It’s a safe bet that absolutely no one had “Nepali citizens hold a meaningful state election on an online gaming server” on their 2025 bingo card. Yet after days of government-toppling protests earlier this month, the nomination, election, and swearing-in of Sushila Karki as Nepal’s new interim prime minister has, so far, gone off without a hitch.
Is this a new era of synergy between politics and online activism? Possibly—though it might depend on what social media platform you’re using.
Karki, a former chief justice of the Nepali Supreme Court and the country’s first female prime minister, was elected on the massively popular, semipublic chat platform Discord after hours of intense political debate between several popular candidates, much of it livestreamed to other platforms such as YouTube.
Released in 2015, Discord is a glorified chatroom, designed for gamers but popular across geek corners of the internet. Anyone can create and run their own Discord server, which can be open to the public or invite-only. This community focus has paid off; the platform boasts more than 200 million monthly users, and nearly all of its $600 million annual revenue is user-generated.
The civic advocacy group Hami Nepal set up the Discord channel and organized an experimental virtual political convention after military leaders restricted large in-person gatherings in the wake of the protests.
With the military working with representatives from the virtual convention to select an interim leader, the Discord channel swiftly exploded in size, gaining more than 140,000 members. By Sept. 10, those participating in the online discussion had elected Karki, standing in for about 30 million Nepali citizens. While authorities probably wouldn’t allow a fraction of the populace to choose the next prime minister under normal circumstances, Karki is a popular choice, and with 99.6 percent of the population having access to the internet via mobile broadband, this is less of a niche, upper-class move than it might first appear.
The election follows a full reversal of a sweeping social media ban enacted in early September by since-ousted Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli. The ban, which included Discord alongside 25 other major social media platforms, was ostensibly just over a technicality because the platforms in question hadn’t registered with the government, but the action appeared to be part of a greater ongoing effort to curb free speech. Incensed Gen Zers and millennials took to the streets in protest. Their larger frustration was with the nation’s long-standing political turbulence. Nepal is still a very young democracy and only ended its monarchy in 2008 after a long, brutal civil war; since then, the country has had more than a dozen governments, with no leader lasting more than a few years. What started as anger over the social media ban rapidly expanded into a national referendum on corruption, with young Nepalis accusing government officials and their families of lording it over a nation that has spent the last decade struggling to recover from a devastating 2015 earthquake.
The government escalated with a violent official response that led to outright upheaval and the deaths of at least 72 people; the wife of one former prime minister was left in critical condition after protesters set fire to their house. When the dust settled, the social media ban had been reversed, Oli had resigned, the military had temporarily taken over, and the streets had cleared, with activists congregating online.
The military’s swift acceptance of the online results says a lot about how drastically things changed in the country in recent days—but also about Discord and the changing role of social media’s relationship to politics.
We’ve seen numerous examples of social media and online networks aiding in organization and mobilization of protests around the globe, from the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East beginning in 2010 on Twitter to the #OccupyWallStreet movement starting in an email list to numerous Black Lives Matter protests and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, all being organized through online spaces.
The benefits of this online networking are obvious: The use of social media and publicly searchable hashtags allows for swift mobilization across a broad collective of protesters and activists. Livestreaming, posting, and sharing video footage in near real time all contribute to increased transparency and full accountability from authorities—it’s harder, for example, to frame a political protest as an unseemly “riot” when the public can see protesters behaving peacefully.
As a form of “leaderless resistance,” the protests redirect public attention away from cults of personality and toward issues and grievances. When those grievances are made visible through social media, which effectively substitutes for the modern town square, they’re more likely to be publicly acknowledged and addressed.
Yet because they’re largely anonymous, in recent years it’s become easier for the protests to be manipulated and misconstrued, with bad actors relying on social media for one of the other things it’s good at: spreading disinformation and distorting reality. This year, conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists infiltrated the Los Angeles protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city, leading to the online spread of negative propaganda against the protesters that included fake content. The same social media platforms, primarily Twitter (now X), that once facilitated the organization of protests now seem destined to impede their effectiveness.
That makes what’s happening in Nepal particularly interesting, not just as an example of an unusual governmental structure but as an example of an unusual social media cycle. It played out on a platform, Discord, that until now would have been an unlikely candidate for this kind of mass mobilization. For starters, it’s almost unheard of for an offline protest to move online, as this one did once the military temporarily forbade public assembly, and still be effective.
Yet this one had several built-in advantages. Hami Nepal was already a large civic organization, with more than 100,000 members, and therefore it had the infrastructure to quickly build and host a serious, well-attended virtual convention that both got the public’s attention and held legitimacy as a political project.
Discord functions as social media, but it’s structured very similarly to project management platforms such as Slack, which makes it a very good space for this kind of massive organization to take place. The largest Discord servers contain millions of members, and while that can lead to chaos, it can also contain everything you’d expect from a virtual convention: livestreamed Q&A in one channel, heated debates in another, an election poll in another. The limiting of access to the Discord also set the tone for who generally got to participate, at least initially: young activists with internet access who likely already had some familiarity with organizing politically.
The Discord protesters benefited from both scale and narrowness. Had they attempted to reach citizens on the public internet footpaths of X, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, Hami Nepal’s leaders likely would have found themselves drowned out by algorithmic noise.
Instead, they were able to mass-distribute Discord invites and bring everyone to a central virtual chatroom, with moderators, clear objectives, and the support of the temporary military rulers. Many of the Gen Z and millennial protesters were likely already familiar with Discord, since its users skew young, with the majority between the ages of 18 and 24. The town hall format, in which candidates standing for election debated one another in front of everyone who logged on to watch, worked to bring in numerous politicians, including the 73-year-old Karki.
All of this suggests that it’s far too soon to write the death knell of social media as an effective organizational tool in the ongoing quest for governmental reform. We’re far too used to social media being seen as a tool to foment global unrest. Facebook alone has been weaponized to destabilize governments from Moldova to Myanmar.
In the sense that privately run Discord channels allow for moderators and specific topics for discussion, the platform arguably functions more like an old-school internet forum than a free-for-all app such as Instagram or X. Perhaps one takeaway here is that the former structure is good for democracy, the latter not so much. Could Americans bolster common consensus if, for example, they held political debates on Reddit? In a recent Pew Research Center survey, only 31 percent of people surveyed across 35 countries felt they had completely free speech. Could a massive, decentralized global chatroom change that?
Obviously, these questions are hypothetical, for now, but they’re fun. Even better, they’re optimistic—a welcome change-up from the usual bleak ways we’re asked to contend with the internet and its role in politics.
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