Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube

That has always been a feature of having free speech. If only "good" free speech is allowed, it's not free speech. Much of it is going to be disagreeable to some people's views and/or objectively harmful in some ways. There is allowance for a red line, but it only covers a sliver of the universe. That of course begs the parallel to social media being harmful and over the red line - the equivalent of "yelling fire in a movie theater" - and this worthy of a ban within a free speech framework, but I think that is disingenuous, and it's more like banning harmful political tabloids and misinformation (which is at the root of the history of free speech itself).

Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).

I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.

this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.

Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.

This paragraph should be emphasized.

> The government now requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances. “We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they don’t listen to us?” said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, a spokesman for the ministry.

I wonder what were the platforms expecting, ignoring local government.

You have to play by the rules society agrees on. Or do the companies think they are too big for consequence?

This is an enforcement of legislation passed in 2023, so unlikely to be connected to Trump.

e: Well, unlikely to be connected to the current admin; it does target misinfo which was a big media focus surrounding the elections in 2016/2020