I don’t use Facebook but I have to run the page for this website which means I feel for those that built businesses at 100% on the Facebook platform. On January 12th, 2021, the Uganda government switched off the giant social media platform after switching off the Google PlayStore, Apple Store, and YouTube head of the January 14th elections.
Nine months down the road, the situation has never changed since then, while all their social media platforms are now back and out of the VPN usage realm the government has still banned Facebook.
ALSO READ: Facebook switched off in Uganda
In a CIB report drafted by Facebook in January, the social media giant removed 220 Accounts, 32 Pages, 59 Groups, and 139 Instagram accounts that originated in Uganda and targeted domestic audiences. Their investigation found links to the Government Citizens Interaction Center at the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology in Uganda. They found this network after reviewing information about a portion of its activity shared with them by researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Given the impending election in Uganda, once they completed their investigation, they moved quickly to take down this network in early January.
Facebook said that the first cluster of this activity focused on posting on the support of the president of Uganda and the ruling party (NRM). The second cluster posted about Lieutenant General Muhoozi Kainerugaba as a potential future presidential candidate. Finally, the last cluster focused on commenting on the opposition pages, targeting the National Unity Platform (NUP) in particular the candidate Bobi Wine. Much of this network was amplified by other fake accounts according to Facebook. “Some of these pages reposted content from local news aggregators and pro-NRM blogs” the statement read in part.
With has said, has the Facebook ban in Uganda affected you? Please leave your response in the poll below.
Truth be told, Facebook doesn’t need Uganda economically, except to fight back against instances of countries banning it because this could spread — and it is almost impossible to imagine Facebook will apologize for banning all the banned accounts for fraud. It is highly probable that we won’t see Facebook unbanned until enough time has passed for the government to save face.
It’s highly likely that telecoms are paying to import the traffic because the ban has shut down our local Facebook cache. People are accessing it anyway, and it’s a ton of bandwidth that we now pay the USA, Kenya, and Europe. It is now safe to say that 100% of Ugandans on Facebook are using some sort of VPN and this makes it hard for digital marketers to target their ads to these Ugandans who are now geographically located in other countries online.
Facebook indirectly contributes to the GDP of Uganda or any African Nation. You see, Facebook is not just a social media service. They are a content company and if they deploy servers in our data centers it draws regional networks to them, helping to turn Uganda into a regional Internet hub. This leads to faster and cheaper internet at home plus cash inflows from other countries who would buy that traffic from us.
Banning Facebook scares companies like these away from our data centers. They will double down in Kenya instead and we will end up sending our money to them making us pawns on the digital economic chessboard. At the end of the day, it comes down to how this ban has affected you as an individual. Leave your poll vote above.
