Signals in the Fire: The Impact of Banning Global Tech in Nepal

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I stood on the roof deck of my ten-story hotel, uneasy, watching the Hilton Hotel tower in Kathmandu, Nepal consumed by fire just six kilometers away. I had never seen a blaze so immense - every floor was engulfed in flames.

In fact, the entire city was burning. There were blazes in every direction.A tire fire just outside my office door on the second day of protests. Image: Tire Fire by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Some fires were just down the street.

The inciting incident is well documented by now: on September 4, 2025 the government started to restrict access to over two dozen social media platforms. A movement known as “Gen Z” staged a protest on September 8th. The movement had been gaining momentum for months as Nepali youth grappled with few opportunities and an entrenched, corrupt political class unafraid to flaunt their wealth.

The demonstration was massive. The angry crowd gathered outside parliament and confronted the police who responded with lethal force. 19 people were killed. The next day would be a day of rage.

Oli’s Gamble

The social media directive that justified the ban was hardly radical on its surface. Originally published on November 27, 2023, the Social Media Management Directive 2080 required platforms to register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MoCIT), maintain a local point of contact, and comply with basic standards - removing hate speech, child exploitation, and other clearly objectionable content. The directive gave a deadline of February 22, 2024 and the Ministry itself had the power to ban non-compliant platforms.

Any Asian country would be foolish not to take note of what happened in nearby Myanmar. A well-documented anti-Rohingya echo chamber on Facebook spiraled out of control by 2017 and eventually helped facilitate an ethnic cleansing.

Facebook didn’t have a representative working in Myanmar in 2017. And by 2025 no local representative existed in Nepal either. The general response to Directive 2080 from USA tech firms was indifference. So the Supreme Court created their own order on August 17, 2025 for Social Media sites to comply. The administration of Prime Minister Oli jumped on this pretense and gave social media platforms 7 days to register starting on August 25th.

I’m not convinced that Oli was solely motivated by a concern for tech sovereignty. But the fact remains that US tech companies are the lifeblood of everyday citizen communication in Nepal. Oli made the political gamble to take them on. So let’s take a glace at the “tale of the tape” to see how a single US tech firm stacks up against Nepal.

Metric Nepal (2024, CIA Factbook) Meta (2024, company report)

Population	31.1 million	3.35 billion daily active people
Fiscal Basis	$42.9 billion nominal GDP	$164.5 billion revenue
Fiscal growth	3.7%	Revenue growth ~16% YoY

Maybe now you can appreciate the size of Oli’s gamble, why most nations don’t attempt communications sovereignty, and why it was unlikely to pay off.

Sector 230 in the United States shields social media companies from the same standards most media companies must meet. The bill treats platforms as “dumb pipes” for information and thus they cannot be held responsible for what happens on their network. Early web publishing platforms and electronic bulletin board systems could make the case that they were no more responsible than the phone company. But this all changed with the algorithmic newsfeed.

Algorithms are no more neutral than the people who write them and the impact of Facebook and Instagram editorial decisions are far more impactful than what happens at the New York Times. At one point there was even a political consensus in the United States to try and do something about this. The President and many in Congress reasoned that the algorithms of ByteDance’s TikTok were spreading dangerous Communist influence. But after bipartisan legislation passed to ban the app, tech moguls openly displayed their allegiance to the party which controls the entire government - the Conservatives - and the first and only threat to Section 230 fizzled.Tech leaders attending President Trump’s inauguration in 2025 ABC7 News

Up to this point, global technology corporations have been able to foist their largely Libertarian and increasingly openly Conservative (generally known as the The Californian Ideology) values onto hapless local populations. Like the energy and mineral conglomerates that preceded them, it’s easy to ignore local laws if it benefits the bottom line. But these technology companies - like all telecommunications - are conduits for culture. So the byproduct of their local ignorance is different.

It wasn’t always this way. At its revenue peak in 1985, IBM employed 405,000 people worldwide - local staff whose very presence informed corporate decisions. Compare that to Facebook’s paltry 74,067 employees.Headcount was 74,067 as of December 31, 2024, an increase of 10% year-over-year according to Meta’s own Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results The Facebook business model requires little on-the-ground knowledge: advertisements are mostly self-administered and the placement relies on automated bidding. IBM, on the other hand, had a tremendous global sales force that relied on local knowledge to be effective.

I admit that measuring outcomes casts a dark shadow on the benefits of this local presence. Some of IBM’s most profitable clients were the governments of Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa. My claim here is that local representation gives democracies a chance to manage their own media ecosystems. The alternative is to ignorantly project the cultural values of Silicon Valley onto the world. The autocrats will be fine either way - it’s only democracy that suffers.

K. P. Sharma Oli was the fairly elected Marxist–Leninist leader, a figure with no parallel in the United States. In America, the Left has no representation within its two major parties and no public figure to counter the Conservative–Neoliberal dominance of media. Nepal’s government, though discredited by corruption across the spectrum, still gave space for a genuine Left.

Oli’s attempt to rein in social media was unlikely gamble for a more U.S.-aligned figure. But he was acting just as many U.S. politicians have acted. Consider that U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said that banning TikTok “would begin to turn back the tide of an enormous threat to America’s children.”David Shepardson. “Senate Republican leader backs legislation to force Chinese divestment of TikTok.” Reuters. April 9, 2024. While Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand expressed her “serious concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to influence and divide the American people” while voting to ban the app.Jon Levine. “NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand calls for TikTok vote, favoring potential ban: ‘I am deeply concerned.’” New York Post. March 16, 2024.

Compressing the political spectrum by regulating telecommunications was in Oli’s long-term political interest. What he seemed to miscalculate was the enormity of the short-term blow back it would engender.

Mahakala in the Clouds

The sense of normalcy in Kathmandu is striking in the days after the protests. The smoldering sites are isolated. So isolated, in fact, that a small cafe can sit untouched between the decimated CG Motors car dealership to the west and the hollowed husk of the Kantipur publishing house immediately to the east.

Site after site, the same story is told.The Hilton Hotel I by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 A furious, angry mob descended on a target. Their rage is self-evident. The story is what’s not seen: evidence of random looting or the sort of collateral damage that small businesses suffer during a riot.

The scenes in Kathmandu seem like the work of Mahakala, the fierce deity seen in the popular forms of Buddhism practiced in Nepal. Mahakala is a frightening figure often surrounded by flames. But he is not evil. He embodies the nature of powerful emotions: unfocused, they consume everything; directed, they become empowering.

The scorched hotels, automobile dealerships, the Supreme Court, Parliament, the Nepal Bar Association, and even sites of telecommunications and media reflect an abstract web of power when taken all together. They are everyday manifestations of corruption, nepotism, and an incredible wealth gap.

Kantipur Publishing, the largest publisher in Nepal, is seen by many as a political project manipulated by power players. Their newsroom was destroyed. Just outside of Kathmandu in Satungal 8 kilometers away, another group of protesters stormed the manufacturing grounds and data centers of CG Electronics. They brought down the data centers owned by Nepal’s only billionaire. The effect of this and other infrastructure attacks was large enough for the Internet Society to independently take note of real connectivity issues in the country.

The tie between power and telecommunications has already been established by this blog. But it’s rare to see citizen activists confront this power directly. From the data centers in Satungal to the Ncell tower in the middle of the city, the protesters treated them as they did the Parliament - as a center of wealth and power.

Public records were not spared. When the protesters stormed the Supreme CourtImage: The Supreme Court of Nepal by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 they also destroyed records kept therein.“The records of at least 26,000 ongoing case files as well as stored records of 36,000 files in the apex court complex were destroyed in the fire.” “An official from the registrar’s office, said: “The Registrar Office on the ground floor was the first to be targeted. The mob then went up to the upper floors and even burnt the chief justice’s chamber. They collected files and computers in one place and burnt them.” Prawesh Lama, Nepal Supreme Court shifts to tents after nationwide unrest (Hindustan Times, Sept 15, 2025) What is the use of court documents in a country where the corruption continues year after year, decade after decade?

When the fires finally abated, the protesters came to an agreement with the remaining government officials. They never sought to destroy the institutions. As evidence, the woman they accepted as interim prime minister, Sushila Karki, was the former Chief Justice of the same court they stormed. She had tried corruption cases despite the system working against her - an experience the protesters could surely recognize.

Telecommunications are a pillar of political power. That makes it essential to distinguish between pipes and platforms. The international reach of algorithmic newsfeeds demands a serious response. That response will inevitably be messy and political because the algorithmic feed is inherently political. This is not only the consensus among social scientists, it is the view of politicians across the political spectrum - from the Leftist prime minister of Nepal to the Conservative leader of the United States Senate. In hindsight, it is no surprise that a social media ban became the spark for a revolution.

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