Same with combustion vehicles and the climate: block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.
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.
What do smokers reach for when they wake up? Their cigs. What about everyone else? Phones.
The net result in São Paulo (Brazil) for (something that approaches) this is that people end up buying a second vehicle.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'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).
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 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.)
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".
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.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.
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 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.
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.
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 if there were employees stationed within the country.
https://about.google/company-info/locations/
Same story with Facebook:
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.
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.
Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.
The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?
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.
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.
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.
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 countries to follow their laws since they operate there.
Except you might get a visit from the FCC equivalent.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/25/pentagon-military-ai-pro...
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.
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.
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