Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

In early September, Anup Kaphle, the editor in chief of the digital news site Rest of World, was in his home country, Nepal, for what he hoped would be a vacation. Around the same time, discontent was brewing among the country’s young people over a weak economy, rising corruption, and a new social media ban, which was poised to shut down the platforms many of them relied on for information, connection, and spare income. 

On September 8, that discontent erupted in a fury of protests and attacks on government and economic institutions, much of it organized on social media platforms like Instagram and Discord. By the end of a week of riots, these so-called “Gen Z Protests” would see the nation’s Parliament set afire, several prominent politicians’ homes attacked, and the prime minister forced to resign. Some seventy-five people were killed and another two thousand injured. Since then, similar Gen Z–led uprisings have taken place in Morocco and Madagascar.

Media institutions in Nepal found themselves trapped in the middle. Some were seen as arms of the establishment. Others were instrumental in providing accurate information about the unfolding events that the social media news influencers who drove the protests relied on. Kaphle was forced to suspend his vacation, and soon found himself inside a Nepali newsroom that was under threat of being besieged by protesters. Rest of World, which considers itself a “technology first” global news publication, was uniquely positioned to cover how the battle over digital rights and the growing social upheaval coalesced into real-world unrest. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ILN: How did the uprising in Nepal last month begin?

AK: Let’s start with the social media ban. A Supreme Court directive essentially asked that any social media platform that was operating inside Nepal must register with the government and secure a license within three months, and appoint a company representative in Nepal. On September 4, the deadline passed and the government announced that it was banning twenty-six social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Obviously, there was disenchantment among social media users. There are people who earn their living through Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube, including journalists.

And while that was playing out, there was also this nepo baby hashtag trend, mostly on TikTok and Instagram. That trend appeared to have come from Indonesia and the Philippines. There were photos of the Indonesian parliament being burned, and then people were generating AI images of the Nepali parliament on fire and saying “We need to do the same thing, enough is enough.”

So there was that disenchantment with the social media ban, which coupled with this frustration among younger people about where the country was headed. The unemployment rate is high. GDP growth averaged under 5 percent. And then every day, close to two thousand people leave the country. The scene at the only international airport in the capital is actually quite jarring: you see thousands of people just there to wave goodbye to their loved ones.

So the narrative was that while all these young people are going abroad in hopes of better lives—and send remittances that essentially help run the economy—there are privileged elites living in luxury and their kids are flaunting those things on Instagram. 

Protests were announced for September 8 by a bunch of youth movements. They organized themselves on Discord and on Instagram, and it was supposed to be peaceful. They asked people to gather at this regular venue where protests usually start, and everything went downhill from there.

What was your experience?

I was going to take a break from work in September, so I was planning a vacation [outside of Kathmandu], even as the protests were taking place. While we were driving [out of town], we realized the protests had gone violent. First we heard that a reporter had been injured by a bullet—it turned out to be a rubber bullet. But it was clear that the police had opened fire, and within the next couple of hours, I learned that thirteen people were declared dead, mostly young students, protesters. So I canceled the vacation and came back to Kathmandu that night, when a curfew had already been imposed.

The next day, I was planning to go to the offices of a media group, Kantipur Publications, that I joined the board of. So we were all in the office that morning—it must have been like ten-thirty or so. Obviously we have been monitoring Discord for a couple of days. We’ve seen people talk about How do you make Molotov cocktails? Here’s what we want to do: we want to start dropping these things on the houses of members of Parliament. And they named specific institutions, including media organizations—Kantipur as well. And then at some point there was enough information that a mob was headed to the building that housed the newsroom, so we all evacuated.

The rest of the day was just utter chaos. I’ve never seen anything like that. I couldn’t get home for the next thirty hours. I stayed with a driver in his house on the way.

How did the traditional media come to be regarded as a part of this ancien régime that protesters were trying to bring down?

It wasn’t always the case. People saw the media as being on their side for a long time. Nepal has gone through a number of revolutions, and the media was seen as one of the political powers that helped fight against autocracy and helped usher the country toward democracy. 

But in the last decade or so, there’s been disenchantment. Even though there are thousands of online media outlets, they haven’t really evolved in terms of what they cover, how they cover it, and are they really doing a public service? I think that’s been the perception. So as the largest media group, Kantipur was obviously a target. 

So where do young people get their news from?

I think if you are Gen Z, you’re most likely getting your news from Instagram, from TikTok, from YouTube, and probably a narrow selection of online mediums, including online versions of newspapers. 

Over the last five years, there’s been a proliferation of social-media-native media platforms. There’s one called Routine of Nepal Banda, which is quite prominent actually. They started out as a Facebook page that used to publicize whenever there was a strike in the country or things like schedules for load shedding and power outages, and they’ve become quite a powerhouse in terms of information sharing. Or there’s In-Depth Story, which is a YouTube explainer platform. But these are not full-fledged newsrooms. A lot of these places are either getting their information from mainstream publications that have reporters out in the field or they’re publishing stuff based on hearsay.

The Arab Spring in 2011 was sometimes described as the Facebook Revolution. Do you see the events in Nepal as a continuation of that kind of movement, or is it something unique? 

I feel like it’s a continuation of what we’ve seen post–Arab Spring. 

One thing I hadn’t seen before was the use of Discord. Obviously, we’ve seen Discord at the center of misinformation campaigns—so it was surprising to see how central it had become in the current revolution in Nepal. One of the major youth movements that had called the protest on September 8 started a group called Youths Against Corruption on Discord, and they were using the platform to plan, organize, mobilize, and share information. 

And then once the government was toppled, the platform also became sort of like an online polling place to decide which candidate, which leader should head the interim government. I believe there were close to seventy-eight thousand votes that were cast live on Discord, and the woman who won that ballot, the former chief justice Sushila Karki, also ended up becoming the interim prime minister.

How can Nepali media change to better meet the needs of the younger generation?

At least inside Kantipur, where there’s a young managing director who’s inherited the business from his father, there is a realization that the media hadn’t actually evolved, even though everything around us had been changing. What does the management look like? What does the leadership look like? What does the newsroom itself look like? Are there young people working inside the newsrooms? What kind of topics are they covering? 

Nepali journalism, for the longest time, has been very politics-heavy. Politics-dominant, actually; there’s very little reporting on social issues or trying to contextualize the socioeconomic stories vis-à-vis politics. I think people were really missing out on this storytelling. So there is an attempt to correct that.

I know even on social media, users are demanding that media organizations and journalists actually need to change. They need to stop parroting anything a politician says as news and really try to help contextualize things and serve the public.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.