Media Blackout Analysis

“Whistleblowing”, “suppression” and “propaganda.” They all have to do with the media. Whistleblowing is when a person reports its own company for doing something wrong, suppression is when the government or the country suppresses the contents of the media, and propaganda is the use of media to force people to look in a biased point of view by politicians. There are numerous amounts of issues brought up by the media in the world today. Multiple cases are not delivered to the audience properly, hidden by the media. It is likely that everybody knows this fact already though. There is a different issue coming out in Africa: “media blackout”. This “media blackout” is not about the media hiding any information, but is a state where social media

Uganda, for example, had the government block social media including Twitter and Facebook for the announcement of the winner of the Uganda Election 2016. The government calls this for “security reasons” but this is somewhat questionable. Similar restrictions have been done on a couple of other African countries as well. Ghana recently had a major issue on an internet shutdown where the government shuts down social media on the voting day. This was “to ensure social media are not used to send misleading information that could destabilize the country” stated by the government, which is a questionable reason as well. The “security reasons” put up by the government are avoiding terrorist activities and people spreading wrong information about anything that have to do with the election. However, this can be taken as the government trying to avoid any opposite opinions or rebellious movements during the election. These media blackouts in Africa are controversial. The citizens of the countries are taking action against the government claiming that their rights to freedom of expression and to have access to more information are violated. Congolese activists with the Ebina Foundation actually sued the government for trying to impede the transparency of the election. African governments shutting down

Protests against the government cutting connection to SNS communication apps are bursting all over Africa. There are still positive sides to what is happening though. Some nice countries note the citizens before they shut down their social media, giving social media users to prepare for the shutdown and less likely to protest against the government for doing so. This is ironic though. The African government's first aim was to avoid terrorist activities and lies that can be spread through social media. Now, they are struggling over protests that happen as a result of blocking social media. They are trying to avoid all the protests that they are causing themselves. This is a bizarre situation. There is no point in blocking social media since citizens are going to protest