Kathmandu, Aug. 11 -- On the night of August 5, at 9:16 pm, an content platform named 'Interviews Nepal' posted an image on Facebook featuring Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel alongside his wife Susmita Adhikari. The post was shared during an acute cooking gas shortage across the country. It carried a fictional dialogue intended to mock the government's failure: 'Sasmit: What does a gas tree look like?'

The uploaded image quickly spread across social media channels as a satirical meme. However, the image was not recent. It was a screenshot extracted from a video recorded during Pokharel's election campaign some five months ago. Similar repurposed visual materials are frequently used across Nepali digital spaces to criticise the governm...