Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One advantage of social media I see is that it has allowed people to create D2C businesses.
The world would probably be a very different place today if instead hope and joy were the bread and butter of Twitter, Reddit, etc.
As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?
Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.
Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.
Social networks are waste of time and source of anger combined with cheap dopamin. Lovely. It is what is really good for your health /s
The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.
It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.
and of surveillance capitalism. Funny how they collude with one another.
(I fully support this move - there is absolutely no way any foreign government should have control and influence over your - communication platform and your media platforms.)
The group that outright wants social media banned in the US, talks down Zuckerberg, etc, by and large will be perfectly fine with other countries banning it if not celebrate it. You have built a strawman.
The "free speech" cohort is largely anti-banning. They want platforms like X, where anything goes, and are often quite militant about their views on this subject.
And there's always the question of who gets to be the arbiter of those things.
It triggered the arab spring, but after that its pretty much used to pinpoint activists and destroy them before they get a chance to organise.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][documentary][44 mins]
Please post your evidence of this regarding Nepal. Also, are you suggesting that Nepal has an authoritarian government? Picking up a book may be helpful, as they literally abolished their authoritarian government in 1990 and their monarchy in 2008.
Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.
We had freedom of speech in the west before the Internet. That speech was not anonymous.
You'll try and get people against wars fired.
Post your name right now. Real name and address. If that's what you want, right?
Which is unsurprising.
Your point gives the authoritian the ability to use "the red scare" as tactic to ensure no subversives appear. No one to challenge their power. We must monitor all to find "the infiltrated enemy".
Your bullshit is not new. It's been done all throughout history and it's always just an excuse to suppress threats to individual power. Political parties are proscribed because "they're working for foreign actors and we deem them to be treasonous".
... you mean late night comedians I'm guessing?
Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
That's disingenous bullshit. From the likes of people who use their power imbalance to pretend their propaganda is truth and dissent is dangerous.
"Freedom of speech is ok but what you're doing is different" is the first step
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
You only need to pay attention to history to see what political totalitarianism means when there's no anonymity.
It's way worse than online trolls.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
Said the dictator, who was accountable to no one. Those who hold the power shield themselves from accountability and want to use it as an excuse to prevent dissent.
Secondly: I think you are happy to not being the target of online violence. I have experience with teens on the brink of suicide caused by it.
Try some other shitty propaganda.
Did he fall out of a window?
Go google "disappeared people in military dictatorships" and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn something about authoritians and how they dealt with "subversives".
Not everyone here lives in the US.
Your account is 17 hours old and you want to find the "enemy within". Aren't you the enemy within?
Demosntate you're not a foreign actor, according to your own rules, post your full name and address. Or maybe that's a stupid thing to do and anonymity is valuable?
I actually am a foreign actor (effectively like your own president). I'm British.
Jones is a rabble rouser, as is most of the "right" in the US. You'd do well to learn how to spot them, and like your president, he's only interested with stuffing his pockets with money.
Enjoy your fascism - comes with a free side of disappearing people. I'm sure you'll be Pinchoeted in no time at all based on your narrative once it's all locked in.
I couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of papers the founders of the US published to argue against tyrannical government were written anonymously.
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent. Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron. The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
So we agree: authoritarian regimes are a gargantuan problem, not stripping away anonymity.
> Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
Online predator almost killed my child - this is not a "very minor problem". At least not for me.
> This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron.
It is not bout things _I_ don't like but things that _we (society)_ don't like. In my country nazi symbols are forbidden in public space and I think it is a good thing. So yes - "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions".
> The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
Why not? There are countries which governments are elected by citizens and are _trusted_ by citizens. Why would I want to be anonymous if I _trust_ people I elected?
At some point the disingenous concerned parents need to start dealing with their own parenting instead of pretending we need to live in 1984 just because your bad parenting requires it.
Your way has many more deaths of government dissenters. Stop using "death" as a scare tactic. Much like the "war on terror" supporters, it's a fraud.
Maybe oppressive government and lack of freedom of speech is a problem in your country, I don’t know that and I’m sorry for you. My suggestion would be though, that you try to fix your government instead of anonymously requiring online anonymity because you’re afraid of your own government.
I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech.
> I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech
I guess you're the kind that learned from the tactics of your oppressors from both sides and want to implement those in the guise of safety.
You don't need to remove civil rights to prevent theft and violence the same way you don't need to nuke a city to combat rape.
Tackle the real problem instead of removing the most fundamental of rights so you can suppress speech and dissent you dislike, which is all this is.
Very easily it becomes, you can't say this about party B or party A, you can't have this political position.
Give me a break.
Again, all these things posted by people who don't share their full name and address. Do it, the government will share yours anyway, voluntarily or not.
But the real problem is oppressive government. My government is not oppressive - my government is here to help me and help the society to maintain civil rights.
The view that it is the government that is against civil rights is anarchistic and... wrong. In reality it is the opposite: the only way to maintain civil rights is to have the rule of law and the government that protects them.
What's more: anonymity itself has to be guarded by... the government (and that's what you require). So your logic is twisted: you trust your government to protect anonymity while at the same time you don't trust it to protect freedom of speech.
In any case, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about, dude. Isn't that the line?
Clearly you can't live up by the standards you want to impose on others.
I have nothing to worry about from my government - that's the important difference.
but the Trump administration and the current USG.
it's a move against the American Culture AND government
e: Well, unlikely to be connected to the current admin; it does target misinfo which was a big media focus surrounding the elections in 2016/2020
Inside actors are also spreading misinfo, rage bait, propaganda and general degeneracy of culture. They're blaming outsiders while doing the same or even worse.
Antivax is a strategy, not a serious point of view.
Freedom of speech is great, but not if its used by your neighbours to stir up trouble. (the civil war was long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War)
One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.
Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat
Yup, because it is a threat.
see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.
The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.
The "export" version... not so much.
I would feel better about this type of activity being regulated. There is quite a bit of room for facebook to live up to higher standards and regulation to prevent that sort of behavior with out banning.
Might also be more a of a hassle to write and enforce the laws though than out right banning though.
The result of that for a country with a small market though might be facebook/similar voluntarily leaving the country/market though.
The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/the-brazilian-...
Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?
This is a ridiculous assertion.
The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. It's still private property, though. If you show up in Aisle 6 trying to convert people to Mormonism, a Costco employee will ask you to leave and stop harassing their customers. Yes, the same principle applies to Twitter, Facebook, X, Truth Social and Instagram.
But it's not at such a scale though. It does not have one location with billions of members.
What gives you the right to leverage their private property as your soapbox? Because people on the sidewalk won't listen, and that hurts your feelings? They have a business, if you are using your speech in any way to obstruct the conduct of their thoroughfare then they can have you ejected. The cops will not listen to your tirade against multinational burger tyrants, they'll drop you off at the drunk tank. Your speech will never be unconditionally protected, not online or in real life.
As always, refer to the relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
With your linking of that xkcd, it's clear you're misunderstanding my point about legal vs natural rights, as I stated initially.
IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days.
The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their freedom of association, and avoid them. Online attempts at a public square tend to be pretty annoying, as a result.
For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.
If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?
Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.
This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens
Read up on the founding of the US and who funded printing all the propaganda flyers, newspapers, and pamphlets. That stuff wasn't cheap back then!
So yes, you have free speech if major news players coordinate whatever. If on social networks you get banned. Absolutely. That's problem 1 for authoritarian regimes. This is not something any authoritarian nation will relent on even slightly.
Second they have a problem with there being any "players" at all. Because you do get different perspectives, most of which don't match the governments. Compare the news in Israel with the "news" in Russia, or with Al Jazeera and you will see the difference. In Israel, there's maybe 5 major channels. But they hate each other. Pro and contra the war perspectives are represented. In Russia, there is no anti-war perspective. In Al Jazeera there is no one questioning how the government is spending money, there is no discussion on viewpoints, on anything in the middle east. There is no discussion of corruption either, in either Russia or Qatar. None.
This illustrates the problem of propaganda: everyone knows it's bullshit. Every Russian knows Russia is less democratic than a US TSA inspection. Everyone knows everything in Qatar is entirely, 100%, corrupt.
Propaganda will fail, certainly in the eyes of the government, if there is some, any way to get real information. And it doesn't matter if it's not easy. This is how it's always been in the US, because now people have some seriously rose colored glasses on how "true" US newspapers were in the early parts of the 20th century. Reality is that in the US bullshit always dominated the news cycle. This is not new.
Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)
People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.
The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.
Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.
Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.
What part of the President threatening financial sanctions and jail time for speech makes you think we have this?
To the degree the American experiment has shown anything about free speech, it’s that it may not work uncensored broadly. At the end of the day, we voted against it.
And it’s causing lots of problems with questionable benefit. Millions of people with no medical training and the critical thinking skills of a first generation LLM debating vaccines online is not productive.
We also see it with judges. Our system isn't perfect, but it allows for people who strongly believe a law is unjust to step in.
He mentioned wanting to move to the US. I assumed smugly “must be for our business environment or contractual benefits” and said as much.
He quickly responded with his concerns about being arrested for social media posts, and mentioned how many people were being arrested in the UK.
No discussion of anything about where he was on the political spectrum or anything; he was leading with this issue.
When it becomes an issue like this, we’re going to see talent flight to more favorable climates
I sincerely hope we see other countries adopt our original intent on free speech as law of their lands.
the worst part is that im only half joking.
I think the big issue is new accounts aren't allowed to downvote posts, but can flag them. In effect, the "flag" merely becomes the new downvote, leading to unpopular but relatively high-efffort coments becoming dead and invisible rather than downvoted.
Honestly just switching the two around (anyone can downvote, but only 500+ karma can flag) would go a long way to ensure only actual low-effort posts and spam get flagged, and unpopular posts get downvoted. As it is now, I rarely see an unpopular opinion that was downvoted and isn't already flagged.
I wonder what his opinion on pro-Palestinians getting banned on twitter is? Is it different then? What about the canning of Stephen Colbert?
I love these smug posts about how "free speech as a concept only applies to the government censoring people" that were made a couple years ago, where now the same figures are unbelievably opposed to sites like Twitter "excercising their right" to ban dissidents.
Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> "Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
Did you mean to demonstrate this with that strawman of a quote? Not exactly a stellar display of free speech's utility and benefits I'd say. I'm sure you will also passionately go around telling everyone how you just got unfairly censored for it if you even manage to get it flagged. It's especially rich considering this started with the dude above pulling out the hivemind card, which is also notoriously useful and productive of course.
On the one hand, curtailing free speech is a problem and a lot of governments have started doing it to a massive degree.
On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
In that regard I do believe that banning them is a net benefit to society, but I fear that for the most part it is done out of the wrong intentions with more sinister goals.
Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).
I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.
There're plenty of things far worse than social network which society has found to acceptable for many decades if not centuries. Things like alcohol, carbonated drinks, sugar etc are all consumed by people in whatever amount they want knowingly full well how much damage it might cause them. We don't need a few people baby-sitting our consumption of diet, be it food or information.
At this point, YouTube probably has a better idea what you will consume next than you yourself do.
> The government now requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances. “We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they don’t listen to us?” said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, a spokesman for the ministry.
I wonder what were the platforms expecting, ignoring local government.
You have to play by the rules society agrees on. Or do the companies think they are too big for consequence?
So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. Obviously a bad thing.
At the same time, a 2 year old law that still hasn't convinced the companies with valuations higher than my countries GDP to throw like $10k to set up an office here and maintain it with less than $5k a month to keep their services running. It doesn't feel right to fight to keep them around either.
PS: The previous paragraphs might have portrayed the current government in a (deservingly) negative light. I wonder if I'll have to start browsing hackernews with a VPN in the future.
Also, being a Gen-X-er who grew up without any of this stuff, I have to snicker just a little bit at people being up in arms about a ban on things that didn't exist 20-30 years ago. I know there is FAR more nuance to it. I simply found the thought humorous at a simplistic level.
Appropriateness.
Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).
"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).
So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.
> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts
It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.
> a coercion over a population
This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.
> the possibility of attempted population control
Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.
The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.
> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war
Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?
> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.
Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?
You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.
> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.
And where did you intend to go? In front of "State cuts the services" you went "Oh I get advantages staying without them". Yes but see, there are 30 million people there that may have had different choice, and some of them with rational choice (and fully evidently so: the World Video Archive is in the ban), and those 30Mln are within other billions that may be in a similar situation. (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
> [Missing out on social media] is quite literally the bare fact itself
Very certainly not: Nepal has blocked YouTube... Being forbidden access the worldwide video library cannot be reduced to "cannot be able to post comments" (that many serious YT users will not do, not even having an account, by the way).
> a characterization
Gross logical fault: there is a coercion in there, and reframing it as protection does not remove the presence of the coercion, which remains a debatable problem. And by going towards "protection" you are confirming my point («not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war»), which is again an extremely serious problem.
> I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses
And a number will reveal that the situation can be construed as serious. Were you to defend the idea that it were not serious, relativism will not help the substantial solidity of the argument.
> Did I ever question its seriousness?
Well, look, if the article is "they blocked the services", and you go you "feel better after doing without them", that heavily suggests you downplaying the seriousness!
Of course we could also have discussions about "could we revaluate the optimal level of those services in life balance", but maybe really not in front of "the State has decided for you"!
> there's lots of downsides to these platforms
Yes. That is also extensively discussed. But it is not in context: here, the matter is something decided for somebody else, and that there are a number of bigger problems (e.g. organized misinformation) that overseeing entities (States) will mismanage in their inability to counter them.
> Wake-up calls
You will probably be reassured that many of us are very much aware that having released transnational masses of substantial infants into echo chambers - to mention one of the foremost consequences - is a hell of a problem.
Where I said I did. I explained it to you several times over. I can only do so much if you're not willing to listen or are unable to relate.
> (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
Cool - and if the same thing happened in Russia and I posted this to my Russian mates on Discord [1], as it happened before, they'd laugh their ass off first, and then we'd shift to discussing workarounds. According to what you explained so far of your world model though, things are either inappropriate or appropriate, and they are observer invariant and temporally static. I guess this would make my Russian mates wrong about what they themselves think or something?
Not very persuasive. I'm also not really sure why you think these peers on these pages need explaining why this situation is bad, or why they'd benefit from reading another endless charade, enumerating the same tired points, and making them spiral even further (since according to you, this was definitively coercive, so there's nothing they can do anyhow). Why there isn't and should not be a space for this specific angle, as it is inappropriate according to you, and even though it is not practically possible for you to have consulted those peers to get their opinion, you're just speaking in their name.
> Gross logical fault
There is a word for that, it's called a fallacy. I did not engage in any, which you must have also noticed, hence why you didn't say that instead.
I feel our "discussion" has run its course.
[1] Yes I did see Discord was blocked in Nepal. Please apply reasoning to fill the blanks.
> not willing to listen
You think you show much hearing on this side? In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple. The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
> I did not engage in any
Apart from the one I pointed to and the other ones I have not mentioned? Not just precising the difference between fallacies and logical faults, but all the attributions of intention you expressed you construed, such as «explaining why this situation is bad». The latter was only pointed out to you because you clearly do not seem to get it, if you go "there are plus sides on not using social media" in front of of a government ban that closes the doors to a critical part of information to a population.
I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media. The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
Regrettably yes, I did. It was a waste of time.
> You think you show much hearing on this side?
Yes.
> In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple.
I understand that that's your position. Would have been pretty hard to miss. I just feel otherwise. I'd think that's been hard to miss too.
> The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
That's regrettable. Unfortunately, you've spent all the empathy I had for you regarding this, so that's something you'll need to reflect on on your own terms if you want to figure it out.
> Apart from the one I pointed to
No, including that one, as that isn't one.
> because you clearly do not seem to get it
I'm not responsible for empathizing with myself on your behalf. I very clearly do get it, which you'd be able to appreciate, if you bothered to even consider its possibility.
> I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban"
I have not. Nepal is not what my world revolves around, and I've been working all day.
Not sure that's the most appropriate way to mention that by the way, you almost sound excited for it, as if those 14 people having deceased now lets you "prove" your point. Would be pretty dishonest and inciteful to frame it this way, right? Then why are you doing it to others?
> over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media
Can you be bothered to restrain yourself from encoding your conviction into every sentence supposedly meant to persuade? It's like announcing the decision before the trial.
It'd go an awful long way in at least making it appear like you actually wanted to persuade someone, rather than just talk about how hurt you feel and expecting to be finally heard for it by magical happenstance.
I get it, you think I should be treating this as if children were dying, as if there was a famine, whatever. I don't want to. I think that's beyond asinine and pointless. It can still be, and is, serious despite this, it's not a race. It can even escalate. It's also not just a single modality, things can be serious in different ways. Would be awfully cool if I didn't need to wade through your loaded sentences to be graciously allowed to have my own position, and not be portrayed as some heartless asshole for it.
> The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
I disagree. Not sure how your insistence that we were being insensitive, and how that means we shouldn't have shared these things, helps these folks though.
By the way, you do recognize just how utterly ironic is it to campaign for us not to talk about something in a thread about censorship, right? I restrained myself from mentioning it so far, as a way to show some solidarity. But it's clearly not being appreciated, so fuck it.
Edit: I have since read the news on the unrest in Nepal. It did way more to contextualize this and why my comment might have been insensitive and misguided than this "discussion" ever could have. Turns out, mentioning that the place is volatile and despotic would have been pretty key info. It's still extremely hindsight heavy though. Like do you have even the remotest concept just how similar this news was in this thread to many many others before it? Where the place wasn't so unabashedly authoritarian that police is licensed to fire live ammo at citizens, and didn't result in an unrest and death? So far removed in perspective, no shit I didn't have a clue why you are making a scene! If this is you "raising awareness", there's a LOT you should improve on, holy shit.
Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.
You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.
Of course the simile I found to try and show that "look, this branch does not seem appropriate for the context" was random. I thought of a few, in time constraints, and the one that looked the best of the bunch happened to be the one of "starvation". It could have anything - surely you understand.
> You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to
But I was talking of the matter in context, and the simile, as said, was logic, not comparative.
It remains very unfortunate that I came to pick a simile about hunger not knowing about your past - to signify in perching_aix's case that abstincence better be voluntary and in yours that loss of something achieved remains a bad thing.
The ugly thing: about "having no idea what I'm talking about",
we are both in this world together - and the rest. We all have seen hell and misery, in the different forms that chance and the evolution of facts inflicted us. I felt immediate participation to your story. Do not suppose, for good or bad, that you are an exception.
We all have seen and lived the most horrible things.
For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.
There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.
-- Promote politically that the informational wealth the YT platform contains¹ should be treated like the rest of public knowledge and archived by the State for preservation.
¹(Picking a few example channels: "Manufacturing Intellect", "British Pathé", "Intelligence Squared"...)