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Ugandu has reached rock bottom and yet has started to dig even deeper with the recent announcement that a daily fee of 200 shillings will be levied to use social media. This is not the first time a country has attempted to have ISPs charge a separate fee for social network access.
Today, Uganda's parliament passed a controversial "social media tax." It will consist of a daily fee of about 200 shillings (5 US cents) levied on anyone who uses social networking and messaging apps and platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. According to Trading Economics, in 2016, Uganda had a per-capita income of $666.10, so this isn't an insubstantial tax.
President Yoweri Museveni was a vocal supporter of and advocate the bill. He believes that social media encourages "gossip," according to BBC News. The law will go into effect as of July 1st, but it's not clear how the government will monitor its citizens or collect the tax.
Also at the BBC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kanweg on Sunday June 03 2018, @02:49PM (3 children)
if you're corrupt, you don't want people to organize themselves. So, a tax on this makes perfect sense. If there is an update to the Handbook for Dictators (you really should read this book if you want to understand how the world works and how certain thing could be improved if we paid attention to them), they can include this as a nice example of how a routine is used to . Taxing is difficult (you need an organizied government to do that) and costly (you need to pay people to do that), Taxing social media firms is easy, so that is the way to go.
In another African country, a few months ago, the dictator declared that no one could start a church unless the priest was trained for at least four years. The argument was that the churches started by other people were rickety and could collapse. So, for the safety of the people they had to be closed. The real situation: Religion is perfect for fleecing people (you make unverifiable promises and threats about the afterlife and people will pay you (tithing). So, people started churches and made a living with that activity. Now, the dictator doesn't see anything of that money (running a dictatorship is expensive. You don't do it alone, you have to pay people, like the army and others). By having the requirement of four years of religious education, only the established religious organisations can have churches. And the dictator receives money from them.
Bert
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:46PM (1 child)
A front page New York Times story published not long after the US Diplomatic Cable wikileak reported that the reason for the great firewall was that high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials were dismayed with what they was written about themselves by Chinese citizens on foreign websites.
Look man: if you can rub two girl scouts together you can make fire. If you can make fire you can write by charring the end of a stick.
Censorship has always been temporary.
Help yourself to some Samizdat [warplife.com].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:05PM
💥 😅
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:13PM
On the other hand, you probably don't want people that probably don't know better to start murdering either.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/13/myanmar-un-blames-facebook-for-spreading-hatred-of-rohingya [theguardian.com]
And for Uganda, US idiots have already fucked up that country,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2014#Criticism_of_US_evangelists [wikipedia.org]
So the government is 100% correct. Facebook and "social media" is a major method of spreading BULLSHIT to people that don't know any better. Just look at US and the last election and how easily some people were swayed by bullshit, and that is supposedly an educated country.
Except it's taxing people's connections to those companies, not those companies.