Group Chats: The Modern Nucleus of Anti-Authoritarian Revolution
The photo above shows a physical ballot box with Discord’s logo at its center, reflecting the Discord elections held in Nepal. Photo courtesy of DashboardIcons and Canva. Original design by Aarnah Kurella.
When most people think of Discord, they likely picture gamers, memes, and unmoderated, chaotic chatter. Discord’s anti-intellectual, anarchic, and informal culture has cultivated its largely unserious reputation online. But in Nepal, it facilitated a revolution. The communications on Discord that spurred this change operated independently of the previous authoritarian regime, paralleling historical underground resistance movements. Now, however, authoritarian surveillance states can be beaten at their own game through the anonymity of these group chats, giving revolutionaries and their projects a new advantage in the digital age.
Underground resistance movements are by no means a new phenomenon. For example, French rebels relied on underground networks to resist Nazi occupation in World War II. However, they met the problem of countless other movements; the revolutionaries’ reach was limited in numbers, and ultimately proved unsuccessful.
As communications technology has evolved, the digital world has emerged as a crucial tool for disseminating resistance information. However, if communications have been revolutionized by the internet, so have the powers of authoritarian regimes seeking to repress change. Social media can be easily surveilled. Governments can access logs of online conversations, which, in the case of revolutionary communications, are inherently anti-authoritarian. WeChat, China’s all-in-one social media app, is functionally controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, notoriously conducting political censorship while retaliating against dissenting voices. Following suit, Russia designed its own social media platform, MAX, which it promoted through muddying connectivity on alternative outlets and pre-installing the app on new devices, ultimately accumulating a third of Russia’s population as its user base. This pattern of surveillance also extends to the United States, where, via geofencing warrants, American police departments have engaged in surveillance practices by buying data from companies to identify protestors based on their Instagram activity. Ultimately, these methods have created deep privacy, legal, and free-speech concerns, forcing individuals to self-censor.
Therefore, the true modern successor to historical underground networks is online group chats, whose greater deregulation allows them to withstand authoritarian pushback. Group chats have come to serve as a centerpiece of the modern revolution against authoritarian states by playing a pivotal role in the most critical organizational stages, providing digital anonymity to counter governmental surveillance, and reaching large numbers of people to mobilize for change.
The recent coup d’état in Nepal saw this new method of resistance in action. On September 4, 2025, Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli’s administration imposed a widespread ban of several social media platforms, utilizing self-created legal loopholes while citing misinformation and international responsibility concerns. The Oli Administration claimed that platforms were noncompliant with new standards developed by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. While the restrictions paralleled China’s social media bans, Nepal did not offer its population any alternatives, effectively isolating individuals from mass communication.
These bans were compounded by Nepal’s increased surveillance of dissenting opinions online, using users’ online speech to justify arrests. For example, last year, Nepali police arrested at least two people for their online critical remarks of Nepali leadership. These instances inspired further distrust in using public social platforms, and with no other means of effective digital discourse, the people of Nepal resorted to VPNs and Bluetooth networks to evade the ban. They also turned to Discord as a far more enclosed, yet accessible, platform. The use of Discord was not just a symbol of protest; it also quickly became a tool to orchestrate resistance against the government. Hami Nepal organized “Youth Against Corruption,” a Discord server that attracted new and existing Gen-Z users. With over 145,000 members, the platform hosted political discussions and utilized multiple rounds of community voting to select debate topics, much like an actual parliament.
This Discord server eventually became the movement's political backbone. Its members focused on organizing protests and even voting for the next prime minister by utilizing polling features to democratize the political process, allowing everyone to have a say. The Discord polls ultimately elected Sushila Karki, broadly regarded as embodying the anti-corruption movement, as the first female prime minister of Nepal. The elections produced a clean, widely accepted result, marked by the conclusion of protests, and clarified the future steps for a very disorganized state. On September 12, 2025, President Ram Chandra Paudel inaugurated her in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Karki’s first order of business was to dissolve the current parliament and schedule an official electoral procedure for March 2026. Traditionally, Nepalese citizens vote for members of the House of Representatives: 165 seats are determined by first-past-the-post, and the remaining 110 by proportional representation. Nepal also has a National Assembly selected by an electoral college, which parallels the power of the U.S. House of Representatives, and together they comprise the federal parliament. Typically, this parliament chooses the prime minister. While the elections on Discord bypassed this procedure and directly selected an interim prime minister, the traditional parliamentary structure was maintained.
The Discord elections mark a pivotal moment in digital resistance. The government attempted to take away platforms of free expression, and in response, those same platforms helped select the new government.
Nepal’s demonstrations are not the only case of organizing change. Morocco, which suffers from insufficient public health services despite spending millions on tourist-oriented infrastructure, has also faced protests organized on Discord. In Hong Kong, end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram have been used to arrange protests when WhatsApp posed infiltration concerns. And in Kenya, private Zello channels disseminated voice updates on protest activity and safe passageways, also demonstrating the power of these private networks not only in planning but also in executing resistance.
Furthermore, encrypted apps such as Telegram offer another layer of freedom from government surveillance, which is especially prevalent in the United States. In addition to parsing through social media posts to justify deportation, detention, and denial of re-entry, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has attempted to tap into government and corporate intelligence to conduct further pre-emptive social media surveillance. ICE has formed partnerships with private data-extraction companies such as Palantir, Clearview, BI2, and Paragon to include social media activity in their broader databases. By monitoring protesters and their social media activity, ICE has effectively forced users to turn to encrypted platforms. When public social media is functionally compromised, group chats also become a new anti-surveillance safe haven for resistance.
In a digital age where governments have extensive control over citizens’ speech and can take measures to limit the efficacy of revolutionaries through extensive surveillance, group chats are the sanctuary of the internet. The group chats in Nepal, Morocco, Hong Kong, Kenya, and the United States prove that they are the new infrastructure through which real change can be incited. No matter how much the government attempts to suppress free speech, these platforms are the epicenter for the average person to have a seat at the table and contribute to an organized revolution. In the future, these group chats, especially those that are encrypted, will likely continue to serve as a safe space for individuals to plan prospective protests, organize mass acts of resistance, and simply speak freely.
Aarnah Kurella (CC ‘28) is a staff writer from Dallas, Texas. She studies applied math and chemistry and is interested in the intersection of science, technology, and politics. She can be contacted at ak4918@columbia.edu.