The next time someone tells you the youth aren’t engaged enough in politics, just point them to Nepal.
According to multiple reports, the youth of the South Asian nation managed to oust the existing government following an attempted ban of major social media platforms and took to Discord to hold an impromptu convention to elect an interim prime minister.
The organizing appears to have worked. On Friday, the military accepted the recommendation of the protest group and named Karki the interim prime minister. Karki, who accepted the role, is expected to pick a new cabinet and eventually hold elections. According to the Times, that is expected to happen within the next six months or so.
On one hand, fuck social media. The recommender AIs that run it are only supposed to optimise engagement, thus optimising ad revenue. But they are far more powerful than that. They can influence public opinion as a whole. Totally out-of-band from the sovereignty of any nation. It is foolish to think that Google, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter aren’t abusing this power. Every responsible nation that wants to defend its sovereignty against recommender AIs must ban social media immediately, along with every other source of such recommendations.
On the other hand, everything else that happened in Nepal. I’m just glad the actual decisions happened on Discord, the least terrible of the platforms. At least Discord doesn’t have these sinister recommender AIs.