Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/4/nepal-moves-to-block-facebook-x-youtube-and-others

by saikatsg • 11 months ago

286 252 11 months ago

boxed2• 11 months ago

https://kathmandupost.com/national/2025/09/04/nepal-bans-fac... is imo a better source for this.

LaundroMat• 11 months ago

Choice quote from the opposition in the article you linked to: "If social media is shut down, the country will become chaotic."

boxed2• 11 months ago

It's quite funny when you get pushback from maoists that you're being too extreme when attacking freedoms.

eeasss• 11 months ago

Great!

guerrilla2• 11 months ago

Why?

rwmj• 11 months ago

Because their algorithms designed to push content that improves "engagement" are poisonous?

fzeindl• 11 months ago

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.

DaveZale3• 11 months ago

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.

Repulsive addictive product.

thrance• 11 months ago

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.

matheusd• 11 months ago

block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.

The net result in São Paulo (Brazil) for (something that approaches) this is that people end up buying a second vehicle.

triceratops2• 11 months ago

So like a pollution tax. People who can't afford the second vehicle will drive less.

entuno• 11 months ago

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).

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

But it was just a step towards more banning, which had great result (less traffic, more people circulating on foot, less pollution)

crossroadsguy2• 11 months ago

And people with multiple cars, multiple registration years, or maybe just people with means, will be the most affected.

orwin• 11 months ago

Still happens every time air pollution gets too high.

Cthulhu_4• 11 months ago

And with great results: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/04/12/..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665793

diggan8• 11 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_4• 11 months ago

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.

_9ptr• 11 months ago

"What are you gonna do, Nepal? Block me?"

(Gets blocked)

blululu• 11 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_4• 11 months ago

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.

dotnet004• 11 months ago

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).

coldpie3• 11 months ago

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.

yorwba• 11 months ago

I wonder whether the companies that didn't register chose this intentionally because they object to the legal requirements, or whether they simply didn't have anyone in charge of compliance with Nepali law and were unaware this would happen. That they don't appear to have statements ready maybe indicates the latter?

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

EU should to the same (FB & X).

In general anything that has "algorytmic content ordering" that pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned and burned to the ground.

thinkingtoilet2• 11 months ago

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.

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

IMHO there were better communities on old forums...

__MatrixMan__• 11 months ago

What needs to go is advertising.

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.

eviks2• 11 months ago

Only with all the censors as kindling!

nradov• 11 months ago

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.

miltonlost• 11 months ago

Lol a content algorithm is not free speech

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

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...

a_ba• 11 months ago

This administration is not standing up for the principles of free speech. It has violated this principle numerous times in action and in spirit.

myvoiceismypass• 11 months ago

for the principle of free speech

Indeed. You are free to praise the president or face the consequences. Some freedom.

maleldil• 11 months ago

standing up for the interests of US tech companies

Imagine if they stood up for the interests of citizens instead.

pessimizer• 11 months ago

for the principle of free speech

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.

jajko• 11 months ago

Interest of tech companies (or more specifically their stockholders), for sure. Not so much for the long term interests of its citizens though.

int_19h4• 11 months ago

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.

plopilop4• 11 months ago

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".

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

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.

richwater• 11 months ago

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woodpanel• 11 months ago

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dang2• 11 months ago

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.

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.

wmeredith• 11 months ago

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.

mrcwinn• 11 months ago

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.

fluoridation• 11 months ago

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.

socalgal22• 11 months ago

Exactly why I often think I should stop reading HN

op00to3• 11 months ago

The clown also shows you pictures of how awesome everyone else is doing and asks why you are so fat and ugly and boring in comparison.

Mistletoe• 11 months ago

Beautiful description of our current life.

tomp• 11 months ago

Why would "algorithmic" outrage-porn content (X, Meta) be any worse than human-ordered outrage-porn content (news websites)?

ktosobcy7• 11 months ago

News websites are regulated…

godshatter3• 11 months ago

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.

op00to3• 11 months ago

I don’t think people want to understand how algorithms manipulate them.

strbean• 11 months ago

I'm not a big fan of banning things like this.

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).

Karrot_Kream4• 11 months ago

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?

abdullahkhalids• 11 months ago

No. Facebook algorithm produces different outputs for every user. HN's algorithm produces one output for all users.

They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.

jerrycruncher• 11 months ago

This is a really canonical example of a "Yet you participate in a society. Curious!" post. Well done.

[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn

blargey• 11 months ago

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.

rasmus-kirk• 11 months ago

I like this, but it also leaves the door wide open to censorship. Also this would include Youtube which would be a marked detirioration in learning.

Krssst• 11 months ago

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.

rdm_blackhole• 11 months ago

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!

No risk of censorship there.

Jon_Lowtek3• 11 months ago

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.

amelius2• 11 months ago

Let's start with banning the monetization model.

bsder• 11 months ago

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.

txrx00002• 11 months ago

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.

mastazi2• 11 months ago

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.

gman83• 11 months ago

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?

rmccue• 11 months ago

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.

diggan8• 11 months ago

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.

analog31• 11 months ago

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.

mastazi2• 11 months ago

this is a list of Google offices. Some of these are in countries that are classified as not free according to most democracy indexes.

https://about.google/company-info/locations/

Same story with Facebook:

https://www.metacareers.com/locations/

boringg• 11 months ago

I would have to imagine that Nepal wants to protect its population from getting too much content from India - they would easily be overrun.

bee_rider5• 11 months ago

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.

aucisson_masque2• 11 months ago

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.

MangoToupe2• 11 months ago

How else can these companies be compelled to follow local laws?

ath3nd• 11 months ago

I would love Signal to register a representative, the rest of the companies listed can go die in a hole as far as I am concerned.

Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.

eviks2• 11 months ago

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?

nonethewiser3• 11 months ago

I assume you feel the same about EU's regulations.

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.

nonethewiser3• 11 months ago

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.

SilverElfin• 11 months ago

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.

thomassmith65• 11 months ago

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.

dogtierstatus• 11 months ago

Similar requirements exist in India too.

crossroadsguy2• 11 months ago

Only five, including TikTok and Viber

Bloody hell! Viber is alive?

That was my first IM (India). Even when people had moved to WhatsApp I was sticking around as something felt less wrong on Viber (I can't recall now). But then I anyway had to move to WhatsApp. I have really not heard of it in a long time so I thought it would have be shutdown or something. And I don't recall it being from Japan either.

dahsameer4• 11 months ago

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.

mynameismon• 11 months ago

Interesting that Mastodon was blocked. How exactly was that ban supposed to be enforced, by blocking every single instance in existence?

dahsameer4• 11 months ago

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

dotnet004• 11 months ago

Probably the usual, where they don't actually know or care about how it works, and just blocked whichever big instance they're referring to.

amelius2• 11 months ago

switch your DNS, and you're good to go

Except you might get a visit from the FCC equivalent.

dahsameer4• 11 months ago

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

jjice• 11 months ago

switch your DNS, and you're good to go

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?

diggan8• 11 months ago

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.

spike021• 11 months ago

wouldn't using a VPN be just as illegal then?

lighttower• 11 months ago

TikTok is still allowed? Isn't it the most damaging?

bee_rider5• 11 months ago

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.

lawlessone2• 11 months ago

Isn't it the most damaging?

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.

noselasd• 11 months ago

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.

The bill and requirments doesn't seem unreasonable, atleast according to https://www.lawgandhi.com/social-media-bill-2081-2025/

ivape• 11 months ago

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.

lawlessone2• 11 months ago

BlueSky still good i guess.

deadbabe• 11 months ago

What if you just access the IP directly?

nomel• 11 months ago

A sparsly populated host file will get around it.

ranguna• 11 months ago

Then you'll lose https I believe

qwerty4561277• 11 months ago

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.

stainablesteel• 11 months ago

maybe this is odd but i just have to ask, do you consider reddit usage to be the sign of a civilized democracy?

alephnerd3• 11 months ago

democratic country

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/

skinnymuch5• 11 months ago

While unequal exchange and western hegemony exists, it always makes sense to not want a global south society to be using western companies like Reddit

electriclove• 11 months ago

Why?

nirava2• 11 months ago

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".

gsky3• 11 months ago

Good move. Hope all countries do block these apps.

Whenever i open YouTube in private tab all default recommendations are garbage. vulgar and sexist videos. its worse than garbage. Just imagine how many teens lives are ruined

karmakaze• 11 months ago

That's odd. I get an empty page that has text "Try searching to get started."

Taek• 11 months ago

That's because you have history turned off. YouTube did this really weird thing where they refuse to give you algorithmic recommendations if you have history off, which includes refusing to let you watch more than a handful of shorts at a time.

As someone who has been addicted to the youtube feed for a long time, it was really refreshing to have a button that basically meant I could only watch videos I knew to search for.

I think they are trying really hard to pressure you into turning history back on, but I'm much happier as a person now that I'm not having videos and clickbait rammed down my throat.

gsky3• 11 months ago

Even worse they are only showing garbage to third world countries since no one dares to question American companies.

Try firefox desktop.

jongjong• 11 months ago

Agreed. It would be in the interest of citizens of most countries to block these apps. IMO, any company which is present in a country must be beneficial to the average citizen of that country. If a company is not beneficial to the average citizen, then it should be banned.

I think the biggest issue with these apps is that they monopolize attention away from local products and local jobs. They destroy national economies. Each country must have their own search engines and their own social media companies.

haakon• 11 months ago

You can block YouTube for yourself on your own, it's not difficult. You don't have to depend on the state to do it for you.

gsky3• 11 months ago

I use third party apps. My cry was for non tech people

nonethewiser3• 11 months ago

Nepal's requirements don't seem very different than the EU. The main difference is simply that Nepal is small so the companies dont care.

Social media companies must have a local contact person, office, and comply with the Directive for Regulation of Social Media Use, 2080. That law requires social media companies to remove content deemed illegal.

krunck2• 11 months ago

In light of this I think countries are right to be wary of American media:

https://theintercept.com/2025/08/25/pentagon-military-ai-pro...

https://archive.is/1IElr

krunck2• 11 months ago

Judging by the down votes I guess the US military has this system up and running. </sarc>

CSMastermind• 11 months ago

Hopefully we'll get enough starlink like systems that bans like this become completely unenforceable.

dvrj1012• 11 months ago

startlink like systems are just relays like wire over ocean, there are through ground stations that do all the work.

Totally enforceable.

objektif• 11 months ago

If I have my own dish directly communicating with the satellite how are they messing with my connection?

sniffers• 11 months ago

Honestly, we'd all probably be better off without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, threads, Pinterest, LinkedIn social networking, and quora.

YouTube has some value but shorts being not opt out able is a serious problem. Reddit has some value too.

Signal, discord, and the other realtime messengers much more of a concern.

Ithrowprivately• 11 months ago

There are several inaccuracies in the comments here.

Although in the past, simple DNS level filtering was common, Telegram's IPs are now blocked at the routing level.

Is Nepal authoritarian? This is a bit complex. If they could or had the ability to enforce all of the laws on the books, then you might be able to argue that.

Nepal is better characterized as loosely anarchic. The country couldn't function if all of the regulations were enforced. What works for them is rampant corruption. This is how things are accomplished. Aside from that, the state institutions are completely inept in almost every way. Even excluding corruption, there isn't enough competence to enforce an authoritarian vision. Nepotism and the other factors you would expect play a role here.

The regulations which are enforced usually relate to opportunities for graft for those tasked with enforcement. Otherwise nobody can be bothered, or they don't want to rock the boat, because the person they'd take action against also has a minister or bureaucrat in their pocket. Easier for them to sit in their gov office, take milk tea, enjoy their benefits and doom scroll the day away.

So while on its face, regulating who can publish a website is an authoritarian affront to free speech norms, it is better understood as a cash grab. Perhaps some high profile journalists might be targeted, that is a recurring issue in Nepal.

Finally, although their Telegram efforts seem to be paying off, this latest effort seems overly ambitious. They have bitten off more than they can chew here. Business is usually conducted with a fair amount of bluster and posturing in Nepal. If tech majors simply ignore it, politicians will lose face. In general, everyone despises them already.

Due to the aforementioned issues, unemployment is a massive factor in Nepal. Money comes into the country from remittance, because doing biz locally is a losing proposition. It is extremely common to see doom scrolling all around Nepal, from the KTM valley to the rural villages. Cutting off YT and FB will create a massive backlash against the universally reviled political classes. It might be hard for outsiders to understand how widely the political class is disliked for their blatant ineptitude and corruption.

rayiner• 11 months ago

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.

maldonad05• 11 months ago

Good! Every country should ban social media. Enought of this psychological poison. Messaging apps are enough for long distance contact. For small scale, specialized discussion, there are forums. Mass many-to-many platforms have to go. But overall, it is imperative that people go back to "living" in the real world, instead of the fake reality created by social media.

cultofmetatron2• 11 months ago

Its a double edged sword. social media is also the only reason any of us know about the genocide going on in gaza right now. I'm pretty sure thats why there's such a rush to start locking down the internet since western governments aiding theocracies in mass murder puts a real "are we the bad guys?" kind of taste in your mouth.

Symbiote• 11 months ago

It's widely reported in newspapers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza

somedude895• 11 months ago

governments aiding theocracies in mass murder puts a real "are we the bad guys?" kind of taste in your mouth.

Agree, and I hope the Qatari people can see that too.

maldonad05• 11 months ago

The gaza war is all over the news.

cogidub• 11 months ago

banned whatsapp too

can16358p• 11 months ago

Banning anything is never the solution.

Don't want to use social media? Don't use it. No one can decide for others.

bamboozled• 11 months ago

Banning cigarettes for minors ? Bad idea ?

maldonad05• 11 months ago

It is the moral duty of the ruler to care for the ruled, and to do what is right to protect them. Just like cocaine or heroin or alcohol are banned for their harm to society, social media must be.

IncreasePosts• 11 months ago

Have you not spent much time on a lot of internet forums? There are always well known posters who "live" on the forums. We also need to ban internet forums so that these people go back to "living" in the real world.

sMarsIntruder• 11 months ago

Freedom on choice, my friend.

Countries that decide what’s good and what’s bad for its people, they usually tend to tyranny in the end.

I could make some recent examples.

maldonad05• 11 months ago

Banning methamphetamine or heroine is not tyranny.

mcdeltat2• 11 months ago

We realised things like lead in toothpaste (or whatever the fuck other whack "medicine" they came up with decades ago) were harmful and should be broadly disallowed, why not something like social media too?

Legitimate question. Killing someone = bad. Poisoning people with whack medicine = bad. Causing loneliness and mental health epidemic = good ??

Societies have always decided what is and isn't allowed.

qwerty4561277• 11 months ago

It is not wrong to regulate social media

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.

RomanPushkin• 11 months ago

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 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

qwerty4561277• 11 months ago

"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves.

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.

petcat• 11 months ago

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.

thr0waway001• 11 months ago

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.

johnisgood• 11 months ago

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.

maldonad05• 11 months ago

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.

txrx00002• 11 months ago

Social media is bad.

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.

skinnymuch5• 11 months ago

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.

like_any_other• 11 months ago

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.

[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...

hilbert42• 11 months ago

"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.

sashank_1509• 11 months ago

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.

shdjdndn• 11 months ago

Pretending that being tolerant of immigrants is even in the same fcking universe as tolerating nazis is just one of your many, many problems.

You confuse “freedom of speech” and “freedom from the consequences of speech”

As usual for the JAQing kind off poster here on hackynews

FloorEgg• 11 months ago

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.

mcdeltat2• 11 months ago

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.

whoisrosh• 11 months ago

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.

WhereIsTheTruth• 11 months ago

Any time you mention how the CIA uses social media to push their agenda (backed by evidence), your comments get flagged

haha

shivajikobardan• 11 months ago

Finally Nepal took a bold decision on world stage. Much needed. Social media companies leech of these "unemployed" nepalese who are getting funds from remittance via saudi, qatar. The "Dalal Pujibad" as socialist aahuti says. And mass consumerism. Needs to stop. He gives an example where Nepalese migrant workers earn money making "stuffs" in Saudi, Qatar, China, Malaysia etc. And they send money back to Nepal where they now buy those items that they made. (They could be any other migrant workers).

The intent of government can be questioned however But this is a right step in a forward direction anyhow.

This should have been done far earlier.

The blocks has been propagated fairly now. I cannot access facebook, whatsapp, linkedin, reddit (major sites, others I have not checked).

t14000• 11 months ago

It is great to see - all companies should comply with laws or get out of the country. Whatever the country, whatever the law, whatever the company.

Never understood why "internet media" companies decided it is fine to publish without moderating. Traditional media companies know they cannot do this.

nirava2• 11 months ago

To everyone agreeing with the decision, here's the real problem:

The efforts to consolidate power, control the media, repeal stricter corruption-related laws, and allow more power and wealth to the political elite have been crazy high in the last few years in Nepal. This much has been obvious to anyone paying attention.

This Social Media Ban is a pretty clear cut next logical step in that process. This could very well be a dampener, or a distraction, done in preparation for the next step.

So, in theory, in the hands of a reliable government, I'd be totally for a ban. I don't want any "mainstream" social media to be above the local laws.

But as it is, this is scary and will probably be looked at as an important event in history.

Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

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