In the wake of their election, current president Museveni banned Twitter and Facebook. He addressed the nation with this “If you want to take sides against the (ruling party), then that group will not operate in Uganda,”. He also said he doesn’t want anybody from the outside deciding what is good and bad for their country. Twitter sent out this response:
The slippery slope of suspending Donald Trump has already started to show itself. These authoritarian leaders took one look at that and said nope, Twitter will not silence my side at all we will ban it all together. Twitter has many problems and specifically with the spreading of “fake news”, however, you could see the value it had in Uganda as challenger Bobi Wine was able to use it to get his message out as all the main media outlets in Uganda refuse to cover him. Without social media he would have almost zero chance to unseat the sitting president.
Twitter has a big issue on their hands and I am not entirely sure what the best solution is. I think everyone can agree that Twitter should regulate and ban things like porn and violent content, but after that is where it gets tricky. Lots of people say Twitter should regulate and fact check news stories and such to stop the spread of conspiracies and “fake news” and I agree in principle with that, but the roll out of that is extremely tricky. It is near impossible to set up a fact check system that doesn’t have bias. This is why I lean towards allowing most things, unless it’s undeniably proven to be false, and we just have to do a good job promoting journalists with integrity and do a good job.
That opens up another problem, as well, as true journalism is dying. The journalist we have now are jokes, from Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, the New York Post and so on, these guys who have no integrity and just answer to what their billionaire donors want them to are a serious problem. I don’t know how this could work but we somehow need to set up a system where real journalist can get proper funding to compete. So many of the problems in our political discourse can be traced back to the BS Fox News and CNN spew out on a daily basis.
Back to the original point though, Twitter has really exposed themselves in the recent month and I am very interested in how all of this plays out. I know I have had issues with Twitter as personal accounts of mine that only had 14 followers, that I just used to have fun with my friends have been suspended without any warning. I don’t envy Twitter as this is not an easy situation to be in but all I know is their current model needs to change.
Side note: conservatives, it is not just you being targeted, it looks like that right now because Trump is the main attraction right now but this happens to the left as well, along with many other innocent groups. At least I can laugh at conservatives going onto Fox News, the highest rated news network on cable television, to complain about how they are being censored.
Green Buddhist 