Sf the decision taken by Twitter to delete Donald Trump’s personal account is provoking a lively debate in the world, in Africa also the Gafam are acting and raging. Facebook has in recent days closed the accounts of several Ugandan government officials accused of interference in public debate, in the run-up to the presidential election due to be held Thursday in the East African country. It must be said that the political climate is tense, while the outgoing president Yoweri Museveni, 76, including 35 at the head of the country, is running for a new term against ten other candidates, including the opponent Bobbi Wine, 38 and song star turned deputy. “This month (January) we shut down a network of accounts and pages in Uganda that were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed at influencing public debate ahead of the election,” said in an email to Agence France-Presse, Facebook’s communications manager for sub-Saharan Africa Kezzia Anim-Addo. “They used fake or duplicate accounts to manage pages, commented on other people’s content, pretended to be users, shared content in groups to make it appear more popular than it was,” said the manager. “With the upcoming election in Uganda, we have acted quickly to investigate and bring down this network. We discovered that this network was linked to the Citizens Interaction with Government Group of the Ministry of Information […] in Uganda, ”Facebook said.
A purge ahead of the presidential election
The responsibility of tech giants for the content published on their platforms is currently the subject of intense debate. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have banned US President Donald Trump, accusing him of inciting his supporters to the violence that targeted Congress on Wednesday, on the Capitol in Washington. Citing similar motives, Amazon has stopped hosting the social network Parler, which is very popular with Trump fans, on its servers, while Apple and Google have removed it from their application download platforms. Decisions denounced as an obstacle to freedom of expression by its supporters. This argument is also repeated in Uganda.
“Foreign forces”
Before this incident, the entourage of President Museveni already accused “foreign forces” – without specifying which ones – of supporting the opposition to achieve regime change. A rhetoric now used against Facebook. The president’s communications advisor, Don Wanyama, who is one of the personalities whose Facebook and Instagram accounts have been closed, notably challenged the US giant’s decision. “Shame on foreign forces who think they can install a puppet regime in Uganda by disabling the online accounts of supporters of the NRM,” the ruling party, he responded. “You will not get rid of President Museveni. ”
According to the National Resistance Movement (NRM), several dozen accounts have suffered the same fate, belonging to various personalities such as a senior official of the Ministry of Information and Communications, a prominent Internet user close to the NRM or a known doctor. The president’s accounts were not affected by Facebook’s intervention. Despite the popularity of the main opponent, Bobi Wine, among the country’s urban youth, the election seems to be over in advance, according to many observers.
In Africa, Gafam on the alert
In recent years, Facebook has regularly faced what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior”. According to its communications manager for Africa, the American giant has “dropped more than 100 of these networks around the world” since 2017. In December, the American giant announced that it had removed three managed networks from Russia and from France, including one linked to the French army, and accused of carrying out interference operations in Africa. The network installed in France mainly targeted the Central African Republic and Mali. In October, Facebook closed the page of a conspiratorial party in New Zealand, accused of spreading disinformation about the novel coronavirus pandemic, two days before the elections in that country.
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