The Right To Stay Logged On

—by Adam Bumas

On Monday, I wrote about how Nepal’s government banned virtually all social media in an attempt to shut down widespread protests, only for those protests to become so widespread that the prime minister resigned and dissolved the country’s Parliament. The largely young leaders of the protest movement, powered initially by VPN services, ended up electing its new prime minister using a Discord poll. (I tried to join the server to find out more, but they’ve understandably closed it to any new invites.)

There are, obviously, huge differences between Nepal’s political environment and our own, but it does feel safe to say that, in the 2020s, the political power of a nation-state is nothing in the face of its citizens’ desire to stay logged on. And that should worry President Donald Trump.

For all the power Trump’s administration has consolidated over the last nine months, they still do have to at least pretend to care about their popularity. Especially if they want Vice President JD Vance to legally win an election in 2028. But they are in the midst of brokering a deeply unpopular TikTok deal right as they are also loudly fantasizing about the total suppression of free speech. To say nothing of the fact that Trump is still very much mired in an investigation of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. According to polling data published this week, Trump’s second term is the most unpopular a sitting president has been in nearly 20 years, even when you compare it to his own first term.

To once again ask a question we’ve been asking all summer: Exactly how much more can Americans take? And to throw another question on the pile: How will young Americans respond when their favorite video app is taken away from them?

President Trump seems to be wondering this, as well, as evidenced by the fact he announced this week that he ordered a fourth extension of the federal ban on TikTok. And The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the US and Chinese governments are ironing out a deal to sell TikTok to a consortium of American buyers, which would put it in compliance with the ban that was passed last year with wide bipartisan support. But the newest version of the deal might move American users to a new domestic-only version of the app, similar to the Chinese-only version of TikTok, Douyin, that operates inside the country’s Great Firewall. A far cry from the original version of the ban, which was meant to force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app and its algorithm, restoring American cultural supremacy to the web.

When President Trump initially tried to ban the app in his first term, his concern was over ByteDance giving user data to the Chinese government. The Biden administration reversed Trump’s ban, but later banned it from all government-owned devices after it was found that they were using that data to spy on US journalists who were speaking to TikTok employees. A few months later, a poll by Pew Research Center showed 50% support for banning the app, with data security overwhelmingly listed as the most popular reason. Interestingly, another Pew poll around the same time showed that more than 70% of respondents didn’t trust the US government with their data either.

Which is part of why the ban effort needed another reason to get off the ground. Rep. Mike Gallagher, who introduced the bill that eventually banned TikTok, wrote in The Free Press at the time that he was motivated by “rampant pro-Hamas propaganda” on the app. Speaking earlier this year, Gallagher, who now works for Palantir, said, “the bill was still dead until October 7th.” Rather than any data issue, it was the specter of young people turning against Israel over the genocide in Gaza that inevitably led to the app being banned. Which is actually not so totally dissimilar from what happened in Nepal this month.

The country’s social media ban, which was also aimed at quelling protests, was meant to cut off younger users from an international movement. In July, multiple storms led to devastating flooding in the Philippines, which increased the visibility and scale of the government’s rampant corruption. Thousands of people have been protesting since August, calling for independent audits of the government, which President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has voiced support for. One of the leading voices for the protests is a newly formed coalition of young activist groups called “Youth Against Kurakot.” Their logo is a vomiting emoji, because “YAK!,” and “kurakot” is Filipino slang for embezzlement.

A few days later the formation of YAK!, the protests against similar corruption in Nepal began. Without the environmental devastation faced by the Philippines, there needed to be a different focus for criticizing the Nepali government’s corruption, and it seems to have landed on “nepo baby” influencers. According to The Kathmandu Post, the protest movement began on Reddit and TikTok, where anti-corruption voices were able to break through via viral videos of the lavish lifestyles of Nepali politicians’ children using the “nepo kid” hashtag. The comments on both platforms, in places like r/NepalSocial or the account wake_up_nepal_977, show that many people were aware the nepo kid trend was an outgrowth of the Filipino movement.

The Discord server where Nepal’s interim prime minister was elected in a simulated “mini-election” (to quote a moderator/Speaker Of The House, I guess) is called “Youths Against Corruption,” a clear sign that these protests wouldn’t look the same without the larger movement in The Philippines. But importantly, they also wouldn’t look the same without the effects of algorithmically-driven social media. In terms of algorithm bait, it’s impressive how many boxes they checked off. Videos of rich influencers flaunting their wealth, which you’re supposed to hatewatch, posted in support of a movement for social change, with a hashtag that’s a tiny variation on a trend from a few years ago (in this case, the great nepo baby reckoning of 2022).

Banning TikTok, or even setting up a Douyin-style walled garden version, might not lead to a revolution here in the US the way Nepal’s more comprehensive ban did. But there have been more frivolous first steps towards toppling an unpopular government. And Extremely Online young Americans are, in their own way, just as intertwined with global culture as young Nepalis are. Everyone on Earth under 30 was basically born into a world where that’s always been the case. Obviously that’s going to change how geopolitics works! And American lawmakers clearly don’t understand that (yet).

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A Good Post

You Can Hire Garbage Day’s Research Team Now

We’ve been fielding a lot of questions this week about how our team analyzes the internet. How we measure trends, surface stories, and track changes on different platforms. Well, I’m excited to announce that if you want to work with our research team, now you can.

We’ve brought on investigative journalist Ellie Hall and she and our head of research Adam Bumas are expanding our research department into a full consulting operation. We’ve already partnered with the excellent newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist and are helping them make sense of the MAHA internet ecosystem. And we’d love to talk to you, your company, your nonprofit, about doing the same for your specific patch of the web. You have questions, we can get you the answers.

If you’re interested in working with Garbage Day’s research team, shoot our managing editor Cates Holderness an email, cates@garbageday.email. Let’s chat!

Tyler Robinson’s Discord Logs Were Released

Discord messages from alleged Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson were released by law enforcement yesterday. Reporter Ken Klippenstein also published a lengthy interview with Robinson’s friends, which has even more from the Discord server he spent time in.

The chat logs aren’t definitive proof of a motive, but they do give us a clearer picture as to why Robinson allegedly carried out the attack. He told the group chat that he had been planning the attack for over a week and that he decided to do it because he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hate.” He also said that the messages on the bullets were “mostly a big meme, I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on Fox News I might have a stroke.” The clear-cut nature of the Discord messages has not helped the staggering amount of confusion online — obviously.

Users on X are more convinced than ever that Robinson was either framed by the FBI or was covering up for his trans partner. Multiple large right-wing accounts are claiming that Robinson was acting out the finale of Breaking Bad, where Walter White leaves a voicemail exonerating Skyler of any wrongdoing. They’ve also become fixated on George Zinn, the 71-year-old who was detained after the shooting and who has since been arrested for child sexual abuse material found on his phone. Users believe he was somehow working with Robinson. Oh, also, a very unwell guy fed the Discord logs into ChatGPT and the AI told him it was “most likely fabricated.”

Meanwhile, on Bluesky, there are still some users convinced that Robinson was a far-right groyper. It’s, of course, possible, but at this point we can pretty firmly say there is no evidence for that.

The thing to watch going forward is how the right reacts to the criminal proceedings. There are already calls — from conservatives — for Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to step down. The former for her disastrous comments on a podcast where she threatened to prosecute anyone not mourning Kirk hard enough. And the latter for, ahem, freaking the fuck out during a congressional hearing yesterday.

Garbage Day Was On PBS News Hour Last Night

I went on PBS News Hour last night to talk about the rise of accelerationist political violence in America. We recorded before the release of Robinson’s Discord chats, but, towards the end, I talked about the rise of a new form of extremism taking root among young Americans, one that exists beyond the right-left political binary and focused more on sowing division and chaos simply for the glory of it or, more often than not, because they think it’s funny.

I went further into this on The Bulwark’s podcast yesterday, as well.

The Accent GeoGuessr

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s some good footage of the DC occupation.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***