
You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others.
Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.
How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.
Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.
Armed citizenry? I do not see any other way. Power always corrupts.
In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.
As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
Dead Comment
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.
What is to be done?
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
In the copy I found of their constitution, it only mentioned freedom of speech for the government. On their house floor.
What was it like there in recent times? Much state repression for political thought or unapproved opinions?
The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state
Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything
I think Westerners and perhaps especially Americans think it has intrinsic power because they have a strong rule of law and effective independent courts so they are used to their Constitution being well inforced.
However, in a country where this is not the case the Constitution is just a piece of paper...
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I mean thats a bit rich given the massive civil war, dictatorship and overthrow of the monarchy that all happened within living memory.
In reality long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace.
14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
some killed were still in their school uniforms, at least one was 16.
It reads like: citizens have been protesting the government using social media, government desperate to curb dissent bans social media, dissent is now on the streets..
Or maybe it's as straightforward as the media has been reporting.
And also because they're in the trap of a government provided cushy lifestyle which the government can terminate at will without violence (de-banking, de-pensioning, de-uneployment, de-social housing, etc) if they're caught protesting. People in underdeveloped countries don't have anything more to loose anyway but their chains.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-media-...
Trump has a similar playbook.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-white-house-press-pool-b...
Then there's also the normal US style limits (fighting words are banned, speech which harms big companies is banned, "obscenity" is restricted or banned, death threats to the president are banned (the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president)
The reporting seems pretty meagre; even strictly with these events, how are so many dying from batons and rubber bullets? Sure these can kill, but fourteen people?
Yes. That's as reasonable as the people there protesting their own government.
lazily pasting one of my comments from yesterday
"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. "
Edit: And the protest was against corrupt politicians, not social media ban.
PS fancy seeing you here!
Deleted Comment
I accept that there is corruption and manipulation by the government, but experience tells us also that these companies may be avoiding taxes towards zero.
The issue is the government in Nepal wants every social media holding company to have a designated person in Nepal who they can directly communicate with for takedowns without going through the traditional process, and if the company does not flllow through, hold that person legally liable.
It's a blatant censorship ploy because protests and dissatisfaction against the KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda musical chairs along with various constant corruption scandals are pushing Nepalis to ask for an alternative.
[0] - https://ekantipur.com/business/2025/01/28/en/from-google-met...