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Nepal: Analysis Shows Social Media Bill Highly Problematic

  • By Raphael CLD
  • 13 February 2025

Nepal: Analysis Shows Social Media Bill Highly Problematical

 

In February 2025, the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) released its analysis of Nepal’s Social Media Act (Bill) 2081, which was tabled in parliament in late January 2025. The Bill has multiple problems when assessed against international standards on freedom of expression, including that the extensive regulatory powers in the Bill are all exercised by government actors, that platforms, defined very broadly, are required to obtain a government licence, that it imposes numerous expansive and illegitimate content restrictions on both users and platforms, and that it utterly fails to put in place any systematic approach to addressing the harms caused by online content.

 

The analysis is available here and the Bill is available here.

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