Uganda has rolled out a 5-cent daily tax to access social media | Hacker News Reader

Uganda has rolled out a 5-cent daily tax to access social media

time.com

33 pointsdjug19 comments

This tax is meant to curb political discussions and a one Tom Voltaire Okwalinga , presumably a hacker whose main platform was Facebook and he was always leaking the illegitimate governments secrets, since they don't have the technical skills to find him and after wasting millions of dollars to scammers, the old man devised a plan to stop the people from accessing the platform itself. This guy has got the president , his family and tribes-mate , booty lickers and his party members by the balls that they get to discuss him in tribe , party meetings and the parliament of all places.But the grand plot of their scheme is to prevent an uprising fueled by social media Long story short, if you happen to pay for the tax, they will link your IP to your mobile money wallet which is linked to your simcard who's operators have details of you national ID , and like that , you get to disappear(tortured if lucky and worst of all whacked) for the comment you made or the post you shared or liked made against the government.

> By making people pay for using these platforms, this tax will render these avenues of communication inaccessible for low income earners, robbing many people of their right to freedom of expression, with a chilling effect on other human rights

It's difficult for me to take this seriously having seen the effect of 10 years of social media on the US. I would personally welcome such a tax, and from my perspective, if anything, it disproportionately benefits the poor.

Do you think there are potential problems giving the government the power to pick and choose what public information you should be charged for accessing?

I know I'm not who you asked but I disagree with the idea of a slippery slope in general. It tends to imply that if step A happens step Z is guaranteed to happen without any consideration of where a line is drawn. It is possible for us to regulate some harmful information without regulating all information.

When it comes to government use of powers that have been granted to it, slippery slope is always a valid concern.

I assume you're talking about phenomena such as "fake news", and suggesting that the inability to access social media will limit exposure to it. But wouldn't it also limit exposure to a plethora of good things, too? Talking with your friends and family (which is often cheaper than texting), knowing about events and happenings (not necessarily news) and of course learning about and talking about "real" news. It's hard for me to see the benefit or how it would be justified, and for some reason using taxes to target the poor, no matter what it's being done for, seems horrible to me.

The tax doesn't seem to be for the benefit of raising funds for society, it actually seems to be just there to keep people out of engaging in whatever online social processes there are. I'm a member of several Facebook groups (and formerly Twitter circles) discussing political philosophy and radical action. While access to these may be at the advantage of the government (or capital), perhaps they might be of "disproportionate benefit" to the poor. Of course, I can say the same thing about car repair groups, technical groups, etc.

Would you be saying the same thing if Hacker News, for instance, was included as part of the tax?

Blocking access to mass media actually seems to have the same effect as mass media itself in twisting the democratic process in favour of certain powers. Perhaps a quote from my favourite social critic Herbert Marcuse would be relevant to your sentiment:

>Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. This is, prior to all expression and communication, a matter of semantics: the blocking of effective dissent, of the recognition of that which is not of the Establishment which begins in the language that is publicized and administered. The meaning of words is rigidly stabilized. Rational persuasion, persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded. The avenues of entrance are closed to the meaning of words and ideas other than the established one--established by the publicity of the powers that be, and verified in their practices. Other words can be spoken and heard, other ideas can be expressed, but, at the massive scale of the conservative majority (outside such enclaves as the intelligentsia), they are immediately 'evaluated' (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language -- a language which determines 'a priori' the direction in which the thought process moves.

I'm talking exclusively about the addictive and distracting quality of these platforms, not fake news. I think it would probably be bad if Ugandan's were taxed for accessing any media publication. As for Hacker News, I consider a category apart from Facebook or Twitter. Whether the Ugandan government does is another question.

I totally agree that the platforms are addictive and indeed distracting (though I do question the idea that distraction is intrinsically bad, the idea seems to be tied up in the rather pernicious notion that we ought to be productive all the time), I really don't think that depriving people of the ability to access it is beneficial, and for the reasons I mentioned in my comment. It severely limits expression, and by limiting even the possibility of discussion the status quo is maintained. Social media, while often entangled with mass media, offers a unique way to subvert mass media too. That's important to keep.

A HN thread a while ago talked about how old forums moved from phpBB to Facebook; although the post was lamenting this fact, it remains that car forums (to use the commenter's example) among other groups have moved to Facebook (which I think is rather sad) -- but such "special interest" forums occupy exactly the same space as HN. So you can't consider HN is a separate category, the categories are intertwined and they have been for quite some time now.

social media may be awful but willfully partitioning society on the basis of wealth is really bad...

"Uganda is one of the poorest nations in the world. In 2012, 37.8 percent of the population lived on less than $1.25 a day."[1] So if you are making $100K per year, this tax would be equivalent to giving away $40K of that for using social media.

Context matters. I don't know anything about Uganda, but maybe different political situation is causing them to use social media more as unbiased news sources rather than discussing dress colors.

If you feel like this kind of tax would benefit you, then you can likely arrange it, on your own, or with a help of some 3rd party and send X to charity for each day when you checked the social media (HN counts right? gov said it counts - so it counts, no discussion).

Unrelated but I think the strategy above is not a good one if you want to spend less time using social media. For me just sitting back and thinking what do you really want works best.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda#Economy_and_infrastruct...

I find it somewhat difficult to believe that Facebook or Twitter could in any sense be called an "unbiased news source", but if there are no trustworthy publications in Uganda, then I could see that perhaps whatever discourse happens there might be a net good.

I think you skewed your math.

If you live on $1.25 in Uganda and spend $0.05 per day you will be spending %4 of your "daily spend" on social media. In the United States [1] the average spend is $154 per day equating to a $6.16 social media tax... or about the cost the average bay area tech employee spends on coffee per day. Thats adds up to $2,248 NOT $40,000 per year...

I would support this tax in the U.S. (as long as a large percentage is legally required to go to education, medical, and social services). I probably would not support taxation in Uganda targeted at the lower or middle class though.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/On-how-many-dollars-does-the-average-A...

Yes, I counted for $0.5 not $0.05, so I got 40% instead of 4%. Big difference, I'm sorry.

While the math does distract from the overall point a little, I think you're right in that context matters. If the the government (or private corporations) made a Social Network package that blocked access to any social networking sites unless you pay an extra 4k per year (or raising it by 333 dollars per month, we'd all be having a heart attack. Even if we used the more common avg of salaries and said 4% of 50k per year, just to go on Facebook, you gotta believe people are gonna be enraged.

FWIW I agree people would be enraged initially. But I believe shortly after they'd realize "hey I don't really need this". And the world would be a better place for it.

I know multiple minimum wage workers who nonetheless spend a significant portion of their income on tobacco products, all of them taxed at enormous percentages. Taxation is literally the worst addiction cure in existence with 0 evidence that it works(and quite a bit of evidence that it does not and disproportionately hurts the poor).

"hey I don't really need this" is such a naive westie hipster take at it's not even funny. People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged communities especially. Your relative is working abroad? You need social media, your community suffers from serious corruption, you need social media. Natural disasters happen in your area often? You need social media. You need to find someone to barter with for old used items because you have no credit card access? social media can help you. You work in the city and need to make your way back home to the country on weekends? Car pooling groups are a life saver.

Social media globally is a tremendous net benefit to humanity. Just because the biggest ones are run by horrible SV oligarchs and infested with state security unscrupulous spammers and that some users can't seem to keep their face out of their phone doesn't mean the thing is bad, just that it has costs.

This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not meant to actually help anyone, I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

> People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged communities especially.

Lower classes need time, money and knowledge. None of that comes out of social media, even LinkedIn is a big reach.

I'm blue collar myself by the way. The attention spans of my coworkers are shot and the younger they are the worse it gets. You're supposed to have a short term memory of about 5-7 items - today it's about 2-3. That's an immense cost.

If you talk of groups with intense focus like the forums peripheral to some activity - that is completely different to what social media is.

You know what blue collar workers need? Self Driving cars. Silicon Valley should concentrate on making that deliverable because it is itself distracted.

> This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not meant to actually help anyone

Sure but often immoral motives have positive side affects.

If the Internet went down tomorrow for about a week, I wager the general sentiment would that of relief. It could be an annual holiday from the information stream.

It's like how when people stop watching television news they become less neurotic.

As the phrase attention economy implies, there are limits, and for many people the Internet has been a DOS on their brains.

> I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

Probably because we think the world's an ecology and not a us vs them dialectic.

Hey you could have made your point without calling me a naive westie hipster.

They should have rolled this tax out for plastic straws and bags, to reduce the waste output for things that have sustainable alternatives that dont require constant consumption.

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