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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @04:58PM (2 children)
Remember Free Basics from Facebook for 3rd world countries -- which made FB free if you had any kind of internet access?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-basics-internet-africa-mark-zuckerberg [theguardian.com]
Looks like Uganda didn't participate in that, although several neighboring countries did.
I compared map on link above with map of Africa,
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uganda/ [google.com]
Kenya, Uganda and DR Congo all took the bait from FB.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:06PM (1 child)
The map indicates that Kenya, DRC, Rwanda, and Tanzania took the bait, but not Uganda.
More participants can be found here:
https://info.internet.org/en/story/where-weve-launched/ [internet.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#Participants [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:40AM
Whoops, thanks for the correction, meant to put Rwanda in my list of countries neighboring Uganda.