Kathmandu, September 15, 2026 — A person is accused of a crime. Within minutes, a name, photograph or video begins circulating online. Comments demand punishment. Old posts are presented as evidence. Strangers analyse body language, reconstruct events from fragments and decide who is guilty and who is innocent.
Sometimes the accused has not even appeared before a court.
Yet, online, the verdict may already have been delivered.
This is the growing power of social media as a court of public opinion in Nepal.
Social media has changed how Nepalis receive information, discuss public issues and hold powerful people accountable. It has given ordinary citizens a way to document incidents, challenge official narratives and bring issues to national attention without waiting for traditional media.
That power can be valuable.
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But it becomes dangerous when public reaction begins to replace verification, when an allegation is treated as a fact simply because thousands of people have shared it, or when outrage becomes a substitute for due process.
Nepal's experience during the September 2025 Gen Z uprising offered a particularly stark demonstration of this problem.
As protests spread across the country, social media became one of the main sources through which people followed events. Videos and photographs from the streets provided information almost instantly. But alongside genuine material came rumours, manipulated content and entirely false claims. Experts told The Kathmandu Post that the information vacuum created by limited and delayed official communication helped rumours spread.
Research by the Center for Media Research-Nepal documented misinformation involving exaggerated death tolls, political claims, religious rumours and other false narratives during the uprising. The report noted that emotionally charged misinformation spread rapidly and that even educated users could be drawn into sharing unverified claims.
The problem was not simply that people were being misinformed.
People were acting on information before they knew whether it was true.
That distinction is crucial.
A false social-media post can be corrected later. But if the post has already destroyed someone's reputation, exposed a private address, encouraged a crowd to target a person or influenced a political decision, the correction may arrive too late.
During the 2025 unrest, reports documented cases of personal information being shared online and false claims about politicians, religious sites and events spreading widely. Some false stories were amplified across borders before fact-checkers could establish what had actually happened.
The consequences of this environment extend beyond moments of national crisis.
Consider how an ordinary criminal case unfolds online.
A video of an alleged assault is uploaded. It receives thousands of views. Users identify the alleged perpetrator, circulate their photographs and publish information about family members. A second video appears. Commenters fill gaps in the story with assumptions. Influencers discuss the incident. Soon, the online narrative becomes more important than the original evidence.
The public may feel that it is demanding justice.
But justice requires something more than anger.
It requires evidence, investigation, the opportunity for the accused to respond, and an impartial process for determining responsibility.
This is the principle of the presumption of innocence: an allegation is not itself proof of guilt.
Social media operates according to a very different logic.
The platforms reward speed, engagement and emotional reaction. A dramatic accusation is often more likely to attract attention than a careful explanation that says, "The facts are still being investigated."
That creates a structural problem.
The internet asks, "What is happening right now?" The justice system asks, "What can be established as fact?"
Those are not the same question.
The difference becomes even more important when artificial intelligence and manipulated media enter the picture.
Nepal's 2026 election provided another warning. A Center for Media Research study found that 87 percent of monitored potential misinformation items during the election period originated from social media. Facebook accounted for the overwhelming majority of the identified social-media misinformation. The research also found fabricated material, old footage presented in new contexts and AI-generated content.
This means that seeing a photograph or video online is no longer enough to establish that an event happened as presented.
The image may be real but old.
The video may be genuine but from another country.
The audio may have been manipulated.
The face may have been generated.
The caption may completely change the meaning of the original material.
Yet social media encourages users to react before investigating.
That is precisely how a digital court of public opinion becomes powerful.
It does not require a judge, a courtroom or a formal charge. It needs only a compelling story, an emotionally charged audience and enough shares to create the appearance of consensus.
And consensus can be misleading.
Ten thousand people repeating an allegation does not turn it into evidence.
A million views do not establish authenticity.
A viral post is still only a post.
This does not mean the public should remain silent when wrongdoing occurs.
Quite the opposite.
Social media has become an important accountability tool. It has allowed citizens to expose misconduct, document abuses and force institutions to respond. During the 2025 protests, social platforms helped young people organise and communicate, and that capacity was central to the movement's mobilisation.
The problem is not public scrutiny.
The problem is public scrutiny without standards.
A healthy public sphere needs criticism, disagreement and accountability. It also needs restraint. When users share an accusation, they should be asking basic questions: Who originally reported this? Is there independent evidence? Has the person accused responded? Is the photograph or video from the claimed place and date? Could the material have been edited or generated?
Those questions may appear slow in a culture built around instant information.
But accuracy is often slow.
Falsehood is fast.
The difference matters most when a person's reputation, safety or freedom is at stake.
There is another danger: social media can create permanent punishment for an allegation that may later prove false.
Courts can acquit.
News organisations can publish corrections.
Investigators can revise their conclusions.
But screenshots remain.
Search results remain.
Videos continue to circulate.
A person who was wrongly accused may discover years later that an old allegation still appears whenever someone searches their name.
In this sense, the social-media court has a punishment that formal courts generally do not: indefinite repetition.
Nepal's institutions are still trying to determine how online platforms should be regulated. The Supreme Court has ruled that social-media and online platforms should be subject to registration and mechanisms for monitoring undesirable content, while the government has separately introduced measures concerning social-media use.
But regulation alone cannot solve the problem.
There is a danger in responding to misinformation by giving the state excessive power to decide what citizens may say. A government that controls the information environment too aggressively can create another problem: censorship disguised as content moderation.
The answer therefore cannot simply be to silence social media.
It has to be to make society better at using it.
That means stronger media literacy, better fact-checking, more responsible journalism, faster official communication during crises and greater individual responsibility before sharing potentially harmful claims.
It also means journalists and influencers have a particular responsibility.
A person with hundreds of thousands of followers is not merely another social-media user when they publish an accusation. Their reach can transform an unverified claim into a national narrative within minutes.
Influence should therefore come with greater caution, not merely greater visibility.
The same principle applies to ordinary users.
Before pressing "share", people should remember that they are not simply passing information along. They may be participating in the construction of a public verdict.
And once that verdict spreads, reversing it can be much harder than creating it.
Nepal does not need a society in which citizens stop questioning authority. It needs one in which questioning authority does not require abandoning evidence.
Social media should remain a place where powerful people can be challenged, victims can speak and hidden problems can be brought into the public eye.
But it should not become a place where accusation automatically becomes guilt.
A functioning democracy needs both public opinion and institutions capable of testing facts.
Public outrage can draw attention to a problem.
It cannot, by itself, establish what happened.
The danger begins when a viral post becomes the evidence, the comment section becomes the jury and the crowd becomes the executioner of someone's reputation.
In that environment, the question is no longer whether social media can influence public opinion.
It clearly can.
The more important question is whether we are willing to slow down long enough to distinguish what we feel is true from what we can actually prove.
That may be the most important rule for a society increasingly receiving its news, forming its opinions and judging its fellow citizens through a screen.