Source: Is government now scared of social media? | The Financial Gazette July 14, 2016
WARNINGS from the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) against the “abuse” of social media in the country have set tongues wagging.
POTRAZ has turned its guns on social media users after a flurry of messages flooded the internet, urging people to stay-away from work.
Using the power of social media, cities and towns were paralysed after supermarkets, industries and commuter omnibus operators grounded operations.
There has been widespread revulsion over the country’s continued drift towards an economic gridlock.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, whereby people are struggling to earn an honest living against the backdrop of limited civil liberties, the social media has become the vehicle through which many people vent out their anger and frustrations.
The primary channel has been to speak out through WhatsApp platform and to a smaller extent through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Riding on the popular WhatsApp platform, church pastor Evan Mawarire has been a sensation through his campaign running under the hash tag #ThisFlag.
Promise Mkwananzi and his group have also been making waves through #Tajamuka/Sesijikile, another social media campaign that has rattled those in high offices.
Mkwananzi has already raffled the authorities’ feathers and is currently out on bail on charges of public violence.
Mawarire was arrested on Tuesday, but was freed after appearing before the courts yesterday
To ordinary Zimbabweans who are being fed propaganda on a daily basis by the State media, social media is seen more as a pain reliever.
But for the government, it’s a technology prone to abuse and other cyber vices.
As such, officials are burning the midnight oil, crafting strategies to curtail the abuse of social media.
On the eve of the stay-away last week, citizens were unable to communicate via WhatsApp, amid indications that government had conspired with service providers to disable the platform.
It was only late in the afternoon on Wednesday last week that users were reconnected.
ICT Minister, Supa Mandiwanzira, said government had nothing to do with the “jamming” of WhatsApp.
He said doing so would mean government had also participated in the purported shutting down of the country.
In the past, Mandiwanzira, has indicated that his Ministry was under pressure from all the network operators to ban social networks such as WhatsApp, Viber and Skype arguing that they were eating into their revenue collections, and yet they have not spent any resource in building their networks.
Mandiwanzira had at one time even threatened to remove Mawarire from Twitter.
In as much as network operators might not have a direct interest in shutting out voices as happened last week, in government they have found a willing partner who is prepared to go all the way in order to achieve its political objectives.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the alleged move by government to block WhatsApp was a clear violation of human rights and the United Nations human rights council resolution on the protection of online rights.
“The Zimbabwean government’s brazen internet blockade which lasted for several hours comes just days after the United Nations human rights council issued a resolution on the protection of rights online called on countries to refrain from disrupting internet service,” said HRW.
Former ICT minister, Nelson Chamisa, said the interference with mobile networks last week was not coincidental, but a well-calculated ploy to cripple communication.
“It can only be on account of instructions from somewhere, instigated from somewhere; it could be some people who are scared of the people,” he said.
In a statement, media watchdog MISA Zimbabwe said it was gravely concerned with the apparent disabling of WhatsApp last Wednesday.
“By blocking the popular information sharing tool, Zimbabwe now joins a growing list of despotic regimes that resort to such cowardly acts when faced with growing citizen dissent,” MISA said.
Throughout the world, governments have been wary of the freedom new technology, particularly social media, has given to citizens who were traditionally dependent on the dose of propaganda from State-owned radio and television stations, which still have a monopoly in many countries.
As the internet grows and technology expands, governments could pose the biggest threat to ICT innovation and growth.
Events in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia five years ago showed that technology was fast transferring control and power from government to the citizens.
The ability for these revolutions to, not only ignite a rebellion, but grow it into a raging inferno was driven by social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp.
In the end, these countries were left without a clear leader.
What was left then was a community awaiting new elections.
When countries undergo this kind of community-led change, governments are often left with the challenges of trying to put the pieces back together.
As power shifts from rulers to citizens and to networks of citizens, governments now feel overwhelmingly cornered.
Most African and Asian governments feel the most vulnerable to the overwhelming changes as movements accelerate with revolutions increasingly making use of connective technologies.
Over the past five years, there has been a massive shift in geopolitical power.
It has been from hierarchies, including government and big media to citizens and networks of citizens.
Considering the enormous growth in mobile connectivity, most governments would want to be even more cautious when considering how to control these networks.
In Zimbabwe, government has had sleepless nights over the emergence of new technologies and has struggled to control access to information and communication by citizens.
So worried is government that last week it blocked the popular social media platform WhatsApp after it had become the main communication tool Zimbabweans were using to mobilise and share information on the spontaneous protest and stay-away.
Government’s move to block the platform was viewed by opposition political parties as a tactic to cripple communication related to the stay-away.
POTRAZ, in a joint statement with telecoms operators last Wednesday, threatened users saying it would use its database to identify those sending out “subversive” messages and take stern action “in the national interest”.
Players in the country’s telecommunications industry comprise Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, Liquid Telecoms, Telecel Zimbabwe, NetOne, TelOne, Powertel and Africom.
The telecommunications regulator hopes to use the threats to discourage consumers from using social media platforms to incite people to demonstrate.
“All sim cards in Zimbabwe are registered in the name of the user. Perpetrators can easily be identified. We are therefore warning members of the public that from the date of this notice, any person caught in possession of, generating, sharing or passing on abusive, threatening, subversive or offensive communication messages, including WhatsApp or any other social media messages that may deemed to cause despondency, incite violence, threaten citizens and cause unrest, will be arrested and dealt with accordingly in the national interest,” said the statement.
Hardly a week after POTRAZ’s statement, some women were already mobilising, through WhatsApp under #beatthepot, calling on all women in Zimbabwe to take out their pots and wooden spoons on Saturday and bang them together on the streets to protest against government’s failure to end hunger, joblessness and the economic meltdown.
While POTRAZ and the law enforcement agencies working on this are likely to have their own methods for identifying social media abusers, the remote monitoring of WhatsApp messages is not one of them.
Three months ago, WhatsApp introduced End to End encryption (E2EE), a feature which secures all types of messages sent on the platform with a digital lock meaning that only the sender and the receiver can open them.
Nobody else, including the internet service provider or mobile network and even the team at WhatsApp, can access these messages.
Analysts, however, see the advent of social media as an opportunity for governments to come closer to citizens and better understand their concerns and needs.
Rather than fight this as a scourge, they said government should embrace new technology as fighting internet access and communication, with the rise of “restrictive” walled social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatApp and YouTube, would be a lost cause.
“I do not think ICTs, especially mobile and the internet, are a threat. If anything, they are tools of convenience for significantly easier communication with the public. ICTs afford governments an opportunity to connect directly with the citizens, establish their needs and assess impact of policy,” said TechZim founder and managing editor, Soul Kabweza.
Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, believes that the principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago were under greater threat than ever.
Brin warned that there were “very powerful forces that had lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”.
Prev Article
« Politics clouds electricity tariff talks
« Politics clouds electricity tariff talks
Next Article
Government scraps free handouts for farmers »
Government scraps free handouts for farmers »