Interesting that Mastodon was blocked. How exactly was that ban supposed to be enforced, by blocking every single instance in existence?

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.

This is not true. "Switch your DNS" hasn't worked for while. It didn't work for the TikTok ban. The ISPs are not incompetent.

If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.

And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".

TikTok is still allowed? Isn't it the most damaging?

> switch your DNS, and you're good to go

Except you might get a visit from the FCC equivalent.

> 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?

What if you just access the IP directly?

BlueSky still good i guess.

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Signal? Fuck your government. That shit ain't right.

Why?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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".

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.

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.

Why would "algorithmic" outrage-porn content (X, Meta) be any worse than human-ordered outrage-porn content (news websites)?

Only with all the censors as kindling!

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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?

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?

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.

Similar requirements exist in India too.

> 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

"Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want."

It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.

As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.

If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.

Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).

By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.

The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.

The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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).

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.

Repulsive addictive product.

I think you have a reasonable take and kudos for re-examining your beliefs with new evidence. I also believe in personal freedoms but at the same time god damn it do us humans have a penchant for "freely choosing" things that are terrible for our wellbeing. Freedom lets us live without fear of injust incarceration, but also gave us potentially society-ending things like climate change. I'm starting to believe that many freedoms we have we'd be better off without - however the issue arises of how to implement that when it seems easy for bad actors to abuse broad controls on the masses.

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

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.

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.

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.

Choice quote from the opposition in the article you linked to: "If social media is shut down, the country will become chaotic."

Judging by the down votes I guess the US military has this system up and running. </sarc>

startlink like systems are just relays like wire over ocean, there are through ground stations that do all the work.

Totally enforceable.

Why?

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...

That's odd. I get an empty page that has text "Try searching to get started."

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.