Establishing Twitter's Presence in Africa

Perhaps you don't owe $BigCo better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Admittedly, Twitter is not my first choice of employer, but it could've been worse. Could've been Facebook.

Every country that managed to get out of poverty did it by moving up the value chain from subsistence farming to eg. textile manufacturing to eg. electronics.

Here, Twitter is hiring knowledge workers and paying them a good wage. They aren’t enslaving anyone. Ghana is growing a middle class, entering the tech industry, and will be able to enjoy a bigger share of the wealth created in the global economy. It’s great news.

As a champion for democracy, Ghana is a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet, of which Twitter is also an advocate.

I'm impressed with how much they have thought about some of the logistics here. If you are running a business and trying to learn how to grow bigger, this is something to pay attention to and contemplate.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/en-xm/features/furthering-our-inv...

Whereas in Africa here people are happy for this development.

I can assure you that the only eyebrows raised are so because every country feels Twitter should have come to theirs. This is big win for Ghana. In fact, many Nigerians are chastising their government at the moment for not being able to attract Twitter due to their instability and corruption

Well this sounds great, maybe Ghana will teach twitter their values. Sounds like a great move overall

Like, even here the title and the African director are writing about the African community but referring to an improving sector within Ghana.

This in turn has the rest of us continuing to talk about Africa in an unnuanced and defensive or unproductive way.

A regional data center serving the African continent is establishing presence in Africa. This would be the same standard as other infrastructure projects in other continents.

A hiring practice or office in a city in one country is establishing a presence in that country. This would be the same standard as other company expansions in other countries.

I think this is a humble ask, as people are excited about attention to the African continent and integration to the global growth community, however there are very many hurdles towards a unified African market and I don't really think thats the focus or most productive goal. It is a fiction to refer to it as such for a place with 50 to 100 regional markets, almost infinite permutations with their own problems and benefits.

So they correctly acknowledge that those communities are already engaged in conversations. How does encouraging these same folks to Tweet at each other improve upon the way they are already conversing? Twitter seems to have appropriated the word "conversation" the same way Facebook has done for the word "friend". That is to say completely redefined it to suit their own business objectives.

I'm glad they're hiring in Africa. There's tons of really smart people there doing interesting things. It's also a very young place per capita. Why couldn't they just say as much though and leave it at that? Instead they decided couch the whole thing in this cringeworthy bit of "noblesse oblige."

Reasonable out-sourcing can be pretty good for a country. I just hope Twitter doesn't steal market share from local companies with this...

How's that going, would you say?

And in the first several words, they've already lied through their teeth. It is very clear that Twitter's primary desire is to steer and shape conversation. One look at the 'passive voice' editorializing of their 'trending' feed is all it takes to confirm that.

I really find Twitter's blog post to be deceptive and tone deaf. For example consider this:

> As a champion for democracy, Ghana is a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet, of which Twitter is also an advocate.

Twitter heavily censors moderates and conservatives in America on any controversial topic that is current - whether that is COVID-19, or gender identity, or immigration, or whatever else. Africa is a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley and holds very different viewpoints on life, morality, ethics, law, politics, etc. Is Twitter going to censor African users and steer their speech as well? If so how can it possibly claim to be an advocate for free speech at all?

Another problematic statement:

> We still have much to learn but we are excited to listen, learn, and engage. Public conversation is essential to solving problems, building shared ideas, and pushing us all forward together.

When has Twitter ever listened to those who think differently from its employee base? I don't think Twitter has listened or learned at all, even in the US where it is reasonable to expect that they would understand their user base better and cater to all viewpoints better. Instead, their playbook seems to be to impose the worldview of their employees and vocal activists on the entire planet. Whether intended or not, the effect of Twitter's adoption in other nations is propagandist, and I find it to be as repulsive as physical colonization.

I hope users in Africa are alert enough to realize that they should use a local platform, or at least one that is more honestly in favor of free speech, rather than one originating from Silicon Valley. European leaders are already waking up to the existential threat Western influence poses to their culture (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...), and China was of course well ahead of other nations in seeing the threat of cultural erasure coming from America. Africa, a continent on the rise and on a path towards global prominence, should be similarly wise.