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Late last month, the government of Nepal issued an ultimatum to major foreign-owned social media platforms: comply with registration requirements in the country within a week, or wind up banned. (Nepal’s Supreme Court had recently ordered something similar.) When the deadline passed, TikTok and the messaging app Viber were reportedly in compliance, but more than two dozen other sites weren’t, and were duly blocked; the list included not only the usual suspects in this type of discussion—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, X—but Reddit, Discord, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn. “We requested them to enlist with us five times,” a government spokesperson said, of the platforms. “What to do when they don’t listen to us?” Many social media users, predictably, were furious. Per the New York Times, some posted their addresses and hailed a new “age of letter exchange.”

Prior to 2008, Nepal had a restrictive environment for speech under a ruling monarchy, but then—following a period of strife that featured a Maoist insurgency, a crown prince massacring much of the royal family with an AK-47, and, eventually, decisive protests—the monarchy was abolished and a new constitution established a republic and guaranteed various freedoms; last year, the Times referred to Nepal as “South Asia’s model for free speech,” in an increasingly censorial neighborhood. By that point, however, this claim was under threat. In 2023, the government moved to ban TikTok, accusing the app of spreading hateful content that undermined social harmony. (One point of contention was tension between different religious communities over the slaughter of cows, which are sacred to many Hindus.) Last August, the ban was lifted after TikTok agreed to certain regulatory conditions, but this looked like a geopolitical maneuver (TikTok is Chinese-owned, and Nepal’s new prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, was perceived as wanting to align with that country in its dispute with India) more than one of principle. Press freedom has recently taken a hit, too: the Committee to Protect Journalists, which closely monitors violations thereof worldwide, registered no updates for Nepal between 2020 and the beginning of last year, but has since raised the alarm about assaults and arrests, including the detention, last spring, of Kailash Sirohiya, the chair of the Kantipur Media Group, Nepal’s largest media conglomerate. (It was in an article about this incident that the Times called into question Nepal’s status as a free-speech model, noting that Sirohiya’s arrest appeared to be a “thinly veiled act of retaliation” on the part of a minister who had been investigated by Kantipur titles.) Recently, CPJ condemned the social media ban, calling it “a dangerous precedent.”

According to CPJ, the affected platforms were told that they might slowly be restored if they began to come into compliance. But events would soon overtake such gradualism, as the ban touched off protests that spiraled into mass unrest. Last Monday, as demonstrators swarmed the area around Parliament in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, police fired not only rubber bullets and tear gas, but live ammunition; according to initial reports, at least nineteen people were killed, and many others were injured, including at least five journalists who were struck by either rubber bullets or stones thrown by protesters. (The number of fatalities, including police officers and people who tried to escape from prison amid the chaos, would later rise above seventy, according to officials.) On Tuesday, premises belonging to Kantipur Media Group and the Annapurna Post were set ablaze; according to Reporters Without Borders, people forced the evacuation of the latter title, and stormed the newsroom of a Kantipur TV station mid-broadcast, then attacked the news director as he smashed a glass door to try and get his colleagues out. All in all, over a dozen media companies and groups saw their offices burned or otherwise vandalized. Sirohiya’s home was also targeted.

By this point, the government had reversed course and restored access to the banned platforms, and the interior minister had resigned, but that didn’t quell the unrest, nor end the political fallout. On Tuesday, Oli, whose home was also burned, resigned as prime minister. What happened next was unprecedented (and, given the precipitating ban, not a little ironic): with the government having collapsed and a military curfew having been imposed in Kathmandu, over a hundred thousand Nepalis (per the Times) convened in a chat on Discord—one of the banned apps, which is US-based and popular with gamers, among other communities—to chart a path forward for their country. According to the Times, the chat was so consequential that news sites and TV channels started discussing and even livestreaming it; one young content creator told the paper that “the Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord.” The military said that it had been in touch with the chat’s organizers about finding new leaders, and by the end of Wednesday, a name had emerged: Sushila Karki, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, who has a reputation for opposing corruption. On Friday, Karki was sworn in as interim prime minister; on Sunday, she insisted that she’d taken the post reluctantly, and would give it up in six months following elections. “I’m not here because of my personal wish,” she said. “People from the streets and everywhere said, ‘Give responsibility to Sushila,’ so I was compelled.” The same day, according to Reuters, representatives of the civil-society group that coordinated the Discord chat participated in meetings to pick new cabinet ministers. Yesterday, NPR reported that young people are back in the streets—but this time, to monitor traffic and help clean up.

At a glance, the narrative of this story might seem to trace an arc from techno-dystopia to techno-utopia. But the reality, as usual, is more complicated. The protests were certainly triggered by the social media ban and characterized by youth participation; they quickly began being referenced, in shorthand, as “the Gen Z protests.” But the underlying animus was as old as time: a generalized anger at a dysfunctional political elite, endemic corruption, inequality, and a lack of economic opportunity. Earlier this year, a wave of protest that has been cited as a harbinger, of sorts, for the recent unrest appeared to coalesce around a fundamentally antiquated demand—the restoration of the pre-2008 monarchy—before being put down by the police. (At least two people died, including Suresh Rajak, a TV camera operator who was killed after protesters set fire to a building from which he was filming.) Some observers suggested that the latest unrest could present an opening for the deposed monarch to return. (Per the Times, the decommissioned palace in which he resides was spared by protesters, and he put out a statement that broadly backed their cause; his niece was even more vocally supportive.) But observers have suggested that even the former, more explicitly pro-monarchy protests weren’t so much seeking a restoration as using that cause, too, as a lightning rod for a broader discontent. The more recent protests, meanwhile, could be seen as having been sparked less by the social media ban and more by what users were seeing online prior to its implementation: viral campaigns calling out the ostentatious privilege of the children of the ruling elite, under the moniker “Nepo Kids.” Yesterday, the son of Nepal’s richest businessman acknowledged to Bloomberg that the protesters had a point.

And the online process that led to the installation of Karki as prime minister, while optimistic in a certain light, was in other ways risky and chaotic. A moderator of the Discord chat (who only recently graduated high school) told the Times that while the aim was to simulate a “kind of mini-election,” the process never claimed to be representative of the entire country, and was only designed to pick an interim leader. Others who took part noted that the chat was open to anyone (making it hard to place typical democratic boundaries on participation) and, literally, noisy, with users sometimes talking over each other in a cacophonous din. There were also some calls for violence, and misinformation. (In response to the latter, the organizers launched a fact-checking effort, releasing, for example, a copy of one of the leaders’ identity documents after a rumor circulated that he was actually an Indian citizen.)

The journalist Pranaya Rana told Al Jazeera that the Discord experiment and broader tech savvy of the protest movement represents “the future,” adding, “We can either remain in the days of giving speeches on stages with mics or get used to talking freely on online platforms. Gen Z is naive, but that’s to be expected. They are young, but they have shown a willingness to learn, and that’s the important part.” Globally speaking, however, that future looks, to me, uncertain. As one expert noted to the Times, while social media has, in the past, proven effective at catalyzing the early stages of protest movements, this can’t be said of its ability to create “a stable political structure in the long term.” (Exhibit A, surely, is the Arab Spring, which led to a surge of people-power-flavored techno-optimism in the early 2010s but ultimately didn’t succeed in implanting durable democracies in that soil.) And, while the messy consequences of social media discourse have been evident for a number of years at this point, we appear to be living through a moment of heightened messiness, one that could even come to be seen as a sort of inflection point. As I’ve explored in this newsletter in recent weeks, various Western governments are taking increasingly ambitious steps to regulate the dark side of social platforms, and yet, often, finding themselves stymied. In the US, the assassination of Charlie Kirk—who became famous in the first place thanks to the internet—seems to be twisting online discourse into ever scarier shapes. (Yesterday, the vice president of the United States took two hours out of his day to host Kirk’s podcast and threaten reprisals against some ill-defined constellation of left-wing groups.) Discord itself has been a subplot of the Kirk assassination, given that his alleged assassin was active there; the platform said it had found no evidence that he used it to plan his attack on Kirk, but per the Washington Post, he appeared to confess to friends there before being arrested.

Recent events in Nepal are, perhaps, a timely—if heavily caveated—reminder of the ongoing democratic potential of social media. But this broader moment reminds us constantly that platforms sold to us as vectors of democratization are subject to constraints—from all sides, and sometimes in very undemocratic ways. Governments’ efforts to control them range from content-moderation regulations produced with democratic consent to blunt-force bans. But even the former pose thorny questions about enforcement and censorship. And in either situation, major platforms’ owners—private, effectively unaccountable behemoths based thousands of miles away—can refuse to play ball. Nepal’s recent social media ban may well have been an undemocratic threat to free expression, but it’s hard to conclude that tech companies’ refusal to register there was a pure manifestation of democratic hope when they effectively seem to pick and choose which countries’ rules to follow based on how much leverage they feel they have. (“Google and Meta and others were like ‘OK, see ya. We don’t care enough about Nepal,’” one expert told the Times.) “What to do when they don’t listen to us?” is a fair question to ask of tech giants. And, as Nepal’s government found out, of itself.

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