Off the Record 118: Who's afraid of TikTok?
Issue 118 • 1 December 2023
It’s December 1, 2023, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
You can read Off the Record for free by visiting this link and subscribing to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Friday.ﾠAll posts are free but you can pledge a subscription if you like my work.
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Kathmandu. First of all, apologies for the lack of a newsletter last week. I am humbled that a few readers felt it necessary to reach out to make sure that I was all right. I am, thank you for asking. I just had a few personal issues, including death and sickness in the family, and that took precedence over the writing of the newsletter. I am sure you understand.
But perhaps my skipping last week was a blessing. It’s given me time to reflect on all that happened then and since this week has been a little slow with the news, I’ll focus largely on the happenings of last week.
The Broken Promise of New Nepal
Last week, Kathmandu was waiting with bated breath. The streets were lined with riot police and warnings were issued to the public not to venture out into the streets unless absolutely necessary. Everyone waited in anticipation of what would happen when the mass of people led by the ‘entrepreneur’ Durga Prasai descended upon the capital city. But it was an instance of what we in Nepal call ‘हात्ती आयो, हात्ती आयो, फुस्सा’. The rallies, although quite large in number, didn’t really amount to much. The feared clashes between Prasai’s followers and the UML’s youth wing, the Yuwa Sangh, never happened due to clever planning on the part of the authorities. Prasai’s rallies were limited to the Balkhu area while the Yuwa Sangh’s counter-rally was consigned to Tinkune; these two areas being on opposite sides of the Valley, preventing any untoward clashes between the two groups.
By now, much has already been said about Prasai and his rally. I’m not going to go into much detail about who Prasai is. (For those who understand Nepali, you can watch this excellent video by The Nepali Comment.) Suffice it to say that he’s a conman and an opportunist. He’s willing to ally with anyone should they suit his current needs. He was pally with both Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and UML chairman KP Sharma Oli when they were actively helping him gain licenses to operate medical colleges in return for ready cash for their campaigns. Now that there’s been a falling out between them, Prasai has suddenly turned monarchist, marshaling the public to rally in support of the ousted king. I do not believe for a second that Prasai is an ardent supporter of the king. I do not believe that he has any real political convictions.
The rally, however, was not so much about Prasai as what he represents. I don’t believe the monarchy is ascendent in Nepal once again. What the public support for someone like Prasai shows is that the people are frustrated and disappointed. They were promised a New Nepal, an end to hereditary rule, cabalistic politics, true democracy, and an end to all kinds of discrimination and injustice. Lofty promises that would never have come true but we haven’t received even an iota of what was promised. Instead, three politicians — Sher Bahadur Deuba, KP Sharma Oli, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal — have entrenched themselves as the permanent establishment. Corruption continues unabated and the promises of inclusion and power to the people have all been nipped in the bud. Instead, ordinary folk are compelled to go abroad in the thousands every day, seeking work in hostile lands. The better-off too are abandoning the country like rats deserting a sinking ship. Among the younger generation, folks below 30 years, the vast majority are looking for any way to get out and once out, never come back. You can’t blame them, can you? Why would anyone choose to live in Nepal when they can live anywhere else? Only fools like myself return.
Things are fast reaching boiling point. The significant win of newfound parties like the Rastriya Swatantra Party in the last election is just the beginning. The mainstream parties — Congress, UML, Maoist — are busy extolling the virtues of republicanism, federalism, and secularism even as they act to undermine these very qualities. In getting rid of the monarch, Dahal, Deuba, and Oli have established themselves as a triumvirate. Federalism continues to be scuppered with the provinces barely able to exercise any power. Secularism has been abandoned by the wayside as politicians actively seek blessings from the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India. And what have the people received? Remittances from their family members toiling abroad and handouts from donors and INGOs. The system is broken and the people know it.
The answer, of course, is not to revert to the monarchy. We can’t bring back a king who has shown before that he is very willing to become a dictator if he feels the need. And what after Gyanendra? Paras, his son, is a womanizer and drug addict who’s suffered multiple heart attacks. His hooliganism is well-documented and he’s even accused to having killed a man by running him over. He is reviled by the public. So we skip Paras and go to his son Hridayendra, say the monarchists. Hridayendra, who has spent much of his life outside of Nepal, who can barely speak any of Nepal’s languages well, who most likely doesn’t understand what is happening within the country, that Hridayendra. If he’s put on the throne, he’ll become a puppet.
Realistically speaking, what do the monarchists want? Paras is a dud and so is his son. You can’t pick and choose who you want in a monarchy. The very fact of a monarchy is that it is hereditary. If you want to choose your king, what you really want is a democracy.
But these things matter little to people. They don’t realistically want a monarchy and even if they do, they haven’t really thought it through. Their opposition is to the current crop of politicians and their venality. The monarchy is just one alternative. A generation that was not alive during the Maoist conflict is now growing up and coming of voting age. These Nepalis have no memories of the monarchy and they are not swayed by invocations of BP Koirala or Madan Bhandari or the 1990 and 2006 Jana Andolans. To them, their material conditions mean more than any ideology. Nothing has changed for them through the system. Their lives have improved not because of the government but in spite of it. Remittance keeps the country afloat, not democracy.
There is a tendency now — since Prasai’s rally did not shake the foundations of the system — to dismiss it and move on. Pundits will say there’s no threat to the system even as politicians point to shadowy figures behind the curtain. I’m no pundit but I see the threat. People are disillusioned like never before. The young are frustrated, the old are tired. Next election, they might not vote for a monarchy but they will vote for those who promise an alternative to the shit-show we currently have. Whether that is parties like the nominally democratic federalist Rastriya Swatantra Party or the Hindu monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party remains to be seen.
Where is Bipin Joshi?
Last and this week, Israel and Hamas have continued to exchange hostages. Among the hostages that Hamas freed were 23 Thai nationals who were released without condition. This was part of a diplomatic effort by the Thai government which worked with Iran to free its nationals. This was a monumental effort by the Thai government and must be applauded. Thirty-nine Thai nationals were killed on October 7 during Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the Thai government seems to have put in everything it could to bring back its citizens.
Alas, I wish I could say the same about the Nepal government. It appears that the ruling authorities have forgotten that Bipin Joshi, a Nepali national, remains a Hamas hostage. The political leadership has not even made a public statement or offered solace to Joshi’s family. Nepal has decent relations with Iran. Why can’t we pursue a similar path as Thailand? Why can’t Nepal mobilize the enormous goodwill it has earned all over the world to rescue the one innocent Nepali man who is being held hostage for no fault of his own? In a video released by Israel on November 20, a man purported to be Bipin Joshi was seen being herded into the Al-Shifa Hospital by Hamas militants. So there is hope that Joshi remains alive and in captivity. So why isn’t the government pulling out all the diplomatic stops to bring this man back to his family and country? I am baffled.
Two more things
One, victims of the Jajarkot earthquake are now dying of inclement weather. Residents displaced from their homes have been forced to live under makeshift temporary shelters and tents, leaving them exposed to the cold. So far, 22 people have already died. With the winter descending and temperatures dropping, even more will perish unless swift action is taken.
Two, Axiata, the Malaysian telecom giant that operates Ncell in Nepal, will reportedly be selling off its stake and exiting the country. The company cited decreasing profits and operational issues as its reasons for leaving. This is a big blow to the Nepal government, which is seeking to invite more foreign investment into the country. An ‘investment summit’ has been planned for April 2024. Ncell is the largest private telecom service in the country, rivaled only by the state’s Nepal Telecom.
PS - Henry Kissinger is finally dead. Good riddance.
And now, the deep dive.
The deep dive: Who’s afraid of TikTok?
Image generated by Bing AI
Two weeks ago, on November 13, the government of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal banned TikTok. While the short-sighted celebrated, others decried the move as an attempt to stifle free speech. What it really was, was an instance of the government killing two birds with one stone. TikTok had become a nuisance to the ruling elites. Unlike social media like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, information spreads much faster on TikTok through its notorious algorithm. TikTok had evolved from being a platform for dancing and challenge videos to one that was actively calling out government misdeeds. Politicians from the prime minister to the president were being criticized. A recent case in point was the presidential pardon of murderer Yograj ‘Regal’ Dhakal. Videos of TikTok showcasing the regal welcome he received upon being freed from jail went viral, as did criticism of the president who had signed the pardon and the government that had recommended the pardon. The subsequent public pressure led to the Supreme Court invalidating the pardon and sending Dhakal back to the slammer.
The casus belli for the ban, however, was the ‘protest’ by conman Durga Prasai, which I discussed above. The government believed that Prasai’s call for Nepalis to descend on the Capital to rally to bring back the monarchy was spreading fast on TikTok. The immediate cause behind the TikTok ban was thus an attempt to limit Prasai’s reach, but the ban also had the chilling effect of stifling all other criticism on TikTok. The urban influencers making their living off of TikTok and the middle-aged aunties in their villages dancing with abandon were collateral damage.
The reasoning that Minister for Communication and Information Technology Rekha Sharma gave for the ban was that TikTok was “disrupting social harmony” and “spreading malicious content”. TikTok was definitely an offender in spreading misinformation and hate speech but so is every other social media, including Facebook and Twitter. In fact, according to Nepal Fact Check, the largest number of complaints registered with the police, by a massive margin, are about Facebook/Messenger, and yet, Facebook remains active while TikTok is banned. The article linked above was fact-checking a Kantipur article that claimed that most cybercrime complaints were related to TikTok. And here is where we need to discuss Kantipur.
The Kantipur article that claimed TikTok was the biggest offender came out on November 7, a week before the ban, and it omits and distorts data from the Nepal Police to make its claim against TikTok. Kantipur presents TikTok as a lone aberration in the social media landscape in not just facilitating harassment, bullying, and malicious content but also actively harvesting private data from users. It would be hopelessly naive to think, in this day and age, that companies like Meta (Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp) or Alphabet (Google/YouTube) are not harvesting your data. Did we all collectively forget the Cambridge Analytica scandal? ByteDance (TikTok) is certainly not alone in hoovering up data from its users. Facebook et all have been doing it for decades but of course, TikTok is Chinese so it’s seen as automatically more malicious.
So Kantipur put out what amounts to a hit-piece against TikTok, specifically targeting the app. (Side-note: the article hilariously keeps calling a server (सर्वर ) cyber (साइबर). This is the digital education of journalists and editors at Nepal’s largest newspaper). A day later, on November 8, Kantipur issued an editorial, titled टिकटकले फैलाएको उन्माद नियमन कहिले ? (‘When will the madness spread by TikTok be regulated?’). The editorial repeats the previous article’s false claims and makes a case for censoring TikTok through appropriate laws. It’s a wild time when a newspaper that is supposed to be a bastion for free speech actively calls for government censorship.
Kantipur provided the government with socio-political cover. If the country’s biggest newspaper, which has constantly been at odds with the ruling establishment, is calling for the authorities to rein in TikTok then there must be something wrong. But is there a specific problem with TikTok? Certainly, TikTok’s algorithm means that malicious content can spread faster than on other platforms, but the data shows that Facebook is a much bigger offender here, given that Facebook is by far the most popular social media in the country. Further, is the solution to misinformation and negative content an outright ban? What about attempting to work with the platform in question to better monitor content, something TikTok itself said they’ve been doing in the past and will continue to do in the future? What about educating the public on digital hygiene and how to recognize misinformation?
Kantipur has also been citing the fact that India and Afghanistan have banned TikTok but India did so as a response to rising tensions with China in the aftermath of the violent clash in the Galwan Valley that left 20 Indian soldiers dead. And concerning Afghanistan, are we really going to hold up the Taliban-ruled country as a model on what to outlaw?
No, the threat to Kantipur, and other traditional media, from TikTok is an existential one. With readership and viewership declining, the country’s largest media house, which operates newspapers, magazines, a radio channel, and a television network, is in panic mode, attempting to do everything it can to maintain its hold over public opinion. Kantipur, once the most trusted newspaper in the country, is now routinely criticized, especially on social media. Not least because it has failed to pay its employees for over three months now. So in a deeply cynical exercise, Kantipur provided political cover to the government’s banning of a social media platform and then even endorsed the move after the fact. A day after the ban, Kantipur published yet another article stating that Nepal is not the only country to ban TikTok, as if to justify the ban.
There’s more context here that shouldn’t be forgotten, though. Even before the TikTok ban, the government had introduced the ‘Directives on the Operation of Social Networking 2023’ which now requires all social media to either operate a local office in Nepal or appoint a focal person. Social media platforms are also required to register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and assist the authorities in taking down any content that promotes child labor, human trafficking, child marriage, polygamy, hate speech, pedophilia, prostitution, use of narcotic substances, misinformation, cyber bullying, terrorism, private content or any other content that spreads “hatred against any gender, community, caste, religion, profession, or people from any particular group.”
That last clause is particularly concerning since it is ripe for misuse. A case in point from Wednesday, comedian Apoorva Kshitiz was fined Rs 10,000 for “disrespecting” the Newa community by making jokes at their expense. (Read my newsletter about Apoorva Kshitiz here.) Kshitiz had been arrested in August 2022 but was released after a mass outcry. The court case filed against him by Newa activists was only decided on Wednesday. If an innocent, albeit in bad taste, joke can get a comedian arrested and fined, we can only imagine what the authorities might do with the mandate given to them by the social media guidelines.
Let's go back further though. Back to 2018 when Nepal decided in a brilliant stroke of genius to ban pornography to curb sexual violence. Few people spoke up then because it was pornography and no one wanted to admit publicly that they consume pornography, even though everyone does. That ban was a test case to see if the Nepali people would tolerate such a glaring restriction on their right to information and digital content, and the public took it pretty well. That emboldened the political parties. They realized then that they could keep pushing censorship and the public would just go along with it. So you naturally get to the TikTok ban, the outlawing of an outlet that was fast becoming the mouthpiece for critics of the established order.
Let’s get something straight here though. This isn’t about just one government led by Maoist prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. In 2018, the porn ban was introduced by the government of KP Sharma Oli, who leads the CPN-UML. The Congress government of Sher Bahadur Deuba was also active in pushing for the social media guidelines. All the major political parties appear to agree that social media needs to be not just regulated but restricted. Perhaps more so after the rise of alternative political forces such as the Rastriya Swatantra Party and independent mayors like Kathmandu’s Balen Shah, all of whom made extensive use of social media in their campaigns. To the parties too, the threat is existential. Social media threatens their hold on the voting public. So the parties and media giants like Kantipur are on the same page. They’re confronting the same threat. But instead of attempting to change and adapt to social media, they’ve taken the approach of trying to outlaw the threat, a move that will certainly come back to bite them in the ass.
The TikTok ban is not where this ends. The government is reportedly planning to place restrictions, if not outright bans, on more social media and messaging apps — Snapchat, Telegram, Bigo Live, Likee, and Tinder. Even mobile games like PUBG and Free Fire are reportedly being monitored. What’s to stop the authorities from banning Twitter next or Facebook. And lest I be misunderstood, I’m not a fan of social media. I understand the risks of addiction and the damage to mental health that most social media can cause but I am not so dogmatic as to want to ban anything that is problematic. In a democracy, compromises and ways out are to be sought, not restrictions on the freedom of individuals.
The one saving grace here might be the government’s own incompetence. Major porn sites might be banned but there are millions of such websites and it’s impossible to completely ban pornographic content on the internet. Even ISPs these days have started to relax the ban and allow access now that the government is not actively monitoring them anymore. As for TikTok, Nepalis can still download the app on their mobile phones even if all content is blocked. But as I was writing this, I tried looking up TikTok on the computer and it seems to be working just fine.
Even if everything is blocked, there are always VPNs and TOR. Digital Rights Nepal, a non-profit, reports that VPN downloads increased exponentially after the government’s TikTok ban, leading the authorities to threaten penalties for anyone using VPN to access TikTok and warning that ‘VPN use may cause theft of sensitive data’. (Subscribe to the Digital Rights newsletter if you’d like, it’s a great summary of digital rights-related issues in Nepal). But people will disregard these warnings to access their favorite social media platform. For those who want access and have some basic knowledge of how the internet works, there’s virtually no way to stop them. There’s an adage floating on the internet, ‘show me a 10-foot wall and I’ll show you an 11-foot ladder.’
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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Great to see you back after so long! Interesting Deep Dive, as always.
ke lekheko bhai, have some respect for the dead: "PS - Henry Kissinger is finally dead. Good riddance."