A terrifying crisis has emerged in today’s political communication: Shitposting as a shield for authoritarianism. The country’s chief executives and powerful leaders post bizarre content on social media that possesses neither diplomatic value nor policy-related seriousness. Yet, the irony is that these very posts are showered with thousands of ‘likes’, leaving their supporters ecstatic. To understand this political behaviour in the digital age, we must first understand the various dimensions of internet culture and its internal architecture.

The bizarre digital content we consume daily on ‘asocial’ media—as CK Lal terms it—may be broadly classified into three genres: memes, trolls and shitposts.

Not every joke or bizarre post seen on anti-social media belongs to the same genre; each has its own character and purpose. A meme has a specific template. It is an idea, image or video whose basic template remains the same, but the content is modified as it spreads rapidly from one person to another. The purpose of a meme is to create a shared social understanding or collective laughter. Trolling, on the other hand, is driven by clear malice or a deliberate intent to provoke, anger or humiliate someone. It targets a specific individual or group.

Shitposting, however, has no fixed format, nor is it designed to go viral like a meme. The core characteristic of shitposting is being crude, low-quality and absurd. Shitposting is not always done with malicious intent, but in today’s political climate, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that its main function is to completely divert or derail serious ongoing conversations. Naturally absurd and semi-nihilistic, the term ‘shitposting’ first appeared in the Urban Dictionary in 2007, where it was defined as: “Posting useless worthless garbage on a messageboard.”

When those who run the country’s governance become the main players in this ‘shitposting’ genre, the discourse of the entire nation falls into the trap of distraction. There is a massive gap between the new, urban-dwelling generation fluent in memes, trolling and shitposting, and well-versed in pop culture and the ordinary citizens who have little to do with internet culture. Balancing the needs of the general public who do and do not have online access should have been the duty of the state, but populist leaders seem to be exploiting this very gap.

Even a superficial look at the political environment before, during and the Gen-Z movement reveals that modern populist movements use social media as their primary weapon to breed distrust towards established institutions. They bypass traditional media and legal channels to fake a direct connection with the public.

In contemporary global politics, US President Donald Trump is perhaps the greatest example of this. He fully utilises his X handle to give bullying, sarcastic nicknames to his opponents and to deflect attention from sensitive issues. When Trump was criticised for his degrading language, his supporters only cheered louder. Trump’s irresponsibility became proof of him being ‘organic’ and ‘authentic’. One of Trump’s famous strategies was “pissing off the liberals.” Lacking the capacity for policy debate, his style of provoking opponents to rile up his supporters has now been copied perfectly by Nepal’s rulers. Lacking a policy debate for a budget that hurts the poor, the finance minister borrowed Trump’s exact style and stated, “This budget was meant to piss off the leftists.”

Singha Durbar, always ready to serve the algorithm, has also acquired expertise in the genre of shitposting. Nepal’s rulers have realised that today’s youth harbour extreme frustration, and that this despair can easily be converted into digital sentiment by ‘roasting’ someone on Facebook rather than through any concrete policy. The PM’s Saturday shitposts continue to expose the grotesque nature of this trend.

We experienced the ugliness of this shitposting and ‘Digital Heroism’ just this past Saturday. A government secretary had reportedly asked the Prime Minister for a ‘favour’ via personal message to secure an ambassadorship. Bargaining for positions within the civil service like this is, in itself, administrative indiscipline. The state had—and should have had—thousands of administrative and departmental avenues to deal with this situation, where administrative warnings or disciplinary actions could have been taken.

However, the prime minister did not want to appear bound by ‘administrative procedures’; our young, energetic, departure-loving PM mayhaps wanted to look like Singham on social media. Grossly abusing his power, he mobilised the Nepal Police in the ‘middle of the night’. The police picked up the secretary late at night and reportedly held him at the station for about nine hours. After this procedural mockery, a ‘triumphant’ shitpost appeared on the prime minister’s personal account.

The comment section was even more embarrassing, as people ranging from lawmaker Ranju Darshana (who doesn’t usually ‘get involved’ on Saturday-Shenanigans) to Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel, and others arrived to entertain the circus. Along with them were the PM’s personal Gorkhapatra-esque he(ze)roes like Victor and the undeclared fan page manager of Rabi Lamichhane, Jwala Sangraula. It goes without saying that this is a mockery of the rule of law.

Why is it dangerous when the prime minister of a country engages in shitposting on Facebook? To understand this, we must grasp the classical theory of satire. In the 20th century, using boxing metaphors, terms like ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’ came into use. ‘Punching up’ means the weak mocking the powerful, while ‘punching down’ means the powerful mocking the weak.

However, long before these metaphors were used, the boundaries of satire had been set by ancient philosophy. In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle laid the foundation for an important theory of humour known as the ‘Superiority Theory of Humor’. According to them, our laughter often stems from a feeling of superiority, of being above people less fortunate or less powerful than ourselves. However, they considered laughing by belittling others in this manner to be highly contemptible and distasteful. In his book, Poetics, Aristotle argued that comedy or satire should not cause actual pain to anyone or target the helpless, but should only mock the “vices and foibles” of society. Mocking vulnerable or weak classes is ‘punching down’—an assault by the powerful on the weak. This was the very first intellectual expression of that concept, even though they lacked the metaphorical boxing terminology of ‘punching down’ at the time.

Long before the precise phrase ‘punching down’ became a central pillar of comedy, the famous comedian George Carlin gave one of the most celebrated expressions, both written and spoken, to preserve the essence of this concept.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the phrase rapidly entered the field of stand-up comedy. It began to be used continuously to analyse setlists, satire and the ethics of the genre.

Today, even though some purists who believe comedy should have no rigid rules occasionally criticise the phrase, it remains the primary metric used by both critics and artists to analyse the ethics of any punchline.

Today’s populist shitposting is ‘punching down,’ where the person assuming the country’s most powerful position is mocking weak national institutions, the law and ordinary citizens who dare to question. The objectively unfunny, below-average and grammatically incorrect shitposts made by our leaders are not a reflection of their intellectual weakness. Rather, it is their most conscious political strategy.

It is designed to keep us distracted and without an agenda, veering us away from grave realities—like the finance minister getting a clean chit while making the customs department a scapegoat after hundreds of vehicles illegally entered the country due to leaked budget tax rates; the blatant abuse of power in the secretary incident; and citizens held ‘captive’ in holding centres dying.