It is great to see - all companies should comply with laws or get out of the country. Whatever the country, whatever the law, whatever the company.
Never understood why "internet media" companies decided it is fine to publish without moderating. Traditional media companies know they cannot do this.
I'm from Nepal. The bans are implemented in a pretty straightforward way: ISPs simply don't resolve DNS queries for these services. switch your DNS, and you're good to go. There are 26 apps that were banned: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, Pinterest, Signal, Threads, WeChat, Quora, Tumblr, Clubhouse, Mastodon, MeWe, Rumble, VK, Line, IMO, Zalo, Soul, and Hamro Patro.
I'm pretty sure they didn't do their research well. They probably think mastodon's app is the top result that comes up when mastodon is typed into google. They also decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
> decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it
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.
One could argue that. There were also a few services that complied a long time ago: TikTok, Viber et al. Twitter(X) is currently discussing with government about this. Also, a big population in Nepal seem to agree with this decision. I could see a lot of people celebrating the decision to block these services.
> MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
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.
Blocking Signal or Reddit sounds bizarre for a civilized democratic country. What sense can that make other than denying people the right for privacy of personal communications or uncensored information access? I am very surprised Nepal goes this way.
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.
I’m assuming that ranking has countries like China as not democratic while countries like the US as democratic. When most people in China are happy with their govt/they correctly believe the govt is working in their interest. Meanwhile the majority in America are usually not happy with their current regimes and most certainly the govt does not represent the people.
> When most people in China are happy with their govt
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.
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]
I consider banning it uncharacteristic to such. I can hardly consider a state where people are not allowed to access Reddit (as well as HN, Wikipedia or StackExchange) freely and anonymously a healthy civilized democracy. It can still be a very civilized society in general but tightening control on the people like this indicates the government is going slippery slope.
Many national subreddits are taken over by power hungry mods who now have behind the scene help from nation-states. Despite ample evidence and other subreddits highlighting consistent systemic biases there is no way to remove mods or change policies. I understand it is difficult to make it completely unbiased as subjectivity and a lot of other factors will influence what counts are right or wrong in that scenario, and mods are not even paid either. But then this always made it ripe for influence from other areas as a part of information warfare and here we are with the outcome
Sure - the reason is the want more control over their people, they want to surveil them (hence blocking Signal), they want them to only read or express "correct" texts and prevent them from participating in open loosely-moderated discussions (hence blocking Reddit).
as long as my ISP doesn't snitch on me, I'm fine. ISPs also have a stake in this ban because the last time a block was implemented (on TikTok), people flocked to VPNs, which drove up bandwidth costs for them. so, I think while ISPs in Nepal are technically complying with the law by blocking these services, they're doing it in a way that’s intentionally easy to bypass. Now that TikTok is unbanned, the news of DNS switching is spreading quickly in Nepal through it
Does using a VPN increase traffic for your ISP? I would think it's roughly the same amount of traffic, just encrypted from the ISPs perspective. Things take a longer route to get to your final destination and back, but it's not the traffic on the ISP that is increased. Unless encrypted data is much larger than unencrypted data.
It's changes the data flow. Transit connections are magnitudes expensive than local exchanges, and you can even connect to neighborhood country exchanges on lower prices than serve all TikTok through Ams/Fra. Since VPN is encrypted you can't reroute its content by your rules.
Also mentioned here, larger corps have local caches which unloads transit significantly. Google does this for YouTube everywhere.
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.
> I think while ISPs in Nepal are technically complying with the law by blocking these services, they're doing it in a way that’s intentionally easy to bypass
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.
Some ISPs make it difficult. In the USA, Comcast blocks DNS other than to their own resolvers you're using their gateway/router device. I believe you can still do it using your own router but then they cap your data.
Those are the old plans. In the last few months they have rolled nationwide a new set of 4 plans: 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 2 Gbps. Upload speeds vary I think depending on whether your area has received the mid split upgrade they have been rolling out for a while. The mid split upgrade allocates more channels for uploads.
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.
Does no one have the political power to ban tiktok? Even the American president couldn’t. It’s just too politically fraught because people get angry without their tiktok.
That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
> That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
The move seems to not be about blocking citizens access or trying to prevent communication at all, but rather to punish those specific companies because they weren't following the law, since there are companies who weren't blocked.
TikTok complied with their regulation last year. The regulations basically requires social media platforms with > 1 million nepalese accounts to get a license to operate in Nepal.
I think it less like: governments see social media sites as damaging, so they ban them.
It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.
So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
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.
I would agree, but one exception: Signal. How did Signal brush them the wrong way? Do they have a law against e2ee that is at odds fundamentally with how Signal works?
Signal seems like an unfortunate loser in this sort of situation. They are big enough to be noticed, but they don’t really have a “business model” that lends itself to complying with this sort of law. I mean, they are more like an altruistic non-profit than a conventional company, so betraying their mission to comply with this sort of law seems… unlikely, right?
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.
What’s the justification? Only a state religion could provide the societal justification. I don’t know, I’m recently living under Trump, so a failed authoritarian state is very new to me. Can anyone explain how normalized and day-to-day news like this is over there?
For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
Doesn't signal automatically proxy your traffic if it detects that the domain is blocked? I assume signal will just continue to work in Nepal despite their DNS block.
In general anything that has "algorytmic content ordering" that pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned and burned to the ground.
It's such an obvious poison. Social media is responsible for the destruction of civility on so many levels. It has destroyed a generations attention span. It is a drug that is more powerful and addictive than something like weed. It seems like people here are too young to remember a life before it. It has transformed society negatively in just a decade. It absolutely should go. I'm glad you did something positive on it. Or found a community. You can still do that without social media. It needs to go.
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.
And it was contained. If you have a small group, you can manage an asshole or two, sometimes it can even be endearing ("he's an asshole, but he's our asshole"). Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate. The benefits nearly all fall away and the negatives are amplified. Add on the smartest people in the world working very hard to get everyone, including children, addicted to social media and it's fucking nefarious.
> Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate.
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.
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.
Ah, this reminds me of the one asshole on the old car forum I used to heavily participate in, who would tell new users how dumb all their ideas were for modifying their cars were. And yes, some would argue back, and then someone else would step in and point out all the threads from the cranky asshole where he'd already tried everything they were suggesting.
I saw a really good analogy the other day (on X, natch) that said subscribing to modern social media is like inviting a clown to come in your house every 10 minutes and scream, "It's gotten worse". I think about that a lot. Curation goes a long way, but it takes work.
Not to the same degree, but I'd argue HN has the same tendencies. Cynical, skeptical, assuming the worst intentions, a bogeyman tech giant hoping to destroy its own customers. Skepticism is, of course, healthy, but the default behavior in this community completely misses the reality that had we frozen progress, say, right near the Apple II launch, we never get HackerNews itself. :)
And if you accept my premise, it's probably not the websites, but rather the humans themselves.
It's one thing to have a community that has tendencies towards cynicism, skepticism, and assuming the worst. It's another thing to build an algorithm optimized for "engagement" which prioritizes polarizing content above all others because it keeps people addicted to the platform.
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.
Might I add that Facebook has also proven time and time again that they believe in zero ethics. They will happily boost a dictator’s post. They’ll happily assist a rapist win elections. They’ll happily let you sell addictive content to kids. Heck they’ll even give you easy ways to target ads to “depressed 14 year old girls” specifically.
It just comes down to how you use it. I use Twitter and BlueSky exclusively to follow artists, and all I see is art. If I didn't come to HN, I don't think I'd hear about any news.
There is immense value in the ability to share realtime events with the rest of the world. If the curation algorithm is the problem, then the solution should target only that, not "BLOW IT ALL UP". There are a few ways:
1) We can build open-source clients with user-configurable client-side recommendation algorithms.
2) We can shame the people actively working to make this problem worse, especially if they make 1) or 3) harder.
3) We can build decentralized protocols like Nostr to pry social media from the hands of tech giants altogether.
These solutions are not mutually exclusive, so we should pursue all of them.
I'm not a big fan of banning things like this. There's good mixed in with the bad and banning things will only lead to new social media sites rising in their place. I don't expect them to be any better.
This is basically a fight against human nature. If I could get one wish, it would be legislation that forces social media sites to explain in detail how their algorithms work. I have to believe that a company could make a profitable social media site that doesn't try all the tricks in the books to hook their users to their site and rile them up. They may not be Meta-sized, but I would think there would be a living in it.
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).
> pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
The opposite, actually - I remember reading that HN downranks posts that have a low favorability:engagement ratio - in its case, high comment count and comparatively low votes. The reasoning being that flamebait topics inspire a disproportionate number of angry/low-substance/pile-on comments and retort-chains compared to normal topics, without garnering a corresponding increase in top-level votes.
It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.
That's interesting, it seems like it would accidentally penalize a lot of "good" posts too, like people asking questions to better understand a topic/perspective
Do you have proof that demonstrates that FB's algorithm is more harmful than upvotes on HN or Reddit? Not that it's harmful compared to a world before FB, that it's more harmful than an upvote based algorithm.
Thanks. I try really hard. Wait was that supposed to be a backhanded compliment? No way, can't be, HN is above that kind of behavior (:
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.
We can have freedom of expression with a regular chronological feed from selected followed users. There's no need for a smart feed that optimises whatever the entity owning the network wants.
Yes, let's give more power to the EU, the entity that's been trying to ban encryption within the EU for the last 3 years and wants to read all your messages, scan all your pictures, but pinky promise, it won't use the data to hunt down political dissidents or silence opposing views.
I am sure it's going to be swell.
Let's also require tech companies to only allow content that has been approved by the central committee for peace and tolerance (TM) while we are it!
The EU is not a single mind, it is many party democracy. Yes there are forces in it that have been pushing for "lawful interception" for some time now. And they have always failed to ban E2E-encryption.
In the USA there exist similar forces who also introduced bills with similar ideas multiple times in the last decade. One of those is currently in congress.
Sooo... Should we ban Google too? It is also ordering the contents of its research results with algorithms. Similarly, HN and reddit order the contents of their front page with some algorithms, and in the case of Google and Reddit, the algorithm is personalized with the user's preferences.
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
ERM, FB itself admited they made a research regarding emotional response to the content they show.
FB/X modus operandi is keep as much people for as long possible glued to the screen. The most triggering content will awaken all those "keyboard wariors" to fight.
So instead of seeing your friends and people you follow on there you would mostly see something that would affect you one way or another (hence proliferation of more and more extreme stuff).
Google is going downhill but for different reasons - they also care only about investors bottomline but being the biggest ad-provider they don't care all that much if people spend time on google.com page or not.
Oh, I know that strong emotions increase engagement, outrage being a prime candidate. I have also no issue believing that FB/TikTok/X etc aggressively engage in such tactics, e.g. [0]. But I am not aware of FB publicly acknowledging that they deliberately tune the algorithm to this effect, even though they carried some research on the effects of emotions on engagement (I would love to be proven wrong though).
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.
> But we cannot regulate by saying "stop being evil", we need specific metrics, targets, objectives.
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.
Fortunately the US federal government is standing up for the interests of US tech companies, and for the principle of free speech. They won't let the EU get away with such an extreme authoritarian move.
I'm very skeptical of EU censorship, but EU citizens can and should figure it out for themselves. There's no reason why we Americans should be telling them how to run their economies, nor do we have some intrinsic right for our companies to operate in any random market.
Can the US and ef-of and keep this civil and social enshitification to itself? The rest of the world would be very happy if the US would finally put the wall around itself and stopped meddling with every darn scrap of the world...
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.
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?
Agreed. If anyone in the medical community tried the stuff that Facebook and Google do, it would fail immediately at an ethics review board and/or the person would lose their medical license.
they are? As far as I can tell they are no more regulated than anyone else.
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
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.
"We should kill/imprison peoples who have (immutable characteristic)" is hardly just a "mean thing people post".
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.
How do you learn to "deal and tolerate" people that constantly spit in your face? Especially if you try to avoid them but the platform does everything in its power to stear them your way?
It's basically a dark entity that cranks up footbal hooligans and then push them on the collision course.
I strongly agree that free speech is crucial, but the first part of your statement is in direct opposition to the second.
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.
On the contrary, I think a meaningful part of the population is incapable of digesting ideas without them being coupled to conflict. You don't need to respect opposing viewpoints in order to engage with them.
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.
The problem, to me anyway, is that FB etc don't serve me the opinions of people I know and want to engage with. Instead, they serve me a stream of content specifically tailored to annoy me and get the dopamine hit and make me react.
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).
Could you please stop posting flamebait, ideological battle comments, etc? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> Companies were given a deadline of Wednesday to register with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation – or face shutdown.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
I don't know Nepal's political situation, but I could imagine companies not wanting to have a potential hostage that they're directly responsible for in more authoritarian countries. Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
I've read about similar requirements for physical products licensed in Europe, and my understanding is that businesses have sprung up to provide "representative as a service" to whoever needs it. So you don't need to have your own boots on the ground, just hire a local boots-provider.
Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company, for companies that want to do business there. We could say their (general hypothetical “they,” I have no idea what the laws of Nepal are like specifically) laws are bad, but apparently they are not bad enough that the social media companies aren’t willing to go there.
IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction. Countries are sovereign, not companies.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
> Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum.
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.
Well, however you want to call it—as I noted at the end of that comment, we’re currently living in the result of companies trying to serve users in countries without actually operating there. The result is that countries don’t really mind blocking them.
Having direct business to consumer relations with the people of a country is doing business in that country, even if the multinational corporation claims otherwise
there are more than 200 countries in the world. do you expect me to hire 200 people, one in each country? and then they do what? should they have access to my servers? if not, what's even the point? to act as a translator? i am ok with having to follow local laws be able to provide services to a country. but if i have to hire people in every jurisdiction just to allow people there to use my free service, then i can't even afford to offer that service anymore.
apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.
If you are offering some free service just out of the kindness of your heart, and a country decides they don’t want to let their people take you up on it, I wouldn’t stress too much about it, right? I mean, it is a shame for them if your free service is really useful, but there are people all around the world without access to it…
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.
nobody asked Matrix to comply with this (as far as I know). like Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's a bit of a lost cause to try to block a decentralised protocol in practice.
i wonder why though. i don't think matrix is small enough that they haven't noticed it, and since mastodon is on the list they either don't understand decentralized services, or they misunderstood mastodon. that's the only explanation i can think of.
> Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
How would that work? They obviously want someone to be inside the country, having to follow the country's laws, in case the companies decide (again) to break the laws.
If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.
If it's just meant to be a contact point/grievance handler, I don't see much issue with them being in another country.
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.
> 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"),
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.
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.
> But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping,
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.
This tends to be the case for these sorts of regulations, so that if necessary they have a representative who can be pulled into court to answer for violations. For example, the GDPR requires an authorised European representative.
how to you prosecute a company that isn't represented in your country ? and how do you get someone, I mean a person, in front of court ?
As far as I know, Nepal can't send its police to America to arrest Facebook CEO and bring him back.
Let's just pretend for a second: Meta deliberately allows pedophiles to organize themselves and abduct Nepalese kids. Nepal government can only publicly object, eventually block Facebook access and that's all ? Nepalese wouldn't be very happy about that.
I am surprised there are even countries where these big corporations don't already have legal representation. It's not like it's expensive compared to what they earn from Nepalese.
Censors always use something superficially "reasonable", and another part you're missing: there is no way anyone reasonable would do the ban for such trivial infractions if these demands were all there is to that.
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.
It’s not reasonable although it can link like it. Brazil demanded the same thing, and then ended up jailing local representatives (even lawyers) and was forcing the company agreed to implement the government’s censorship. Even though it violated their constitution to demand such censorship. Ultimately these policies are just anti free speech and are an indicator of authoritarianism.
The can't be bothered. FA*NG companies care about China and the USA because that's where the money is. They resentfully pay a little attention to the EU. Nobody at these companies has time for Nepal.
They are pretty much the same as other content moderation around the world. There is some government body that determines their own content moderation policy then requires companies to implement it. Same as the EU, Brazil, etc.
I think a lot of westerners trust the EU government to use better judgement, and maybe they are even correct, but the fundamentals of the law are pretty much the same.
The biggest difference is these large companies dont really care that much about business in Nepal.
As someone from Nepal,
Another bill was proposed in parliament that was killed due to public backlash. That bill contained language that broadly defined what counts as actionable offenses for legal proceedings. This current bill is the wolf in sheep's clothing compared to that one.Nepali politicians have always used vague language to justify their actions—like claiming TikTok "disrupts social harmony" to justify banning it. My personal understanding is this is more about control than anything else.The last mayoral election for the Kathmandu valley was won in Facebook by an outsider young candidate with no party affiliation. Legacy political parties are facing a paradigm shift they don't know how to navigate, so they want to control it. The main person overseeing this ban claims it's about tax collection we should be getting, but when last checked, companies are already paying taxes.
I’m a big fan of 100% anything goes free speech. But the insanity of how X has implemented this, makes me think twice. In turns out that if you allow completely free speech on a town public square, one of the most popular high engagement speech will be prejudice and hatred towards out-groups (to throw an olive branch to rightists, an outgroup can be immigrants for rightists or nazis for leftists though these days my X feed it is just anti immigrant and I don’t see much brown shirt hysteria ).
Now I’m convinced, free speech maybe works in a technocracy, where the common man has no power and could scream whatever he wants and you could ignore him. In a liberal democracy, probably speech, especially speech to the masses need to be policed, because the ideas that win to the masses are just complete insanity. And so my new leaning goes, I still can’t give up on my free speech prior, I don’t mind all the insane nonsense I see on X but I would mind if someone tries to implement that in real life and the way things go, I think that’s just a matter of time.
In complex environments there can often be more than one effective combinations of properties. One combination that is clearly best, one combination that is pretty good, one that is okay, etc. and a long tail of completely ineffective combinations.
My point is that when education is poor quality and expensive, and attention is competitively monetized, and technology enables many to many communication with attention maximizing communication prioritized, the economic cycle is on the backend, and the world power system is being shaken up, then we get problems.
The problem isn't free speech, in fact it's probably the only property worth keeping. The biggest problems are the very competitive attention economy, the late-economic-cycle deleveraging, and the very expensive and inefficient education system.
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.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I 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
Ruling is all about balance and drawing lines. Why is alcohol and tobacco banned for people under 18? Why are heroine and cocaine banned? Aren't these two cases examples of liberties that the government is cutting?
The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.
Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.
A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.
The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.
There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.
Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)
When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.
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.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want.
And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.
Facebook and X are whatever. Nobody cares if they get blocked.
But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Yeah this would be the only one I sweat. Heck, I live in Canada and haven’t been on Facebook or Twiter in like 3 years. Don’t miss them. But YouTube I go on every day lol.
When those foreign companies are from [western] countries where massive unequal exchange against them happens, the moral focus should be on that. Universal individualized liberalism isn’t inherently good.
Many countries in the region are banning social media. In Bangladesh, they recently banned Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/asia/bangladesh-bans-what.... Of course, Bangladesh did so in an effort to suppress a national movement that actually ended up overthrowing the government. So maybe Nepal has good reasons to worry, lol.
Apart from the reasons for this block: Why do these decisions always have to be black and white. I believe it would benefit mental health if Facebook was blocked one day per week so people are forced to live a day without it.
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
> Why do these decisions always have to be black and white.
This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.
It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.
The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
Plus, if it was a 'grey' punishment like a fine... these companies have billions if not trillions, they would just pay them, OR pay their army of lawyers to stall, fight, and try to overturn the decisions. Because an army of lawyers is still cheaper than an EU scale fine.
Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).
Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
> Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
If that's how low your bar is for where government should interfere with people's daily lives under the guise of public health, we might as well also ask for restrictions on how much food people are allowed to buy, and mandatory daily exercise.
Yeah, definitely agree there's a ton of room for disagreement on the topic.
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.
I agree with your intention, I'm just not a fan of arbitrary measures like a one-day ban.
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).
IIRC Paris has done something that in the past - you could only drive in the city on certain days depending on the registration of your car (even vs odd numbers).
The panny-D was great for that, early days saw stuff like clean air in China, India, wildlife coming into the cities, clean water in Venice, etc - and that was after only a few weeks.
We've had car-free sundays in the past a few times, but that was also due to oil crises. But also, a lot of inner cities have a ban on cars, a restriction on cars (only locals and suppliers at fixed times), or environmental zones (no older Diesel engines, some are going a step further and banning all vans and trucks, promoting electric alternatives for last-mile deliveries). They're all having a significant impact on the health and liveability of city centers.
But it makes a lot of sense too, as they're 1000 year old city centers that were never designed for cars anyway. Often the only roads that can support cars at a normal in-city speed are on the outside of where city walls used to be.
Anyway, speaking for myself, I haven't used FB in forever, I don't think a blanket pause would affect most people that much, I posit it's only a small minority that falls into the problematic FB usage category.
Agreed. These services offer a lot of valuable social infrastructure, and it would be nice to keep the good and stop the bad.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
I have personally seen a couple family members go more than a little nuts on fb, and I've been stalked there. It is poison for some.
Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.
I hadn't thought of the comparison to tobacco yet, but it's great. I wonder if social media will follow a similar trajectory, of going from the cool thing everyone picks up to a lame addicting health-destroyer. Thankfully, it's way easier to quit Facebook than smoking.
The comparison of social media to tobacco is almost too perfect. It feels good while you're doing it and can be an effective social tool, but leaves you feeling like shit when you stop and has disastrous long-term health consequences.
Yes! I read commentary a while back that said the size of the phone is roughly (w/in a factor of two) the size of a cigarette pack and just like the pack, is almost always within arm's reach and frequently sought.
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.
Good! Every country should ban social media. Enought of this psychological poison. Messaging apps are enough for long distance contact. For small scale, specialized discussion, there are forums. Mass many-to-many platforms have to go. But overall, it is imperative that people go back to "living" in the real world, instead of the fake reality created by social media.
Have you not spent much time on a lot of internet forums? There are always well known posters who "live" on the forums. We also need to ban internet forums so that these people go back to "living" in the real world.
Its a double edged sword. social media is also the only reason any of us know about the genocide going on in gaza right now. I'm pretty sure thats why there's such a rush to start locking down the internet since western governments aiding theocracies in mass murder puts a real "are we the bad guys?" kind of taste in your mouth.
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"
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.
It is the moral duty of the ruler to care for the ruled, and to do what is right to protect them. Just like cocaine or heroin or alcohol are banned for their harm to society, social media must be.
Nepal's requirements don't seem very different than the EU. The main difference is simply that Nepal is small so the companies dont care.
Social media companies must have a local contact person, office, and comply with the Directive for Regulation of Social Media Use, 2080. That law requires social media companies to remove content deemed illegal.
Finally Nepal took a bold decision on world stage. Much needed. Social media companies leech of these "unemployed" nepalese who are getting funds from remittance via saudi, qatar. The "Dalal Pujibad" as socialist aahuti says. And mass consumerism. Needs to stop. He gives an example where Nepalese migrant workers earn money making "stuffs" in Saudi, Qatar, China, Malaysia etc. And they send money back to Nepal where they now buy those items that they made. (They could be any other migrant workers).
The intent of government can be questioned however But this is a right step in a forward direction anyhow.
This should have been done far earlier.
The blocks has been propagated fairly now. I cannot access facebook, whatsapp, linkedin, reddit (major sites, others I have not checked).
I wonder whether the companies that didn't register chose this intentionally because they object to the legal requirements, or whether they simply didn't have anyone in charge of compliance with Nepali law and were unaware this would happen. That they don't appear to have statements ready maybe indicates the latter?
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.
There are several inaccuracies in the comments here.
Although in the past, simple DNS level filtering was common, Telegram's IPs are now blocked at the routing level.
Is Nepal authoritarian? This is a bit complex. If they could or had the ability to enforce all of the laws on the books, then you might be able to argue that.
Nepal is better characterized as loosely anarchic. The country couldn't function if all of the regulations were enforced. What works for them is rampant corruption. This is how things are accomplished. Aside from that, the state institutions are completely inept in almost every way. Even excluding corruption, there isn't enough competence to enforce an authoritarian vision. Nepotism and the other factors you would expect play a role here.
The regulations which are enforced usually relate to opportunities for graft for those tasked with enforcement. Otherwise nobody can be bothered, or they don't want to rock the boat, because the person they'd take action against also has a minister or bureaucrat in their pocket. Easier for them to sit in their gov office, take milk tea, enjoy their benefits and doom scroll the day away.
So while on its face, regulating who can publish a website is an authoritarian affront to free speech norms, it is better understood as a cash grab. Perhaps some high profile journalists might be targeted, that is a recurring issue in Nepal.
Finally, although their Telegram efforts seem to be paying off, this latest effort seems overly ambitious. They have bitten off more than they can chew here. Business is usually conducted with a fair amount of bluster and posturing in Nepal. If tech majors simply ignore it, politicians will lose face. In general, everyone despises them already.
Due to the aforementioned issues, unemployment is a massive factor in Nepal. Money comes into the country from remittance, because doing biz locally is a losing proposition. It is extremely common to see doom scrolling all around Nepal, from the KTM valley to the rural villages. Cutting off YT and FB will create a massive backlash against the universally reviled political classes. It might be hard for outsiders to understand how widely the political class is disliked for their blatant ineptitude and corruption.
You're reading into this too much my friend. Tiktok was banned for a long time just not long back. The government wants service providers to register. They're even targeting some nepali apps.
> The fact that TikTok remains accessible is telling
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.
I didn't expect to see a ragebaiter in hackernews...
If you don't know what Nepal is, no worries but your comment adds nothing to HN & you were better off just searching nepal on google.
:/
Please, lets not have such comments on Hackernews, like ever...
man, the only thing that I can think of this guy is, The less I know the better....
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)
Good move. Hope all countries do block these apps.
Whenever i open YouTube in private tab all default recommendations are garbage. vulgar and sexist videos. its worse than garbage. Just imagine how many teens lives are ruined
That's because you have history turned off. YouTube did this really weird thing where they refuse to give you algorithmic recommendations if you have history off, which includes refusing to let you watch more than a handful of shorts at a time.
As someone who has been addicted to the youtube feed for a long time, it was really refreshing to have a button that basically meant I could only watch videos I knew to search for.
I think they are trying really hard to pressure you into turning history back on, but I'm much happier as a person now that I'm not having videos and clickbait rammed down my throat.
In a private window, there is no account to check for "History is turned off". I don't think the root comment is accurate: at least in the US, I see an empty page when I visit YT in a private window.
That's what I see when I open YouTube for the first when I'm not logged in, too. I much, much, prefer this over their recommendation system. Although the first few sets of recommendations after your first few videos are actually useful.
Agreed. It would be in the interest of citizens of most countries to block these apps.
IMO, any company which is present in a country must be beneficial to the average citizen of that country. If a company is not beneficial to the average citizen, then it should be banned.
I think the biggest issue with these apps is that they monopolize attention away from local products and local jobs. They destroy national economies. Each country must have their own search engines and their own social media companies.
It is great to see - all companies should comply with laws or get out of the country. Whatever the country, whatever the law, whatever the company.
Never understood why "internet media" companies decided it is fine to publish without moderating. Traditional media companies know they cannot do this.
I'm from Nepal. The bans are implemented in a pretty straightforward way: ISPs simply don't resolve DNS queries for these services. switch your DNS, and you're good to go. There are 26 apps that were banned: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, Pinterest, Signal, Threads, WeChat, Quora, Tumblr, Clubhouse, Mastodon, MeWe, Rumble, VK, Line, IMO, Zalo, Soul, and Hamro Patro.
Interesting that Mastodon was blocked. How exactly was that ban supposed to be enforced, by blocking every single instance in existence?
I'm pretty sure they didn't do their research well. They probably think mastodon's app is the top result that comes up when mastodon is typed into google. They also decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
> decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it
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.
One could argue that. There were also a few services that complied a long time ago: TikTok, Viber et al. Twitter(X) is currently discussing with government about this. Also, a big population in Nepal seem to agree with this decision. I could see a lot of people celebrating the decision to block these services.
Does mastodon actually operate in Nepal?
It's a big country; surely there's at least one instance running.
How dare they!
> MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
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.
Probably the usual, where they don't actually know or care about how it works, and just blocked whichever big instance they're referring to.
Blocking Signal or Reddit sounds bizarre for a civilized democratic country. What sense can that make other than denying people the right for privacy of personal communications or uncensored information access? I am very surprised Nepal goes this way.
> democratic country
Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.
Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.
Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.
Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.
Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2024/
I’m assuming that ranking has countries like China as not democratic while countries like the US as democratic. When most people in China are happy with their govt/they correctly believe the govt is working in their interest. Meanwhile the majority in America are usually not happy with their current regimes and most certainly the govt does not represent the people.
> When most people in China are happy with their govt
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.
I agree, what ICE is doing in LA is pretty shameful!
Whereas in the US, masked government goons have never thrown people in unmarked vans /s.
> while countries like the US as democratic
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]
[0] - https://labourreview.org/strike-wave-china/
>most people in China are happy with their govt/they correctly believe the govt is working in their interest
we can't complain ;)
While unequal exchange and western hegemony exists, it always makes sense to not want a global south society to be using western companies like Reddit
Extremely popular Nepali platforms like Hamro Patro were banned as well, as was Zalo from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
maybe this is odd but i just have to ask, do you consider reddit usage to be the sign of a civilized democracy?
I consider banning it uncharacteristic to such. I can hardly consider a state where people are not allowed to access Reddit (as well as HN, Wikipedia or StackExchange) freely and anonymously a healthy civilized democracy. It can still be a very civilized society in general but tightening control on the people like this indicates the government is going slippery slope.
Many national subreddits are taken over by power hungry mods who now have behind the scene help from nation-states. Despite ample evidence and other subreddits highlighting consistent systemic biases there is no way to remove mods or change policies. I understand it is difficult to make it completely unbiased as subjectivity and a lot of other factors will influence what counts are right or wrong in that scenario, and mods are not even paid either. But then this always made it ripe for influence from other areas as a part of information warfare and here we are with the outcome
I’d think it doesn’t specifically mean anything for civilized or democracy or slippery slope to block a bunch of western sites.
The grammar is our enemy here. Blocking a website may be Okay. Blocking a person willing to access it is not.
Reddit, civilized and democracy are not strongly correlated. Free speech and civilized, they are.
reddit makes no harm, thus there is no reason to block it.
Reddit is a western American site while western hegemony exists. There’s always a reason for the global south to block western sites/companies
Sure - the reason is the want more control over their people, they want to surveil them (hence blocking Signal), they want them to only read or express "correct" texts and prevent them from participating in open loosely-moderated discussions (hence blocking Reddit).
Wouldn't want comrades to get cooties from reading icky things?
> switch your DNS, and you're good to go
Except you might get a visit from the FCC equivalent.
as long as my ISP doesn't snitch on me, I'm fine. ISPs also have a stake in this ban because the last time a block was implemented (on TikTok), people flocked to VPNs, which drove up bandwidth costs for them. so, I think while ISPs in Nepal are technically complying with the law by blocking these services, they're doing it in a way that’s intentionally easy to bypass. Now that TikTok is unbanned, the news of DNS switching is spreading quickly in Nepal through it
Does using a VPN increase traffic for your ISP? I would think it's roughly the same amount of traffic, just encrypted from the ISPs perspective. Things take a longer route to get to your final destination and back, but it's not the traffic on the ISP that is increased. Unless encrypted data is much larger than unencrypted data.
It's changes the data flow. Transit connections are magnitudes expensive than local exchanges, and you can even connect to neighborhood country exchanges on lower prices than serve all TikTok through Ams/Fra. Since VPN is encrypted you can't reroute its content by your rules.
Also mentioned here, larger corps have local caches which unloads transit significantly. Google does this for YouTube everywhere.
It does, but mostly in an indirect way.
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.
Not really an L for web services, since the caches would just end up near the VPN locations (and sometimes inside the same DC).
Disclaimer: Former YT Engineer.
~10% overhead, is that significant for the ISP? Don't know.
> I think while ISPs in Nepal are technically complying with the law by blocking these services, they're doing it in a way that’s intentionally easy to bypass
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.
Some ISPs make it difficult. In the USA, Comcast blocks DNS other than to their own resolvers you're using their gateway/router device. I believe you can still do it using your own router but then they cap your data.
I'm on Comcast Xfinity and I use my own router with custom DNS settings. I'm not aware of any difference wrt data caps.
They cap your bandwidth, according to my friend in SF who uses an Xfinity router in bridge mode behind his own firewall.
Those are the old plans. In the last few months they have rolled nationwide a new set of 4 plans: 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 2 Gbps. Upload speeds vary I think depending on whether your area has received the mid split upgrade they have been rolling out for a while. The mid split upgrade allocates more channels for uploads.
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.
Does no one have the political power to ban tiktok? Even the American president couldn’t. It’s just too politically fraught because people get angry without their tiktok.
> switch your DNS, and you're good to go
That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
> That would definitely allow you to access the sites again, but is it illegal to do that now, or is this kind of just a soft block without legal ramifications?
The move seems to not be about blocking citizens access or trying to prevent communication at all, but rather to punish those specific companies because they weren't following the law, since there are companies who weren't blocked.
wouldn't using a VPN be just as illegal then?
TikTok is still allowed? Isn't it the most damaging?
TikTok complied with their regulation last year. The regulations basically requires social media platforms with > 1 million nepalese accounts to get a license to operate in Nepal.
The bill and requirments doesn't seem unreasonable, atleast according to https://www.lawgandhi.com/social-media-bill-2081-2025/
I think it less like: governments see social media sites as damaging, so they ban them.
It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.
So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
>Isn't it the most damaging?
Depends on who you ask. I'd consider it damaging but nowhere near as damaging as X in recent times. And would consider FB worse that both for sheer the hysteria it generates in the old.
What if you just access the IP directly?
A sparsly populated host file will get around it.
BlueSky still good i guess.
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I would agree, but one exception: Signal. How did Signal brush them the wrong way? Do they have a law against e2ee that is at odds fundamentally with how Signal works?
Signal seems like an unfortunate loser in this sort of situation. They are big enough to be noticed, but they don’t really have a “business model” that lends itself to complying with this sort of law. I mean, they are more like an altruistic non-profit than a conventional company, so betraying their mission to comply with this sort of law seems… unlikely, right?
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.
What’s the justification? Only a state religion could provide the societal justification. I don’t know, I’m recently living under Trump, so a failed authoritarian state is very new to me. Can anyone explain how normalized and day-to-day news like this is over there?
For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
Signal? Fuck your government. That shit ain't right.
Doesn't signal automatically proxy your traffic if it detects that the domain is blocked? I assume signal will just continue to work in Nepal despite their DNS block.
Why?
EU should to the same (FB & X).
In general anything that has "algorytmic content ordering" that pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned and burned to the ground.
It's such an obvious poison. Social media is responsible for the destruction of civility on so many levels. It has destroyed a generations attention span. It is a drug that is more powerful and addictive than something like weed. It seems like people here are too young to remember a life before it. It has transformed society negatively in just a decade. It absolutely should go. I'm glad you did something positive on it. Or found a community. You can still do that without social media. It needs to go.
What needs to go is advertising.
The evils of social media are not consequences of people using the internet to connect with other people, they're consequences of people using platforms where you can buy a following instead of having to earn it.
IMHO there were better communities on old forums...
And it was contained. If you have a small group, you can manage an asshole or two, sometimes it can even be endearing ("he's an asshole, but he's our asshole"). Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate. The benefits nearly all fall away and the negatives are amplified. Add on the smartest people in the world working very hard to get everyone, including children, addicted to social media and it's fucking nefarious.
> Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate.
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.
I think part of that was volunteer moderation. Were you paid to moderate those boards? Most moderation was a form of community involvement
Recent social media (& maybe "recent" no longer applies) doesn't have this kind of community run tooling
> Were you paid to moderate those boards?
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...
Ah, this reminds me of the one asshole on the old car forum I used to heavily participate in, who would tell new users how dumb all their ideas were for modifying their cars were. And yes, some would argue back, and then someone else would step in and point out all the threads from the cranky asshole where he'd already tried everything they were suggesting.
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I saw a really good analogy the other day (on X, natch) that said subscribing to modern social media is like inviting a clown to come in your house every 10 minutes and scream, "It's gotten worse". I think about that a lot. Curation goes a long way, but it takes work.
Not to the same degree, but I'd argue HN has the same tendencies. Cynical, skeptical, assuming the worst intentions, a bogeyman tech giant hoping to destroy its own customers. Skepticism is, of course, healthy, but the default behavior in this community completely misses the reality that had we frozen progress, say, right near the Apple II launch, we never get HackerNews itself. :)
And if you accept my premise, it's probably not the websites, but rather the humans themselves.
It's one thing to have a community that has tendencies towards cynicism, skepticism, and assuming the worst. It's another thing to build an algorithm optimized for "engagement" which prioritizes polarizing content above all others because it keeps people addicted to the platform.
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.
Might I add that Facebook has also proven time and time again that they believe in zero ethics. They will happily boost a dictator’s post. They’ll happily assist a rapist win elections. They’ll happily let you sell addictive content to kids. Heck they’ll even give you easy ways to target ads to “depressed 14 year old girls” specifically.
The problem is that humans themselves will amplify the most controversial and problematic content because anger is one of the strongest emotions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Have you worked in a fortune 500?
It just comes down to how you use it. I use Twitter and BlueSky exclusively to follow artists, and all I see is art. If I didn't come to HN, I don't think I'd hear about any news.
Exactly why I often think I should stop reading HN
The clown also shows you pictures of how awesome everyone else is doing and asks why you are so fat and ugly and boring in comparison.
Beautiful description of our current life.
There is immense value in the ability to share realtime events with the rest of the world. If the curation algorithm is the problem, then the solution should target only that, not "BLOW IT ALL UP". There are a few ways:
1) We can build open-source clients with user-configurable client-side recommendation algorithms.
2) We can shame the people actively working to make this problem worse, especially if they make 1) or 3) harder.
3) We can build decentralized protocols like Nostr to pry social media from the hands of tech giants altogether.
These solutions are not mutually exclusive, so we should pursue all of them.
I'm not a big fan of banning things like this. There's good mixed in with the bad and banning things will only lead to new social media sites rising in their place. I don't expect them to be any better.
This is basically a fight against human nature. If I could get one wish, it would be legislation that forces social media sites to explain in detail how their algorithms work. I have to believe that a company could make a profitable social media site that doesn't try all the tricks in the books to hook their users to their site and rile them up. They may not be Meta-sized, but I would think there would be a living in it.
> I'm not a big fan of banning things like this.
I think this is a pretty perfect use case for banning. The harms are mostly derived from the business model. If the social media companies were banned from operating them, and the bans were evaded by DIYers, Mastodon and the like, most of the problems disappear.
When there's still money in the black market alternative, banning doesn't work well (see: narcotics).
I don’t think people want to understand how algorithms manipulate them.
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> pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
The opposite, actually - I remember reading that HN downranks posts that have a low favorability:engagement ratio - in its case, high comment count and comparatively low votes. The reasoning being that flamebait topics inspire a disproportionate number of angry/low-substance/pile-on comments and retort-chains compared to normal topics, without garnering a corresponding increase in top-level votes.
It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.
That's interesting, it seems like it would accidentally penalize a lot of "good" posts too, like people asking questions to better understand a topic/perspective
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No. Facebook algorithm produces different outputs for every user. HN's algorithm produces one output for all users.
They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.
Do you have proof that demonstrates that FB's algorithm is more harmful than upvotes on HN or Reddit? Not that it's harmful compared to a world before FB, that it's more harmful than an upvote based algorithm.
This is a really canonical example of a "Yet you participate in a society. Curious!" post. Well done.
[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn
Thanks. I try really hard. Wait was that supposed to be a backhanded compliment? No way, can't be, HN is above that kind of behavior (:
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.
I like this, but it also leaves the door wide open to censorship. Also this would include Youtube which would be a marked detirioration in learning.
We can have freedom of expression with a regular chronological feed from selected followed users. There's no need for a smart feed that optimises whatever the entity owning the network wants.
Yes, let's give more power to the EU, the entity that's been trying to ban encryption within the EU for the last 3 years and wants to read all your messages, scan all your pictures, but pinky promise, it won't use the data to hunt down political dissidents or silence opposing views.
I am sure it's going to be swell.
Let's also require tech companies to only allow content that has been approved by the central committee for peace and tolerance (TM) while we are it!
No risk of censorship there.
The EU is not a single mind, it is many party democracy. Yes there are forces in it that have been pushing for "lawful interception" for some time now. And they have always failed to ban E2E-encryption.
In the USA there exist similar forces who also introduced bills with similar ideas multiple times in the last decade. One of those is currently in congress.
Sooo... Should we ban Google too? It is also ordering the contents of its research results with algorithms. Similarly, HN and reddit order the contents of their front page with some algorithms, and in the case of Google and Reddit, the algorithm is personalized with the user's preferences.
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
ERM, FB itself admited they made a research regarding emotional response to the content they show.
FB/X modus operandi is keep as much people for as long possible glued to the screen. The most triggering content will awaken all those "keyboard wariors" to fight.
So instead of seeing your friends and people you follow on there you would mostly see something that would affect you one way or another (hence proliferation of more and more extreme stuff).
Google is going downhill but for different reasons - they also care only about investors bottomline but being the biggest ad-provider they don't care all that much if people spend time on google.com page or not.
Oh, I know that strong emotions increase engagement, outrage being a prime candidate. I have also no issue believing that FB/TikTok/X etc aggressively engage in such tactics, e.g. [0]. But I am not aware of FB publicly acknowledging that they deliberately tune the algorithm to this effect, even though they carried some research on the effects of emotions on engagement (I would love to be proven wrong though).
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...
> But we cannot regulate by saying "stop being evil", we need specific metrics, targets, objectives.
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.
You have banned Google, Reddit, and HN.
Google is not social media, Reddit and HN offer ranking based on karma instead of addiction algorithms.
Let's start with banning the monetization model.
Fortunately the US federal government is standing up for the interests of US tech companies, and for the principle of free speech. They won't let the EU get away with such an extreme authoritarian move.
This administration is not standing up for the principles of free speech. It has violated this principle numerous times in action and in spirit.
I'm very skeptical of EU censorship, but EU citizens can and should figure it out for themselves. There's no reason why we Americans should be telling them how to run their economies, nor do we have some intrinsic right for our companies to operate in any random market.
Can the US and ef-of and keep this civil and social enshitification to itself? The rest of the world would be very happy if the US would finally put the wall around itself and stopped meddling with every darn scrap of the world...
> for the principle of free speech
Indeed. You are free to praise the president or face the consequences. Some freedom.
> standing up for the interests of US tech companies
Imagine if they stood up for the interests of citizens instead.
> for the principle of free speech
This administration is taking a newly-formed censorship regime that was largely operated by the nepo babies of politicians running do-nothing tax-supported nonprofits, but implemented and operated by Mossad agents, and removing the nepo babies from the loop.
You can say "retard" now, but if you call somebody who executes Palestinian children a retard, you're going on a government blacklist.
edit: This post has been classified and filed, and associated with me for the rest of my life.
Interest of tech companies (or more specifically their stockholders), for sure. Not so much for the long term interests of its citizens though.
Lol a content algorithm is not free speech
All software is free speech, end of.
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?
End of what?
Agreed. If anyone in the medical community tried the stuff that Facebook and Google do, it would fail immediately at an ethics review board and/or the person would lose their medical license.
Why would "algorithmic" outrage-porn content (X, Meta) be any worse than human-ordered outrage-porn content (news websites)?
News websites are regulated…
they are? As far as I can tell they are no more regulated than anyone else.
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
Yes, they are (not sure about US).
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.
Only with all the censors as kindling!
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"We should kill/imprison peoples who have (immutable characteristic)" is hardly just a "mean thing people post".
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.
How do you learn to "deal and tolerate" people that constantly spit in your face? Especially if you try to avoid them but the platform does everything in its power to stear them your way?
It's basically a dark entity that cranks up footbal hooligans and then push them on the collision course.
There is no civility there.
I strongly agree that free speech is crucial, but the first part of your statement is in direct opposition to the second.
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.
On the contrary, I think a meaningful part of the population is incapable of digesting ideas without them being coupled to conflict. You don't need to respect opposing viewpoints in order to engage with them.
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.
The problem, to me anyway, is that FB etc don't serve me the opinions of people I know and want to engage with. Instead, they serve me a stream of content specifically tailored to annoy me and get the dopamine hit and make me react.
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).
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Could you please stop posting flamebait, ideological battle comments, etc? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Companies were given a deadline of Wednesday to register with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation – or face shutdown.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
I don't know Nepal's political situation, but I could imagine companies not wanting to have a potential hostage that they're directly responsible for in more authoritarian countries. Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
I've read about similar requirements for physical products licensed in Europe, and my understanding is that businesses have sprung up to provide "representative as a service" to whoever needs it. So you don't need to have your own boots on the ground, just hire a local boots-provider.
this is a list of Google offices. Some of these are in countries that are classified as not free according to most democracy indexes.
https://about.google/company-info/locations/
Same story with Facebook:
https://www.metacareers.com/locations/
Even their HQ is in a country that is classified as a "flawed democracy," and might be classified as a "hybrid regime" in 2025 wink, wink
Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company, for companies that want to do business there. We could say their (general hypothetical “they,” I have no idea what the laws of Nepal are like specifically) laws are bad, but apparently they are not bad enough that the social media companies aren’t willing to go there.
IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction. Countries are sovereign, not companies.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
> Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum.
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.
Well, however you want to call it—as I noted at the end of that comment, we’re currently living in the result of companies trying to serve users in countries without actually operating there. The result is that countries don’t really mind blocking them.
Having direct business to consumer relations with the people of a country is doing business in that country, even if the multinational corporation claims otherwise
Direct contact without any money is not business.
That's like arguing a Seattle coffee roaster is doing business in Nepal because someone in Nepal called them on the phone.
there are more than 200 countries in the world. do you expect me to hire 200 people, one in each country? and then they do what? should they have access to my servers? if not, what's even the point? to act as a translator? i am ok with having to follow local laws be able to provide services to a country. but if i have to hire people in every jurisdiction just to allow people there to use my free service, then i can't even afford to offer that service anymore.
apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.
If you are offering some free service just out of the kindness of your heart, and a country decides they don’t want to let their people take you up on it, I wouldn’t stress too much about it, right? I mean, it is a shame for them if your free service is really useful, but there are people all around the world without access to it…
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.
nobody asked Matrix to comply with this (as far as I know). like Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's a bit of a lost cause to try to block a decentralised protocol in practice.
i wonder why though. i don't think matrix is small enough that they haven't noticed it, and since mastodon is on the list they either don't understand decentralized services, or they misunderstood mastodon. that's the only explanation i can think of.
suspect they compiled a list of platforms where they had found anti-Nepalese content of whatever flavour, and there just happens to be none on Matrix.
Why would you assume it's anti-nepalese content and not some other kind of objectionable content, like child pornography?
> Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?
How would that work? They obviously want someone to be inside the country, having to follow the country's laws, in case the companies decide (again) to break the laws.
If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.
If it's just meant to be a contact point/grievance handler, I don't see much issue with them being in another country.
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.
> 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"),
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.
>not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping, rather than "So a person can be put in front of a court".
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...
They use torture on nobodies.
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.
> But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping,
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.
I would have to imagine that Nepal wants to protect its population from getting too much content from India - they would easily be overrun.
This tends to be the case for these sorts of regulations, so that if necessary they have a representative who can be pulled into court to answer for violations. For example, the GDPR requires an authorised European representative.
how to you prosecute a company that isn't represented in your country ? and how do you get someone, I mean a person, in front of court ?
As far as I know, Nepal can't send its police to America to arrest Facebook CEO and bring him back.
Let's just pretend for a second: Meta deliberately allows pedophiles to organize themselves and abduct Nepalese kids. Nepal government can only publicly object, eventually block Facebook access and that's all ? Nepalese wouldn't be very happy about that.
I am surprised there are even countries where these big corporations don't already have legal representation. It's not like it's expensive compared to what they earn from Nepalese.
How else can these companies be compelled to follow local laws?
Censors always use something superficially "reasonable", and another part you're missing: there is no way anyone reasonable would do the ban for such trivial infractions if these demands were all there is to that.
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
I assume you feel the same about EU's regulations.
That's the interesting thing to me. They seem quite similar fundamentally but there are a couple key differences in the dynamic.
1) Nepal is a small country so these large companies just dont have to care so much
2) People on Hackernews probably have a higher opinion of the EU's governance
But fundamentally, the laws themself seem extremely similar.
This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.
It’s not reasonable although it can link like it. Brazil demanded the same thing, and then ended up jailing local representatives (even lawyers) and was forcing the company agreed to implement the government’s censorship. Even though it violated their constitution to demand such censorship. Ultimately these policies are just anti free speech and are an indicator of authoritarianism.
The can't be bothered. FA*NG companies care about China and the USA because that's where the money is. They resentfully pay a little attention to the EU. Nobody at these companies has time for Nepal.
They are pretty much the same as other content moderation around the world. There is some government body that determines their own content moderation policy then requires companies to implement it. Same as the EU, Brazil, etc.
I think a lot of westerners trust the EU government to use better judgement, and maybe they are even correct, but the fundamentals of the law are pretty much the same.
The biggest difference is these large companies dont really care that much about business in Nepal.
I would love Signal to register a representative, the rest of the companies listed can go die in a hole as far as I am concerned.
Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.
As someone from Nepal, Another bill was proposed in parliament that was killed due to public backlash. That bill contained language that broadly defined what counts as actionable offenses for legal proceedings. This current bill is the wolf in sheep's clothing compared to that one.Nepali politicians have always used vague language to justify their actions—like claiming TikTok "disrupts social harmony" to justify banning it. My personal understanding is this is more about control than anything else.The last mayoral election for the Kathmandu valley was won in Facebook by an outsider young candidate with no party affiliation. Legacy political parties are facing a paradigm shift they don't know how to navigate, so they want to control it. The main person overseeing this ban claims it's about tax collection we should be getting, but when last checked, companies are already paying taxes.
I’m a big fan of 100% anything goes free speech. But the insanity of how X has implemented this, makes me think twice. In turns out that if you allow completely free speech on a town public square, one of the most popular high engagement speech will be prejudice and hatred towards out-groups (to throw an olive branch to rightists, an outgroup can be immigrants for rightists or nazis for leftists though these days my X feed it is just anti immigrant and I don’t see much brown shirt hysteria ).
Now I’m convinced, free speech maybe works in a technocracy, where the common man has no power and could scream whatever he wants and you could ignore him. In a liberal democracy, probably speech, especially speech to the masses need to be policed, because the ideas that win to the masses are just complete insanity. And so my new leaning goes, I still can’t give up on my free speech prior, I don’t mind all the insane nonsense I see on X but I would mind if someone tries to implement that in real life and the way things go, I think that’s just a matter of time.
In complex environments there can often be more than one effective combinations of properties. One combination that is clearly best, one combination that is pretty good, one that is okay, etc. and a long tail of completely ineffective combinations.
My point is that when education is poor quality and expensive, and attention is competitively monetized, and technology enables many to many communication with attention maximizing communication prioritized, the economic cycle is on the backend, and the world power system is being shaken up, then we get problems.
The problem isn't free speech, in fact it's probably the only property worth keeping. The biggest problems are the very competitive attention economy, the late-economic-cycle deleveraging, and the very expensive and inefficient education system.
Pretending that being tolerant of immigrants is even in the same fcking universe as tolerating nazis is just one of your many, many problems.
You confuse “freedom of speech” and “freedom from the consequences of speech”
As usual for the JAQing kind off poster here on hackynews
> It is not wrong to regulate social media
Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.
It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.
Hopefully Nepal is not going this far.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I recently created YouTube algo booster (open source) that allows to take this control back a little bit: https://github.com/ro31337/youtube-algo-booster
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
> "Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves.
Perhaps we can think about YouTube or Facebook this way (Instagram - obviously). But I don't think Signal controls anybody yet they block it as well.
Ruling is all about balance and drawing lines. Why is alcohol and tobacco banned for people under 18? Why are heroine and cocaine banned? Aren't these two cases examples of liberties that the government is cutting?
The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.
Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.
A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.
The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.
There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.
Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)
When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.
Social media is bad.
But why?
Misaligned corporate incentives? State-backed influence campaigns? Unenlightened masses?
Notice how banning social media solves none of these problems. It just makes us blind to the problems and unable to speak about them.
They banned Signal too, that's not social media.
While it's true that lines have to be drawn to maintain any semblance of order in society, I wish we'd be more critical of who's actually drawing the lines, by what means, and for what purpose.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want.
And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.
[1] Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...
[2] Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
Facebook and X are whatever. Nobody cares if they get blocked.
But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Yeah this would be the only one I sweat. Heck, I live in Canada and haven’t been on Facebook or Twiter in like 3 years. Don’t miss them. But YouTube I go on every day lol.
When those foreign companies are from [western] countries where massive unequal exchange against them happens, the moral focus should be on that. Universal individualized liberalism isn’t inherently good.
Many countries in the region are banning social media. In Bangladesh, they recently banned Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/asia/bangladesh-bans-what.... Of course, Bangladesh did so in an effort to suppress a national movement that actually ended up overthrowing the government. So maybe Nepal has good reasons to worry, lol.
Apart from the reasons for this block: Why do these decisions always have to be black and white. I believe it would benefit mental health if Facebook was blocked one day per week so people are forced to live a day without it.
Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
> Why do these decisions always have to be black and white.
This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.
It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.
The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
Plus, if it was a 'grey' punishment like a fine... these companies have billions if not trillions, they would just pay them, OR pay their army of lawyers to stall, fight, and try to overturn the decisions. Because an army of lawyers is still cheaper than an EU scale fine.
"What are you gonna do, Nepal? Block me?"
(Gets blocked)
> block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
The net result in São Paulo (Brazil) for (something that approaches) this is that people end up buying a second vehicle.
So like a pollution tax. People who can't afford the second vehicle will drive less.
Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).
Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
> Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?
I don't think it's a punishment so much as a public health measure. Like restricting who can buy tobacco and alcohol and where they can be consumed, or car pollution regulations.
If that's how low your bar is for where government should interfere with people's daily lives under the guise of public health, we might as well also ask for restrictions on how much food people are allowed to buy, and mandatory daily exercise.
Yeah, definitely agree there's a ton of room for disagreement on the topic.
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.
I agree with your intention, I'm just not a fan of arbitrary measures like a one-day ban.
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).
IIRC Paris has done something that in the past - you could only drive in the city on certain days depending on the registration of your car (even vs odd numbers).
And with great results: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/04/12/..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665793
But it was just a step towards more banning, which had great result (less traffic, more people circulating on foot, less pollution)
And people with multiple cars, multiple registration years, or maybe just people with means, will be the most affected.
Still happens every time air pollution gets too high.
The panny-D was great for that, early days saw stuff like clean air in China, India, wildlife coming into the cities, clean water in Venice, etc - and that was after only a few weeks.
We've had car-free sundays in the past a few times, but that was also due to oil crises. But also, a lot of inner cities have a ban on cars, a restriction on cars (only locals and suppliers at fixed times), or environmental zones (no older Diesel engines, some are going a step further and banning all vans and trucks, promoting electric alternatives for last-mile deliveries). They're all having a significant impact on the health and liveability of city centers.
But it makes a lot of sense too, as they're 1000 year old city centers that were never designed for cars anyway. Often the only roads that can support cars at a normal in-city speed are on the outside of where city walls used to be.
Anyway, speaking for myself, I haven't used FB in forever, I don't think a blanket pause would affect most people that much, I posit it's only a small minority that falls into the problematic FB usage category.
Agreed. These services offer a lot of valuable social infrastructure, and it would be nice to keep the good and stop the bad.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
I have personally seen a couple family members go more than a little nuts on fb, and I've been stalked there. It is poison for some.
Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.
Repulsive addictive product.
I hadn't thought of the comparison to tobacco yet, but it's great. I wonder if social media will follow a similar trajectory, of going from the cool thing everyone picks up to a lame addicting health-destroyer. Thankfully, it's way easier to quit Facebook than smoking.
The comparison of social media to tobacco is almost too perfect. It feels good while you're doing it and can be an effective social tool, but leaves you feeling like shit when you stop and has disastrous long-term health consequences.
> The comparison of social media to tobacco is almost too perfect
What do smokers reach for when they wake up? Their cigs. What about everyone else? Phones.
Yes! I read commentary a while back that said the size of the phone is roughly (w/in a factor of two) the size of a cigarette pack and just like the pack, is almost always within arm's reach and frequently sought.
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.
and if you use it on toilet, you apparently can't shit
Good! Every country should ban social media. Enought of this psychological poison. Messaging apps are enough for long distance contact. For small scale, specialized discussion, there are forums. Mass many-to-many platforms have to go. But overall, it is imperative that people go back to "living" in the real world, instead of the fake reality created by social media.
Freedom on choice, my friend.
Countries that decide what’s good and what’s bad for its people, they usually tend to tyranny in the end.
I could make some recent examples.
Banning methamphetamine or heroine is not tyranny.
Have you not spent much time on a lot of internet forums? There are always well known posters who "live" on the forums. We also need to ban internet forums so that these people go back to "living" in the real world.
Its a double edged sword. social media is also the only reason any of us know about the genocide going on in gaza right now. I'm pretty sure thats why there's such a rush to start locking down the internet since western governments aiding theocracies in mass murder puts a real "are we the bad guys?" kind of taste in your mouth.
It's widely reported in newspapers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza
> governments aiding theocracies in mass murder puts a real "are we the bad guys?" kind of taste in your mouth.
Agree, and I hope the Qatari people can see that too.
The gaza war is all over the news.
> The gaza war is all over the news.
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.
banned whatsapp too
Banning anything is never the solution.
Don't want to use social media? Don't use it. No one can decide for others.
It is the moral duty of the ruler to care for the ruled, and to do what is right to protect them. Just like cocaine or heroin or alcohol are banned for their harm to society, social media must be.
Banning cigarettes for minors ? Bad idea ?
Nepal's requirements don't seem very different than the EU. The main difference is simply that Nepal is small so the companies dont care.
Social media companies must have a local contact person, office, and comply with the Directive for Regulation of Social Media Use, 2080. That law requires social media companies to remove content deemed illegal.
Finally Nepal took a bold decision on world stage. Much needed. Social media companies leech of these "unemployed" nepalese who are getting funds from remittance via saudi, qatar. The "Dalal Pujibad" as socialist aahuti says. And mass consumerism. Needs to stop. He gives an example where Nepalese migrant workers earn money making "stuffs" in Saudi, Qatar, China, Malaysia etc. And they send money back to Nepal where they now buy those items that they made. (They could be any other migrant workers).
The intent of government can be questioned however But this is a right step in a forward direction anyhow.
This should have been done far earlier.
The blocks has been propagated fairly now. I cannot access facebook, whatsapp, linkedin, reddit (major sites, others I have not checked).
I wonder whether the companies that didn't register chose this intentionally because they object to the legal requirements, or whether they simply didn't have anyone in charge of compliance with Nepali law and were unaware this would happen. That they don't appear to have statements ready maybe indicates the latter?
Any time you mention how the CIA uses social media to push their agenda (backed by evidence), your comments get flagged
haha
In light of this I think countries are right to be wary of American media:
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/25/pentagon-military-ai-pro...
https://archive.is/1IElr
Judging by the down votes I guess the US military has this system up and running. </sarc>
> Only five, including TikTok and Viber
Bloody hell! Viber is alive?
That was my first IM (India). Even when people had moved to WhatsApp I was sticking around as something felt less wrong on Viber (I can't recall now). But then I anyway had to move to WhatsApp. I have really not heard of it in a long time so I thought it would have be shutdown or something. And I don't recall it being from Japan either.
There are several inaccuracies in the comments here.
Although in the past, simple DNS level filtering was common, Telegram's IPs are now blocked at the routing level.
Is Nepal authoritarian? This is a bit complex. If they could or had the ability to enforce all of the laws on the books, then you might be able to argue that.
Nepal is better characterized as loosely anarchic. The country couldn't function if all of the regulations were enforced. What works for them is rampant corruption. This is how things are accomplished. Aside from that, the state institutions are completely inept in almost every way. Even excluding corruption, there isn't enough competence to enforce an authoritarian vision. Nepotism and the other factors you would expect play a role here.
The regulations which are enforced usually relate to opportunities for graft for those tasked with enforcement. Otherwise nobody can be bothered, or they don't want to rock the boat, because the person they'd take action against also has a minister or bureaucrat in their pocket. Easier for them to sit in their gov office, take milk tea, enjoy their benefits and doom scroll the day away.
So while on its face, regulating who can publish a website is an authoritarian affront to free speech norms, it is better understood as a cash grab. Perhaps some high profile journalists might be targeted, that is a recurring issue in Nepal.
Finally, although their Telegram efforts seem to be paying off, this latest effort seems overly ambitious. They have bitten off more than they can chew here. Business is usually conducted with a fair amount of bluster and posturing in Nepal. If tech majors simply ignore it, politicians will lose face. In general, everyone despises them already.
Due to the aforementioned issues, unemployment is a massive factor in Nepal. Money comes into the country from remittance, because doing biz locally is a losing proposition. It is extremely common to see doom scrolling all around Nepal, from the KTM valley to the rural villages. Cutting off YT and FB will create a massive backlash against the universally reviled political classes. It might be hard for outsiders to understand how widely the political class is disliked for their blatant ineptitude and corruption.
Honestly, we'd all probably be better off without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, threads, Pinterest, LinkedIn social networking, and quora.
YouTube has some value but shorts being not opt out able is a serious problem. Reddit has some value too.
Signal, discord, and the other realtime messengers much more of a concern.
Hopefully we'll get enough starlink like systems that bans like this become completely unenforceable.
startlink like systems are just relays like wire over ocean, there are through ground stations that do all the work.
Totally enforceable.
If I have my own dish directly communicating with the satellite how are they messing with my connection?
Great!
Why?
Because their algorithms designed to push content that improves "engagement" are poisonous?
And US propaganda.
And Russian, and your local political whatsits.
This is like blaming poppy seeds for heroin addiction.
No it's not. It's like blaming heroin dealers for heroin addiction. Nobody blames the algorithms; they blame the people who made the algorithms.
https://kathmandupost.com/national/2025/09/04/nepal-bans-fac... is imo a better source for this.
Choice quote from the opposition in the article you linked to: "If social media is shut down, the country will become chaotic."
It's quite funny when you get pushback from maoists that you're being too extreme when attacking freedoms.
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You're reading into this too much my friend. Tiktok was banned for a long time just not long back. The government wants service providers to register. They're even targeting some nepali apps.
> The fact that TikTok remains accessible is telling
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.
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I didn't expect to see a ragebaiter in hackernews... If you don't know what Nepal is, no worries but your comment adds nothing to HN & you were better off just searching nepal on google. :/
Please, lets not have such comments on Hackernews, like ever...
New account whose account history is basically geared towards making bait-y comments, ex: acting like they don't even know what an HDD is.
Very sad people feel the need to come on a platform like hackernews to let off steam.
man, the only thing that I can think of this guy is, The less I know the better....
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)
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Good move. Hope all countries do block these apps.
Whenever i open YouTube in private tab all default recommendations are garbage. vulgar and sexist videos. its worse than garbage. Just imagine how many teens lives are ruined
That's odd. I get an empty page that has text "Try searching to get started."
That's because you have history turned off. YouTube did this really weird thing where they refuse to give you algorithmic recommendations if you have history off, which includes refusing to let you watch more than a handful of shorts at a time.
As someone who has been addicted to the youtube feed for a long time, it was really refreshing to have a button that basically meant I could only watch videos I knew to search for.
I think they are trying really hard to pressure you into turning history back on, but I'm much happier as a person now that I'm not having videos and clickbait rammed down my throat.
In a private window, there is no account to check for "History is turned off". I don't think the root comment is accurate: at least in the US, I see an empty page when I visit YT in a private window.
That's what I see when I open YouTube for the first when I'm not logged in, too. I much, much, prefer this over their recommendation system. Although the first few sets of recommendations after your first few videos are actually useful.
You can block YouTube for yourself on your own, it's not difficult. You don't have to depend on the state to do it for you.
Agreed. It would be in the interest of citizens of most countries to block these apps. IMO, any company which is present in a country must be beneficial to the average citizen of that country. If a company is not beneficial to the average citizen, then it should be banned.
I think the biggest issue with these apps is that they monopolize attention away from local products and local jobs. They destroy national economies. Each country must have their own search engines and their own social media companies.