Beyond Debunking: Lessons on Narrative Building From Nepal’s Gen Z Protests

When a single misleading post goes viral, fact-checkers can debunk it with evidence. But what happens when dozens of posts, new reports, memes, and videos all push a similar line of thought?

This is something we saw in the recent ‘Gen Z protests’ held in Nepal earlier this month. However, the pattern is not unique to these protests. This is how narrative building works.

It is the process by which seemingly disconnected and sometimes fake stories are framed and amplified in a way that serves a particular agenda. Unlike one-off fake news, narratives shape the lens through which people interpret all future events.

Coming back to the Nepal crisis , we observed posts on social media and some reports in traditional media channels attempting to create a narrative of religious unrest, anti-