Discord, the platform long associated with gaming communities and crypto traders, has now become the unlikely stage for a political revolution in Nepal.
After widespread protests and the banning of major social media platforms, young protestors flocked to Discord to coordinate, deliberate, and even vote on who should lead the country next.
The “Youth Against Corruption” server, which quickly ballooned to more than 130,000 members, hosted multiple polls over the past week.
On Sep. 10, the group reached consensus. Sushila Karki, Nepal’s former chief justice, was chosen as interim leader. More than 7,700 votes were cast before Karki crossed the 50% threshold, reported South China Morning Post.
I’d hate to be a discord employee who just wanted to make a cool game communication platform now.
Better to be a discord employee who wanted all along to help the CIA appoint rulers of other nations
We’ll see what happens in the real elections in 2026. I don’t think anyone reasonable thinks a Discord server membership is proof of citizenship but the interim PM also has the support of the army.
If both the youth and the military are against your government existing I don’t think anyone can argue this revolution isn’t the will of the people.
The main point is, Discord is a totally centralized service under US control, you can’t know whether the outcome of Discord polls is at all real. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily fake, but as a choice of tool it seems really stupid to me. There’s precedent, incentive, and means for significant interference and deception here, whether not it did in fact happen. If this type of use of services like Discord continues going forward, it will be safe to assume that it is happening, because of course it will.
This type of shit is what cryptography is good for, it should be used when it matters. I think adversarial use of cryptography is really cool, and it honestly pisses me off a little bit that the article keeps namedropping cryptocurrency, as if unconditionally trusting Discord is what it’s all about, when it should really be the opposite.