Uganda bans social media ahead of election | Hacker News Reader

Uganda bans social media ahead of election

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Discussed a couple days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704433

with an informative top comment from a Ugandan HNer.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749447

Twitter’s official statement on this is one for the history books:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059275461685250

It's strange how they think they are part of an open internet movement.

Maintaining the illusion is an important part of any propagandists toolset. Of course your enemies will see right through it, this kind of content is produced for the people you have thoroughly cut off from all other sources of information. It reenforces the the true believer's inner narrative that they are a part of GoodGuyInc.

Wow, exactly.

The phrase of the day is "Cognitive Dissonance".

What's the link? twitter banning a single user for repeatedly breaking the rules is comparable to a countries government banning the social network ahead of an election? seems tenuous.

> Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.

The jokes write themselves

It's funny.

The first tweet condemns internet shutdowns. In the second tweet they say they suspended a number of accounts targeting the election in Uganda.

Hilarious - it should be abundantly clear that Twitter are the guys.

I don't think so. There's a big difference between a reactive censorship of a single powerful person by Twitter and the proactive censorship of an entire population of people with very little power by a government -- both functionally and philosophically.

Trump can summon a press conference 24/7 and have his message broadcast to the entire world. He controls publication on multiple personal and government websites. What comparable publication powers do the people of Uganda have besides social media?

The impact of censorship is only relevant in the context of power.

Trump wasn't banned before the elections. He wasn't banned after Charlottesville, and then wasn't banned for 3.5 more years while he continued to undermine American institutions. He was only banned after refusing to accept the election results and inciting insurrection with conspiracies.

People are /really/ reaching for something that isn't there. To be clear, I don't think Twitter is "the good guy", but the comments in this subthread are very disappointing.

This after repeatedly violating rules that tend to get other uses banned.

Twitter always said they had more lenient rules for world leaders, and that part makes sense, since anyone that is an elected public official needs to communicate with the public and sometimes talk about controversial topics.

But if that elected official is refusing to accept the same system that elected them in the first place, then that's a logical dead-end and no amount of reasoning will do any good, or even matter in that case. Without the framework of elections, there is no such thing as an elected official.

Are the people running Twitter high 24-7 or just during election season?

This doesn't look good for Twitter, but comparing blocking an entire country from social media a few days before an election and blocking a few leaders who have clear ties to inciting violent riots via conspiracy theories seems like a false equivalence. Instead of justifying censorship as "good" or "bad" in some essential fashion, I think it's important to be clear about the context.

EDIT: In fact, Twitter has done more than just ban a few leaders, removing many accounts associated with QAnon, for example [1]. The point still stands that context matters and the two situations don't appear to be exactly equivalent. (It can still be argued that Twitter's ban was not good for society, but the argument should be more nuanced than "because censorship is always bad".)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/11/trump-t...

> clear ties to inciting violent riots

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1347302588434284544

Twitter selectively enforces their rules, largely targeting conservatives.

I updated my post to be more accurate about the extent of Twitter's actions regarding bans. Also, to be fair, conservatives are associated with the conspiracy theories and the Capitol riots, so it makes sense they would be targeted. I agree it is a shame if there are some conservatives who are not promoting conspiracy theories that have been silenced.

Yes, conservatives have been the only group associated with riots this year. Makes total sense why they are the only ones targeted.

When tens of millions of people protest something, it could just be because they have a legitimate grievance.

That said, it should be perfectly OK to permanently ban seditionists and traitors, as well as those who egg them on. If those are conservatives to you, then that's your words, not mine.

And Twitter should act as an arbiter for such distinction?

They decided to.

Are you saying the personal comments of a MSNBC reporter are equivalent to the personal comments of a sitting US president or Senator?

No. I'm saying that leftwing violence is distributed. Rightwing is centralized. The radical left is smart. There's no head antifa leader. Doesn't mean antifa is any less dangerous, I might argue more dangerous because there's no head to the hydra.

Are you making the argument that there are coordinated, yet distributed, Antifa cells spread across America that pose a greater or equal threat then:

1) the mob that stormed the capitol building with threats to kill and kidnap US congressmen, senators, and the VP?

2) the several dozen Michigan militia members currently indicted for attempting to kidnap the governor of Michigan

3) the texas commuters who attempted to steer the Biden/Harris campaign bus off the highway

What you've linked to is a splicing of several segments of video which attempts to link together events, groups, places people and organizations most of which are not actually linked together. For example:

* A person says "looting", and in a following or preceding segment another person, on another channel at another time says "Antifa".

* An image of cars on fire in the background, and segments by some anchors or pundits saying that protests are important, or should not be polite.

So, while I'm no fan on MSNBC, CNN etc., and think they're being rather hypocritical with their treatment of the confirmation protesters - that clip is just under-handed smearing by its author and by you.

Every large platform selectively enforces rules. The squeakiest wheels get the grease. The Twitter firehose is a notoriously large amount of data; difficult for computers to parse, and impossible for a human to review unless brought to their attention. I don't think it's fair to automatically attribute it to malice.

Also, not sure I'm following what that link is supposed to demonstrate. Twitter has no power to censor cable news networks.

Double standards are bad. Principles should matter more than your biases.

I'm trying to make the case in my comment above that I don't believe the situations are equivalent and thus there is no double standard. (You can of course disagree with this and I'd be interested in your argument)

There is one standard for leaders who promote documented conspiracy theories and another for blocking an entire country's access to social media in an effort to alter the outcome of an election.

The leaders who tirelessly promoted Russian influence conspiracy theory and supported violent riots last year are somehow not blocked.

Feel compelled to provide context on a double-standard, here are just a few counter examples of leaders in US politics who have, with their speech, “promoted conspiracy theories” and “incited violence” with no measures taken to make them accountable for their words. While no person, country or company is perfect... maybe Uganda witnessed this and decided to take a more formal position, like BigTech decided:

- Stacey Abrams claimed election fraud and was never censored on social media.

- "protesters should not let up," - "This is a movement, I’m telling you, they’re not going to stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day," she said. "And everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not." - Vice-president elect Kamala Harris

- "there needs to be unrest in the streets." - - "You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives." - Rep. Ayanna Pressley

- "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere." - "You think we’re rallying now? You ain’t seen nothing yet," - "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere," - Rep. Maxine Waters

Probably more.. something to consider.

“You Americans are gullible. We’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands”. — Nikita Kruschev

I can see a future where something like this becomes default in most countries. Unthinkable just a few years ago.

Iran and China both banned stuff all the time. I think a few other countries did too, those just leapt to mind first.

When they were shutting down the internet during the arab spring uprising?

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I've created 4 accounts over four years.

wolco - which had 5000 karma over three years wolco2 - which had 500 karma over three months wolco3 - negative - one day wolco5 - active

The first one got hacked. The second one I created a super difficult password and couldn't remember when I cleared my stored passwords. The third I started off poorly by replying to a Trump thread and wanted to start fresh.

I'm not a spammer creating accounts for some purpose other than losing accounts and I would love to get back my wolco account if possible.

Ok, I've clearly misclassified you—sorry! There are a lot of accounts doing less defensible things and it's not always easy (well, basically impossible) to tell who's up to what.

I'd be happy to help you get the wolco account back, but can you email hn@ycombinator.com? The process for account recovery is best not performed in public.

It wasn’t and isn’t unthinkable in most of the world. “Free Speech” is an US thing. It pretty much doesn’t exist anywhere else as a right, and never has.

What about in Canada, Germany, England, France, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Spain, Italy, etc?

It's quite different:

Canada it isn't an absolute right and has much more willingness from the country to amend "unacceptable expression". Which is different to the US quite substantially.

Germany you are right it has a similar framework to the US.

UK doesn't have this as a right outside of parliament (parliamentary speech is protected). So not sure why you raise this as a counter example.

France is a weird one to bring up... where they have banned certain kinds of expression in different settings (i.e no religious symbols). Extremely different from the US.

India similar to Canada has so many provisions (and willingness) in which to revoke this right, it's definitely not as strong as a constitutional right that the US gives.

Italy again its freedom of expression is tempered by a host of restrictions on that freedom.

I could go on... none of them are like the US having a constitutional right for freedom of expression that quite literally supersedes other laws.

I think even democratic country like India would start to consider "national" social media for national security purpose. Of course, Jio might be a strong lobbyist for that.

We've been doing this for a while: https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/uk-elections-media-b...

The difference, as I understand it, is that the government made the choice for people rather than a private organization. Under the US constitution, free speech means that the government cannot limit your speech except in narrow circumstances. This has no bearing on private organizations, which is why Twitter can ban users.

US constitution? This happened in Uganda.

Right. What I'm saying is that people making comments about this being the same thing Twitter did with the @realDonaldTrump account and others are maybe missing the differences between the two situations.

This is splitting hairs. Twitter has no problem booting millions of people off their platform for political purposes. Clearly, they also don't mind that a rising competitor (Parler) was put out of business overnight.

Yet, they don't like it when a country blocks them. This is hypocrisy, regardless how people might try to distinguish one kind of "blocking" from another.

It would be better if Uganda didn't block social media. It would also be better if social media didn't block users here in the U.S.

It would be best of all if social media did not exist.

> It would also be better if social media didn't block users here in the U.S.

Would it, though? Do you think social media should be a completely unbounded venue for discourse? HN has rules; if I violate them by attacking others or otherwise being a jerk and get banned, is that really a bad thing? I don't think so, personally. We've all been places online with lax standards and absent/ignorant mods, and, generally, it's a shitshow race to the bottom of personal attacks and racism.

Some part of me feels like a ban on social media during an election period is not all that bad. The US has proven to the entire world that people can't be trusted to act civilised and honestly discuss issues, and that lack of trust extends from the highest levels of government down to the average citizen.

That's not to say I am advocating the suppression of speech. All people should be free to speak about corruption and misinformation. But the last twelve months or so have, at least to me, shown that most people would rather burn the public square to the ground than speak of corruption and misinformation. And it does make me wonder what elections would be like in all countries if, at least for the campaign and election period, sites like Twitter were just outright banned.

Should elected officials be allowed to use social networks to communicate with the people? I don't consider myself a traditionalist, but this is one area where I prefer to see elected officials use government and journalistic channels for broadcasting information.

But what's the definition of a journalistic channel?

The White House has an official twitter account, also a Youtube channel and a Facebook account. That's a reasonable use of social media, don't you think?

The imbalance is clear though. If Museveni can leverage social and state media but Wine can't, then it makes organization, outreach, and exposure much more difficult.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704433

I mean, maybe it sounds like an over step for a country that has day to day violent rebel problems - but honestly... sounds based.

I saw Twitter's Public Policy team melting down about this. What did they expect? Pandora's Box has been opened

Turns out the censors don't like to be censored.

Please. Uganda ran newspapers out of the country, they routinely arrest opposing politicians, and they remove anything that might get in the way of the dictator staying in power. Museveni shuts down opposition - it has nothing to do with Twitter other than the fact that Twitter is a popular form of communication.

Well, yeah, it's a dictatorship run by warlords.

It turns out that once you shut down the leader of the world's largest empire, every tinpot thug who fears losing their ability to control their citizens will shut down access to your platform. Whoda thunk? It has nothing to do with right and wrong and everything to do with realpolitik.

It has nothing to do with Trump at all. They shut all these sites down in 2016 too - https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/463407/

"It has nothing to do with Trump at all" might be a strong assertion, but this history is absolutely relevant. Thanks for sharing.

I don't think it's a particularly strong assertion. Museveni's pattern around elections and dissent has been EXTREMELY consistent since I first started living there 20 years ago.

You're actually in Uganda?

Point taken!

That may well be. The problem is that Twitter has lost their credibility on the issue. If you make a habit of rolling around in the mud, then don't be surprised if people assume you stink.

This is the rejoinder to those who defended them by saying "they're a private platform, they can do whatever they want". And I actually agree with that. But in spheres of life without explicit legal protections, people will come to rely on informal reputation and cultural norms.

Twitter is learning the hard way about why companies jealously guard their reputation for fairness and neutrality. Taking a public and divisive stand on the culture war issue du jour is rarely smart business. Like many tech darling Icaruses, Jack Dorsey probably thought the time-tested rules of business didn't apply. Watching 10% of his company's value vaporize in a few days was a hard way to learn that's not true. Hopefully $5 billion was worth it to keep attending Bay Area cocktail parties.

At the end of the day Twitter has wrecked its reputation as a fair and neutral platform. It will take at least a generation to repair. A consequence of this will be that in situations like Uganda, nobody will afford it the benefit of the doubt any more.

Having a reputation for being a neutral haven for electoral fraud and calls to violence isn't exactly a great thing to aspire to. (Falsely claiming an election is illegitimate, refusing to recognize its results, threatening election officials into awarding you a victory, and stopping its certification is, in fact, a form of electoral fraud.)

It's unfortunate that a major political movement in the US has aligned itself in support of those two things, but having done so, it forced Twitter's hand.

Nonsense. This ban was not a result of the backlash Trump is suffering. The government of Uganda didn't take some principled stand, here.

I can confidently say that it would have happened anyways, because banning Twitter and Facebook has already been used, multiple times, by various governments in an attempt to illegitimately retain power.

The only Pandora's box that has been opened is one of domestic American politics... And that lid was popped open ~5 years ago. You can't easily put that genie back in the bottle, now.

This is wonderful, and I hope my country follows suite. We already have laws banning election campaigning in the 24hrs leading up to the elections, but there's no way to control that on social media.

Shutting off FB, Twitter, and Insta during that 24hrs is a great idea.

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