In September 2025, large-scale anti-corruption protests and demonstrations took place all across Nepal, predominantly organized by Generation Z students and young citizens. Known as the "Gen Z Revolution" or "Third People's Movement", they began parallel to a nationwide ban on numerous social media platforms including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and were motivated by the public's frustration with corruption and display of wealth by government officials and their families, as well as allegations of mismanagement of public funds. The movement expanded to encompass broader issues of governance, transparency, and political accountability, and became notable for the central role that social media and digital platforms played in organizing demonstrations and facilitating public deliberation during the political transition. The situation escalated, with police violence against children and hospitals, protests against public officials, and vandalism of government and political buildings taking place throughout the country.
According to a report by Himal Southasian, this event marked the highest single-day death toll from a public protest in Nepal's history.
On 9 September 2025, Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, along with a few government ministers, resigned. On 12 September, Sushila Karki was appointed the interim prime minister of Nepal. The protests subsided by 13 September.
There were 76 deaths. According to the Nepali Army's official report, of those people, 22 were protesters, 3 were police officers, and 10 were prisoners who were shot to prevent their escape.
Background On 4 September 2025, the Government of Nepal ordered the shutdown of 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Signal, and Snapchat, for failing to register under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology's new rules. According to People's Dispatch, the registration requirement had been motivated in part as a way to enable the enforcement of a new Digital Services Tax and stricter value-added tax rules on foreign e-service providers in an effort to boost revenue. However, critics alleged the shutdown was prompted by a social media trend highlighting nepotism, focusing on the privileges enjoyed by the children and relatives—nicknamed "Nepo Babies" or "Nepo Kids"—of influential political leaders.
According to People's Dispatch, the media platform ban had a significant impact on Nepalese political economy. Of the Nepalese GDP, 33% comes from remittances, with hundreds of thousands of exit permits being issued, alongside 20.8% youth unemployment. These remittances keep thousands of households afloat and pay import bills, and also indicate a lack of structural transformation in the domestic economy toward an employment-first model, pushing the youth into work in online spaces. Banning social media thus threatened youth livelihood.
Prior to the protests, the average Nepali citizen made per year, while families of the country's ruling elite displayed their wealth on social media. This "Nepo Kid" trend prompted significant public anger, particularly from Generation Z users. The median age of Nepal's population is 25, meaning that a large part of the population is in Gen Z, the age group that uses social media the most. This relatively young population, combined with the country's largely rural, rough terrain and substantial migration abroad, leads to Nepal having one of the highest social media usage rates in South Asia, about 48% of Nepalese using social media.
According to Himal Southasian, the protests were "a long time coming," fueled by a "long series of corruption scandals." involving the political and business establishment, which reinforced a "dismal view of the system." The report further noted that while Nepal has progressed since the civil war, the process has been "slow and tortuous," with public services remaining poor despite high tax burdens.
Digital coordination Youth participatory groups, particularly Hami Nepal (a non-governmental organization), used Discord online communities (called "servers" in Discord) and Instagram channels as central organizing tools in the Gen Z protests. According to Green European Journal, the Discord server rapidly evolved into the movement's primary communications hub before the demonstrations. Volunteers organized dedicated channels for media outreach, legal assistance, medical response, fact-checking, documentation, regional coordination and newcomer support. Participants also collaboratively prepared protest guidelines, assigned volunteer responsibilities and discussed contingency plans for possible internet disruptions.
Shaswot Lamichhane, who established the Discord server and served as the moderator manager, was a recent graduate with a background in science and technology. He was involved in the technical coordination that underpinned these exercises in digital democracy, explaining that the discussions were meant to simulate a "mini-election", emphasizing that it was intended to gauge people's preferences rather than constitute a binding election or formal appointment process.
Organizers incorporated QR codes into protest banners so that photographs distributed by news articles would also direct viewers to the Discord server. They additionally coordinated outreach to approximately 140 social media influencers before the protests to broaden participation despite the government's social media restrictions. VPNs and posted flyers were also used to evade the social media ban.
According to several news outlets, messages in the Youth Against Corruption Discord channel advocated for violence against the Nepalese leadership. Tactical discussions on Discord included procurement and use of Molotov cocktails, suggestions to seize ammunition from police stations, and instructions on disabling airplane tires using acetylene gas. After police response led to 19 deaths, organizers in some Discord servers asked members to stop attending classes. They called for an indefinite closure of colleges and schools until the government accepted accountability for the fatalities. However, Green European Journal, based on an analysis of the archived Discord logs, reported that the server had initially functioned as the movement's principle coordination hub, with dedicated channels for logistics, legal support, medical response, media outreach and fact-checking. It also reported that moderators urged protesters to remain peaceful and attempted to regain control after violence broke out, but that the rapid influx of members following the police shootings overwhelmed moderation efforts and allowed increasingly violent messages to proliferate.
After Oli's resignation, the army's chiefs met with Hami Nepal and asked them to suggest nominees for an interim leader who would oversee national elections. On a Discord server with over 100,000 members, more than 10,000 users met virtually in a Discord channel to debate. The discord server had sub channels for constitutional law, fact-checking and candidate research. After discussions, several polls, and the use of sub-channels for fact-checking, the members settled on Sushila Karki.
Supporters of the process were seen by Al Jazeera English as viewing the online process as "a revolutionary counter to the traditional practice of politicians choosing leaders behind closed doors, which had displayed little transparency".
Sudan Gurung, founder of the youth organization Hami Nepal coordinated online discussions through Discord and served as a liaison between protest organizers and the Nepali Army during the transition period that followed Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli's resignation.Reuters, 14 September 2025NDTV, 9 September 2025Al Jazeera, 27 September 2025
Digital privacy and nonviolent tactics Scholars of nonviolent resistance argue that digital literacy and secure communication have become increasingly central to sustaining nonviolent campaigns in the twenty-first century. In Nepal, the 2025 Gen Z protests began as youth-led demonstrations against a government ban on major social media platforms and long-standing corruption and inequality, and were initially framed by organizers as peaceful rallies and symbolic actions.
The shutdown of 26 platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp, heightened fears of surveillance and content removal. Drawing on wider patterns of “digital repression”, activists reported that mainstream platforms felt heavily monitored and vulnerable to takedowns. Youth organizations therefore relied on platforms such as Discord and Instagram as central tools for coordination, using Discord's server structure, channels and role-based permissions to manage access, share logistical information and hold large-scale discussions about strategy. Some organizers also used flyers with QR codes and virtual private networks (VPNs) to direct supporters to these spaces and to bypass platform restrictions.
At the same time, reports on Discord chat logs indicate that some users also discussed more confrontational tactics, including Molotov cocktails and attacks on infrastructure, revealing tensions within the movement over how far to escalate. Analysts of nonviolent resistance note that such debates are common in contemporary protest waves, where movements often combine mass peaceful mobilization with episodes of rioting or property destruction. The Nepalese case highlights how Gen Z activists have intertwined nonviolent ideals with concerns about digital security, seeking to protect both physical protesters and their online communities while challenging entrenched political elites.
International media outreach and narrative framing Using open-source intelligence (OSINT) methodology, the Nepalese media watchdog platform Media Kurakani analyzed over 60 TikTok videos to document how youth citizen journalism drove global media coverage during the demonstrations. As police responded with force on 8 September 2025, protesters livestreamed unedited smartphone footage and created English-language videos directly appealing to international outlets—including CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Sky News—demanding media attention as it is.
Although major global outlets initially reported the events primarily as a reaction to the government's social media ban, Gen Z activists conducted an online campaign targeting foreign journalists to correct the framing. Demonstrators asserted that the primary drivers of the movement were systemic government corruption, political nepotism, and police brutality, prompting international outlets to update their coverage accordingly. Digital appeals directed at international human rights bodies also contributed to public statements from the United Nations calling for transparent investigations into police conduct.
Timeline 8 September Large gatherings took place in Kathmandu, particularly at Maitighar Mandala and around the federal parliament building, New Baneshwor, with tens of thousands of participants. The protests were originally organized as a peaceful rally by Hami Nepal, an NGO whose website highlights earthquake relief projects. Anil Baniya, one of the protest organizers from Hami Nepal, said the government cracked down on the protesters after some protesters began to climb the walls of the parliament complex and others threw stones. Baniya stated that what began as a peaceful protest was hijacked by "external forces and political party cadres" but that regardless, the government should not have responded to stones being thrown with live ammunition from the armed police. The Straw Hat Pirates' Jolly Roger flag from the manga series One Piece was used by some protesters, in similar fashion to the 2025 Indonesian protests.