As Nepal’s Gen Z clashed with riot police and torched government buildings, Vijay Rai—an architect from Damak—didn’t march to Kathmandu to join the movement. He logged into a server called Youth Against Corruption on the popular gaming voice conference tool Discord, where an unusual experiment in political decision-making unfolded.
Thousands of young Nepali dissidents joined the server, and raised their digital hands, queuing up to debate who should lead the country.
“There were about 30–35,000 people listening. Anyone who raised a hand got a chance to speak, and there were polls running side-by-side,” Vijay recalled over a conversation with Decode. Participants were voting for their favourite candidate directly on the server. “I voted for Sushila Karki as interim PM,” Vijay added.
Screenshot of the Discord server Youth Against Corruption. Source: The Telegraph India
“The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord,” one participant told The New York Times, as the organisers of the group, Hami Nepal, steered marathon voice calls and drafted shortlists.
Karki, a popular former chief justice with a reputation for being tough on corruption, emerged as a consensus choice.
A Social Media Blackout Left Discord Standing
Long before the Hami Nepal group started the now famous Discord server, digital platforms were already being used extensively by Nepal’s Gen Z population to express dissent over corruption.
The protests first spread through TikTok, with faces, chants, and “Nepo Baby” callouts going viral. Later, Reddit became a home for anonymous debate. An ensuing government ban on social media finally triggered the protests, leading to the prime minister’s resignation and a nationwide curfew.
In such a precarious and uncertain backdrop, Discord emerged as a likely candidate to host discussions.
“Every other platform was banned and Discord was still up, so the organisers jumped on it,” Dridhata Silwal, a feminist civic-tech activist, who dipped in and out of the seven-hour call to help decide the country’s next leader, told Decode.
Availability was not the sole reason. Discord’s live audio let thousands speak and listen in real time, something that Facebook or Instagram could not replicate.
“In the server chat many people were joking around. But in the live voice conference, despite the disagreements, participants were really serious about what they spoke,” noted Rai.
“I would say it was very authentic,” said Dridhata. “Ironically, that authenticity was partly because Nepal’s mainstream party machines and their youth wings were not on Discord; they still use Facebook and party channels.”
From Online Debate To Offline Decisions
“This was largely a leaderless protest. So when the time to negotiate came, the army chief called for a representative among the protesters,” Biren (name changed upon request), a Nepali scholar studying online communications and disinformation, told Decode.
“There was initially nobody to represent the protesters. There were groups, but no common leader. In that power vacuum, Hami Nepal took the initiative and stepped forward,” he noted.
Hami Nepal, led by 36-year-old DJ-turned-activist Sudan Gurung, began as a disaster-response volunteer group during the 2015 earthquake, distributing relief when state institutions faltered. Since then, they’ve reinvented themselves around social service and activism, running blood donation drives, crowdfunded relief efforts, and youth campaigns.
“Hami Nepal stepped into that gap and they basically used the Discord server as a place to create some sense of discussion. They used that to basically legitimise their choice,” Bushnu added.
And it worked. The results of the server’s polls became an offline reality with Karki’s appointment.
Bias, Exclusion, and the Digital Divide
Dridhata observed several limitations to the Discord discussions, particularly of bias and exclusivity. She noted that Hami Nepal members were backing their favourite, Balendra Shah, who eventually stepped away from the interim role, eyeing a full tenure.
She also recalled that the invite link to the server was not public, and was passed from person-to-person, thus throttling its reach. Furthermore, Discord—a platform built primarily for tech-savvy gamers—could be tricky to deal with for new users, which she believed deepened the digital divide.
Dridhata also noted a lack of constitutional literacy among the participants. “Youth joined because of momentum, not knowledge,” Dridhata said, describing confusion about interim powers and the constitution.
Organisers were not blind to the risks. Aware of how misinformation, fake news and rumours could derail the movement, the Gen Z leaders launched a sub-room on the Discord server dedicated to fact checks, according to Al Jazeera. In it, participants shared sources and verified claims in real time in an attempt to protect deliberations from spiralling into disinformation.
Decode ascertained that the server initially had 5,000 participants, which ballooned to over 35,000 as the decision for the interim leader was being made.
While hailing the use of Discord as a workaround in response to the social media ban, Dridhata and Biren both highlighted an obvious flaw in the legitimacy of the server as a real democratic space—that a group of 5,000-35,000 anonymous users could not possibly represent a youth population of over 12.5-14 million fairly.
A Fragile Experiment
Kiran Garimella, assistant professor at Rutgers School of Information and Communication, believes that while the narrative of a leader being chosen via Discord is certainly compelling, it is a “dangerous oversimplification” of what really transpired.
“The idea that a decision as monumental as selecting an interim prime minister was genuinely made by a popular vote on a chat app used by probably less than 5% of the population is really worrying,” Kiran told Decode.
Questioning the legitimacy of the online poll, he believes it’s more likely that a core group of organisers strategically backed a widely respected, politically neutral figure, and used Discord to “stage a public spectacle of ratification”.
He also highlighted that the platform itself was not built for political decision-making, and that its authenticity could not be verified and audited. The anonymity factor also opens the door to manipulation tactics like astroturfing. Coupled with the reliance on a US-based company’s infrastructure to mediate a fragile political moment, Kiran warns it could leave a country like Nepal vulnerable to widespread manipulation.
By contrast, he points to Estonia’s digital democracy, where secure ID systems and one-person-one-vote online elections are state-backed. Nepal’s Discord, by comparison, was improvised, temporary, and fragile.
The Youth Against Corruption server still exists. Its membership has swelled to 160,000, but activity has slowed. “I was listening there just two hours ago. They were discussing how to reform the judiciary,” Biren noted.
Highlighting the potential for influence and manipulation, he concluded, “We cannot say yet that this is digital democracy, and it is too early to call it a success story.”
