Fanaticism-as-Performance: Social-Media “Styled Experts” and Politics of Nostalgia in Nepal

Abstract

Nepal’s social media sphere is crowded by short videos and reels - a country with increasing internet access and low digital literacy. This article attempts to study the operation of ‘fanaticism-as-performance’ in this contentious environment.  Employing a qualitative model drawing from information disorder and performative expertise theories, the study manually analyses publicly available short videos from TikTok, YouTube and Facebook with interpretive coding of narrative and viewer interactions. The study’s finding includes six repetitive rhetorical devices, together, structuring political persuasion: heroic salvation, moral emotional language, certainty posturing, nostalgia activation, conspiracy insinuation, and call-to-action. These findings illustrate that self-styled experts employ these rhetorics to theatricalize authority, revoke nostalgia, and link moral outrage and institutional distrust. In conclusion, Nepal’s political environment is largely mediated through performance-driven epistemics, intensified by low civic and digital literacy, weak platform governance, and polarization, which ultimately transforms nostalgia into a moralized substitute for democratic trust.