An attempt to ban social media in Nepal ended this week in violent protest with the Prime Minister ousted, Parliament in flames and soldiers on the streets of the capital. Now, the very technology the government tried to outlaw is being harnessed to help select the country’s next leader, as more than 100,000 citizens are meeting regularly in a virtual chat room to debate the country’s future.
After the government’s collapse on Tuesday, the military imposed a curfew across the capital, Kathmandu, and restricted large gatherings. With the country in political limbo and no obvious next leader in place, Nepalis have taken to Discord, a platform popularised by video gamers, to enact the digital version of a national convention.
“The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord,” said Sid Ghimiri, 23, a content creator from Kathmandu, describing how the site has become the centre of the nation’s political decision-making.
The conversation inside the Discord channel, taking place in a combination of voice, video and text chats, is so consequential that it is being discussed on national television and live streamed on news sites.
The channel’s organisers are members of Hami Nepal, a civic organisation, and many of those participating in the chat are the so-called Gen-Z activists who led this week’s protests. But since the Prime Minister’s abrupt resignation on Tuesday, power in Nepal effectively resides with the military. The army’s chiefs have met with the channel’s organisers and asked them to put forth a potential nominee for interim leader.
By the end of Wednesday, they said, after lengthy discussions and several polls, the Discord group had coalesced around Sushila Karki, Nepal’s former chief justice.
“The point was to simulate a kind of mini-election,” said Shaswot Lamichhane, a channel moderator who helped establish the server and has represented the group in meetings with the military. Lamichhane graduated from high school a few months ago.
The Discord group, he said, did not represent the whole country, and its goal was only to suggest an interim leader who could oversee elections.
In just four days, the server has grown to more that 145,000 members. And users are quickly discovering both the limits of democracy and of a social media platform in which everyone gets a say.
The chat history of the server is a reflection of disorder and infighting. Anyone can join the channel, making it easily infiltrated by trolls or people from outside Nepal. Moderators have had to tamp down calls for violence. And because anyone can speak up, conversations are often a garbled mess of unidentifiable voices.
New York Times News Service