Nepal’s Revolution Shows Discord Might Be the New Twitter for Protesters

It is a safe bet at all that no one is absolutely “Nepalion citizens dragging governmental elections on an online game server” on the Bingo 2025 card. However, days after the protests that the government escalates earlier this month, the nomination, election and election of Social Karki as the new interim prime minister in Nepal, so far, has been launched without any obstacles.

Is this a new era of synergy between politics and activity online? Perhaps – although it may depend on the social media platform you use.

Karki, the former chief judge in the Nepalese Supreme Court and the first prime minister in the country, was elected in the dispute of the semi -government chat platform on a large scale after hours of intense political debate among many famous candidates, most of which were on other platforms such as YouTube.

Discord was released in 2015, a glorious chat room, designed for players but is popular through the corners of the internet obsessive. Anyone can create and operate their Discord server, which can be open to the audience or invitation only. This concentration of society has resulted; The platform includes more than 200 million users per month, and is established in all its annual revenues of $ 600 million.

The Civil Da`wah Group has established Hami Nepal, the Discord channel, and organized a experimental virtual political conference after the military leaders restricted the large personal gatherings in the wake of the protests.

With the army’s work with representatives from the virtual conference to choose a temporary leader, the Discord channel exploded quickly in size, and gained more than 140,000 members. By September 10, Karki discussion participants were elected, as they stand for about 30 million Nepalese citizens. Although the authorities may not allow a small part of the population to choose the following prime minister under normal circumstances, Karki is a common choice, with 99.6 percent of the population access to the Internet via the mobile wide range, this is less than a specialized upper -class step, which may appear first.

The elections have followed a complete reflection of the overwhelming social media ban that enacted in early September by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli since then. The ban, which included Discord along with 25 other major social media platforms, was more apparent than just a technique because the relevant platforms were not registered with the government, but the procedure seems to be part of a more continuous effort to reduce freedom of expression. General Zires and thousands of years took the streets to protest. Their frustration was the greatest with the long -term political turmoil of the nation. Nepal is still a very small democracy that was only born ownership of ownership in 2008 after a long brutal civil war; Since then, the country has had more than ten governments, with no leader that lasts for more than a few years. What began as anger at a social media ban, quickly expanded to a national referendum on corruption, as the Nepalese young people accused the government officials and their families of walking on a nation that ruled the past decade fighting to recover from a devastating earthquake in 2015.

The government escalated with a violent official response that led to an explicit revolution and the death of at least 72 people; She left the wife of the former Prime Minister in critical condition after the demonstrators set fire to their home. When the dust settled, the embargo of social media was reversed, the first resignation, the army was temporarily assumed, and the streets were cleared, with activists gathering online.

The rapid army acceptance of the online results says a lot about how things have changed dramatically in the country in recent days – but also about the dispute and the changing role of social media relationship to politics.

We have seen many examples of social media and online networks that help organize protests all over the world, from the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East starting in 2010 on Twitter to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET from an email to many protests on the Internet from blacks.

The benefits of these online networks are clear: The use of social media and the publicly searched retail marks allows fast filling through a wide range of demonstrators and activists. Live broadcasting, publishing and sharing video footage in the actual time contributes to increasing transparency and fully accountability of the authorities – difficult, for example, framing a political protest as inappropriate “riots” when the public can see the demonstrators act safely.

As a form of “resistance without leadership”, the protests re -direct the audience’s attention away from the sects of personality and towards issues and grievances. When these grievances appear through social media, which effectively replace the city’s modern field, it is more likely to be recognized and publicly treated.

However, since they are largely unknown, it has become easier in recent years to be tampered with and misunderstanding, as bad actors rely on social media for one of the other things that are good: spreading misleading information and distorting reality. This year, conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists infiltrated the Los Angeles protests against the American immigration and customs raids in the city, which led to the spread of negative propaganda on the Internet against the demonstrators who included fake content. The same social media platforms, in the first place (now X), which has now facilitated the organization of protests to obstruct its effectiveness.

This makes what is happening in Nepal in particular, not only as an example of an unusual government structure but as an example of an unusual social media cycle. I have played on a platform, Discord, so far it will be an unlikely candidate for this type of mass mobilization. For beginners, almost no one has heard it in protest that is not connected to the Internet, as he did once once the army was prevented from the General Assembly, and it is still effective.

However, this one had many integrated advantages. Hami Nepal was already a large civil organization, with more than 100,000 members, and therefore she had the infrastructure to build and host a dangerous virtual conference and good attendance attracted the attention of the public and held legitimacy as a political project.

Discord works as social media, but is very similar to project management platforms like Slack, making it very good for this type of huge organizations. The larger dispute servers contain millions of members, and although this can lead to chaos, it can also contain all the virtual agreement you expect: questions and answers in one channel, hot discussions in another, an electoral poll in another. Reducing access to the dispute puts a tone for those who can generally participate, at least in the beginning: young activists who have access to the Internet and who are likely to have some knowledge of political organization.

The demonstrators benefited from the dispute from both the scope and distress. If they tried to reach citizens on the general infantry corridors in X, Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook, the leaders of Hami Nepal may have found themselves drowning due to the algorithm noise.

Instead, they managed to invite Discord to the Ministry of mass and brought everyone to a central virtual chat room, with supervisors, clear goals, and supporting temporary military rulers. It is already likely that many demonstrators from Gen Z and Millennial are aware of the dispute, as its users have stopped young people, with the majority between the ages of 18 and 24. Coordination of the city hall, where the candidates in the elections discuss each other in front of all those who logged in, to bring many politicians, including 73 -year -old Karki.

All this indicates that it is too early to write social media as an effective organizational tool in the continuous endeavor of government reform. We are accustomed to the social media that is seen as a tool to provoke global turmoil. A Facebook weapon alone was made to destabilize governments from Moldova to Myanmar.

In the sense that the specially run Discord channels allow supervisors and specific topics for discussion, it can be said that the statute is very similar to a forum on the Internet in the old school more than a free application for all such as Instagram or X. Perhaps one of the fast foods here is that the previous structure is useful for democracy, the latter is not much. Can the Americans enhance the common consensus if they have been conducted, for example, political discussions about Redit? In a recent survey of the Pew Research Center, only 31 percent of the people surveyed in 35 countries felt that they suffer from freedom of expression completely. Can a huge unknown global chat room change that?

It is clear that these questions are currently hypothetical, but they are enjoyable. Better, it is optimistic-a change in the usual dark ways required to deal with the Internet and its role in politics.