Please, lets not have such comments on Hackernews, like ever...
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.
Seems to indicate they're not actually trying to prevent their citizens from doing anything in particular, they're just trying to get these international companies to follow their local laws since they operate there.
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.
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.
Telling that TikTok, a Chinese company (ooh the enemy!), happens to be better at following local laws than American companies?
What you're seeing is companies based in the US flagrantly ignoring requests from the government to start following the law, and subsequently be banned for ignoring them. As has happened in many other countries before that.
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.
https://about.google/company-info/locations/
Same story with Facebook:
Where I'm coming from is, I think social media is one of, if not the top most, destructive forces in society today. It provides a huge megaphone for people who benefit from spreading misinformation and actively encourages conspiratorial thinking. The attention- and ad-based business model rewards the worst kind of communication, and we can see how quickly it has been abused to destroy our society. Being one of the worst inventions in human history is not a "low bar."
I don't know what the fix is, but I know that the current situation is very much not working. I'd like it if we tried some kind of regulation to reign in this poison we are all collectively consuming. Again, something similar to how we regulate other harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco. We don't need to outright ban it, but we need to do something.
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
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
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.
If they're meant to be "held accountable" as leverage to ensure the company's compliance ("delete this politically inconvenient content worldwide or your local employees will never see their families again"), then it seems fairly understandable why social media sites would be reluctant to give that leverage - particularly for cases like this where the bill in question seems fairly restrictive (including imprisonment for using an anonymous identity).
> 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.
If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world? I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.
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.
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.
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/25/pentagon-military-ai-pro...
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.
Yeah, of course, similarly if US decides that they need people on the ground so they could execute them in a CIA blacksite in case they commit crimes.
But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping, rather than "So a person can be put in front of a court".
> If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world?
If you want to operate a service at scale, which you gain profits from, in another country than where you live, it's fairly common to have some sort of representative in that country, one way or another. Usually it's ignored when the scale is small, but once you reach the size of Facebook, I think it's expected that you get some representative in the countries where you operate, yeah.
> I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.
Exactly what we saw happen right here :) Ignore the laws, get blocked, then the companies can decide if they wanna start operating again by following local laws, or exit the country.
People stating their perspectives and arguing against other's with complete disregard for civility (or being 'mean' as you said), makes it far more difficult for people to respect opposing viewpoints.
I'd rather see targeted actions, say, bans or severe restrictions on recommendation systems/algorithmic feeds. Limit how far they're allowed to reach from your personal network of follows, limit the percentage of posts that can be algorithmicly driven, controls on the balance of popular posts vs relevant posts, ban infinite scrolling feeds, limit how strongly sites may neuter their search systems, maybe require warnings after certain levels of continuous usage.
If the goal is to directly and forcibly limit usage, a "credit" system would be preferable, you have some weekly time allocation for large-scale social media usage (forums were technically social media, but were far healthier than platforms like reddit, facebook, X), and you can use that allocation however you want. Your allocation can grow kr shrink based on your specific circumstances (career, history of healthy use of social media, social circumstances like living far from family, medical circumstances).
Of course, my solution was to stop using those services. But, I wouldn't be surprised if certain personality types are unable to do that (same as they can't quit smoking or porn or whatever else).
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
FB/X modus operandi is keep as much people for as long possible glued to the screen. The most triggering content will awaken all those "keyboard wariors" to fight.
So instead of seeing your friends and people you follow on there you would mostly see something that would affect you one way or another (hence proliferation of more and more extreme stuff).
Google is going downhill but for different reasons - they also care only about investors bottomline but being the biggest ad-provider they don't care all that much if people spend time on google.com page or not.
It's basically a dark entity that cranks up footbal hooligans and then push them on the collision course.
There is no civility 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.
Very sad people feel the need to come on a platform like hackernews to let off steam.
For such people everything must be framed in a good versus evil, us vs them or generally sensationalist manner to sustain any kind of attention.
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.
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.
If legal it's "imprisonment" of the employee - and I feel it's hard to argue that's out of the question when we're talking about a bill that already threatens imprisonment just for users using an anonymous identity.
> If you want to operate a service at scale, which you gain profits from,
This doesn't have such stipultaions as far as I can tell - just any "publicly available social media platform created in cyberspace".
> Ignore the laws, get blocked
That's the idea - Nepal can exert the leverage of blocking the site, but nothing further like they could if there were employees stationed within the country.
Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.
> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company
The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.
It's insane that the same community that rails against attempts to police encryption, that believes in the ethos of free software, that "piracy isn't theft" and "you can't make math illegal" and that champions crypto/blockchain to prevent censorship is so sympathetic to banning "content ordering algorithms."
The problem is not the algorithms, the problem is the content, and the way people curate that content. Platforms choosing to push harmful content and not police it is a policy issue.
Is the content also free speech? Yes. But like most people I don't subscribe to an absolutist definition of free speech nor do I believe free speech means speech without consequences (absent government censorship) or that it compels a platform.
So I think it's perfectly legitimate for platforms to ban or moderate content even beyond what's strictly legal, and far less dangerous than having governments use their monopoly on violence to control what sorting algorithms you're allowed to use, or to forcibly nationalize and regulate any platform that has over some arbitrary number of users (which is something else a lot of people seem to want.)
We should be very careful about the degree of regulation we want governments to apply to what is in essence the only free mass communications medium in existence. Yes, the narrative is that the internet is entirely centralized and controlled by Google/Facebook/Twitter now but that isn't really true. It would absolutely become true if the government regulated the internet like the FCC regulates over the air broadcasts. Just look at the chaos that age verification laws are creating. Do we really want more of that?
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.
There's mean content ("I think you are an asshole") and there's content that's going to cause actual harm because it either goads others to violence or because it creates a constant cortisol increase from fear and dehumanization.
What do smokers reach for when they wake up? Their cigs. What about everyone else? Phones.
> Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.
For sure. Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum. Additional considerations can be taken, of course.
>> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company
> The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.
This is where we are, the next step in this back-and-forth is that entities without any local representation get blocked.
Indeed. You are free to praise the president or face the consequences. Some freedom.
Absolutely. Countries you operate in, meaning countries you actually employ people in and do business in and have a legal nexus in. Being accessible over the Internet is not "operating in" a country, even if that country might wish to claim otherwise.
And if you accept my premise, it's probably not the websites, but rather the humans themselves.
Because Nepal is not known for a robust rule of law or an effective legal system. They have a particular problem with torture.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/29/new-nepal-police-chief-h...
https://kathmandupost.com/national/2025/06/26/nepal-fails-to...
https://amnestynepal.org/press_release/en-nepals-systemic-fa...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_of_Hom_Bahadur_Bagal...
If you reframe the issue from "Nepal wants to punish the users" to "Nepal wants to punish the companies", implementing an easy DNS block makes a lot more sense. As long as most users are unable to access the platforms, the companies will get hurt by it, I think the idea is at least.
As someone who spent an embarrassingly long time on what lots of people claim to be the most toxic forum in the world (not sure about that, it's the biggest in the Nordics though, that's for sure), and even moderated some categories on that forum that many people wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, it really isn't that hard to moderate even when the topics are sensitive and most users are assholes.
I'd argue that moderation is difficult today on lots of platforms because it's happening too much "on the fly" so you end up with moderators working with the rules differently and applying them differently, depending on mood/topic/whatever.
If you instead make a hard list of explicit rules, with examples, and also establish internal precedents that moderators can follow, a lot of the hard work around moderation basically disappears, regardless of how divisive the topic is. But it's hard and time-consuming work, and requires careful deliberation and transparent ruling.
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.
But admitting FB did publicly say they manipulate their users' emotions for engagement, and a law is passed preventing that. How do you assess that the new FB algorithm is not manipulating emotions for engagement? How do you enforce your law? If you are not allowed to create outrage, are you allowed to promote posts that expose politicians corruption? Where is the limit?
Once again, I hate these algorithms. But we cannot regulate by saying "stop being evil", we need specific metrics, targets, objectives. A law too broad will ban Google as much as Facebook, and a law too narrow can be circumvented in many ways.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerber...
apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.
Lots of countries seem to be scrutinizing large social media companies more aggressively than small volunteer projects. These sort of companies definitely can afford local representatives. They are businesses, if they aren’t making enough money in the country to justify the representatives, they can make the business decision to pull out.
For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
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.
I think their source code is up on, like, GitHub or something. Blocking GitHub seems a bit too far for most countries. Who knows, maybe folks in Nepal will figure out a workaround using the source code.
There in the issue that a news site generally has limited number of contributors where has a social media site has an infinite number of contributors.
In either case, it seems like the same laws apply like defamation laws, fraud laws, etc apply to the authors of the posts which might be easier to target when it’s a news site as the site itself takes responsibility for the content
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.
Recent social media (& maybe "recent" no longer applies) doesn't have this kind of community run tooling
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?
They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.
In general the mere fact that there is limited number of contributors that are known and indicated authorship goes a long way. Also - all publishers have to register indicating who is behind particular "medium".
Contrary, social-"media" there is no accountability. Anyone can publish anything and there is basically no information who published that. You can sue but then again publishing platform has no information about the author so the process is long and convoluted.
Making social-media what it started from (network of close friends) where you only see the content they publish and requirement of actual details who is behind the particular profile (could be for pages/profiles with more than something like 10k followers, in which case - let's be honest - it's not "friend" at that point) would go a long way.
Ban any kind of provider-defined feed that is not chronological and does not include content of users the user does not follow, with the exception for clearly marked as-such advertising. Easy to write as a law, even easier to verify compliance.
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.
No, none of the moderators were paid, but I do think the ~2/3 admins were paid. But yeah, I did it purely out of the want for the forum to remain high-quality, as did most of the other moderators AFAIK.
> Recent social media (& maybe "recent" no longer applies) doesn't have this kind of community run tooling
Agree, although reddit with its "every subreddit is basically its own forum but not really" (admins still delete stuff you wouldn't + vice-versa) kind of did an extreme version of community run tooling, with the obvious end result that moderation is super unequal across reddit, and opaque.
Bluesky is worth mentioning as well, with their self-proclaimed "stackable" moderation, which is kind of some fresh air in the space. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
From experience, this is a symptom of them wanting to censor a specific piece of content which is on all those platforms. Look for it, you may discover something interesting.
I live in Tunisia, which had one of the most censored internet in the world before 2011.
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).
Agree, and I hope the Qatari people can see that too.
See, companies that deal with a lot of traffic on static data have geographically distributed caches.
Let's say Steam has a major game release, and gets slammed with the DL traffic of 5 million gamers all around the world trying to get their hands at that new game all at once. However, Steam has an instruction manual that allows any ISP to set up their own cache servers. So an ISP that has a cache set up can convert a lot of that global traffic to local traffic, saving them money, and offering users a better experience.
(One small ISP I knew had it set up so that all traffic to their local Steam cache was fully exempt from client rate limiting, reportedly because the ISP's admins were avid gamers.)
Other services like major CDNs, YouTube or Netflix may have deals with ISPs to locate their caching hardware on ISP premises, or may buy their own caching servers in specific datacenters. Same idea applies - it's cheaper for both ISPs and web services when the users hit local caches than when they "cache miss" and generate global traffic.
VPN use is a "forced cache miss", so it's a loss-loss for both ISPs and web services.
Also mentioned here, larger corps have local caches which unloads transit significantly. Google does this for YouTube everywhere.
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.
Can't recall the exact source, but the conclusion of the article was: if you want to kick the phone habit, first of all, keep it out of arm's reach.
Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.
It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.
Hopefully Nepal is not going this far.
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I recently created YouTube algo booster (open source) that allows to take this control back a little bit: https://github.com/ro31337/youtube-algo-booster
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
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.
[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn
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.
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.
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.
yea, a sanitized version where a Palestinian 6 year old girl who was riddled with IDF bullets is described as a "young woman" and a young Israeli "boy" was "kidnapped at gunpoint from his tank." (he was an active IDF soldier)
Lets not forget that CNN's coverage has been extremely lackluster. If they broadcast whats actually going on, Israel would be facing extreme sanctions. instead the US is sanctioning Palestinians for "bringing a war crimes accusation to trial"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/04/us-sanctions-p...
The only reason we know who the real bad guys are is because we see Israelis blowing up and sniping little kids 24/7 along with countless testimonies from first responders.
and worse, this post will likely get flagged because there's a large amount of people on this site who either choose to stick their head in the sand or secretly support this mass genocide.
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.
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.
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.
My point, overall, is that there is all the criticism of social media that excludes HN is based on vibes. And if we're about to ban social media for the EU then hopefully we have more than vibes to go off of.
The bill and requirments doesn't seem unreasonable, atleast according to https://www.lawgandhi.com/social-media-bill-2081-2025/
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.
Let's not kid ourselves, TikTok representative or Meta ones aren't going to be treated the same way that a random Nepalese. They get the golden jails.
The reason they don't want legal representative is because they would rather avoid liability and be able to do whatever the fuck they want in other's countries.
America is ranked as a flawed democracy within the EIU - just like Israel, South Korea, and Italy - which I would say is a fairly accurate take about the state of American democracy.
> When most people in China
It's hard to tell whether Chinese think one way or the other, as these kinds of polls are tightly held. That said, protests are fairly common in China, and the rate of labor unrest within China has risen dramatically compared to the past 10 years [0]
Also I read through your comment history and you seem to refer to keystatic and zola, although I knew about zola, keystatic caught me off guard and man it was something that I exactly wanted but didn't knew how...
I once vibe-coded something similar which sucks because someone mentioned and I was curious. I will definitely try out keystatic with astro templates or maybe zola too. Thanks a lot tbh (I hope that this doesn't count as straying away from the original post but just wanted to say thanks, nowadays I feel like its underrated idk, anyways thanks once again lol)
Maybe the problem is the websites that amplify the most controversial and problematic content because they get the most clicks, so these companies can report better DAUs and MAUs.
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...
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.
You confuse “freedom of speech” and “freedom from the consequences of speech”
As usual for the JAQing kind off poster here on hackynews
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.
You don't seem to have seen the videos of people being shoved into vans when they try to exercise their right to lodge grievances about government corruption.
These plans all include unlimited data and an Xfinity gateway.
You aren't required to use their gateway, although they will still ship one to you unless you ask them not to. There is no discount for not using it. Unlimited is tied to the account, not the modem or gateway so you still get unlimited if you use your own modem. Same if you use their gateway but put it in bridge mode and supply your own router.
For new customers each of the new plans can be gotten at an introductory discount. The discount price is guaranteed for 1 year or 5 years (your choice, with 1 year generally giving a steeper discount). These are all month to month plans so you aren't locked into a contract.
Existing customers can switch to the new plans. There is no discount but they do get the 1 year or 5 year price guarantee.
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.
haha
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).
we can't complain ;)
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.
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.
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.
Never understood why "internet media" companies decided it is fine to publish without moderating. Traditional media companies know they cannot do this.
Good luck trying to do any of that in China. US and other democratic societies may have warts, but there is a huge gap between those systems and China.
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.
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.
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".
So we're not regulating every possible negative outcome. We're only blocking some that are "too" negative. Where's the line? It moves over time, and it changes from area to area. Food, for example, is regulated as to poison, but not as to just being junk.
We have the freedom of not living in a nanny state. Not everything that can cause harm is forbidden.
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.
I had a quick look at the maps I could find that indicated the locations of Mastodon server instances, and I was not able to find anything local to their - of course that's not to say there is not one or more. It is important to the network that there should be many Mastodon instances, in many places, so it would be great if there were some!