Tech

African Nations Fail on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter


In November 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey tweeted from the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that he’s moving to “Africa” for up to six months in 2020. His month-long tour of the continent, where he visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia, has ended and the billionaire is feeling wistful. “Africa will define the future (especially bitcoin!). Covid will hinder his journey, although in 2020 he went out with Jay-Z in the Hamptons, and Hawaii, and on a yacht, and in January 2021 he considered whether Should Donald Trump be banned from Twitter while on vacation in French Polynesia? . Then, two years and two days after he announced that he would make his second messiah come to Africa, Dorsey Resign as CEO. We never learned where in “Africa” he might mean. We know that his arrogance and failure in three of the four countries he first visited will have a significant impact on his legacy on the continent.

To the West, Twitter during Dorsey’s reign from 2015 to 2021 often looks like an acid, hateful, and raging bonfire. But what Westerners get is a platinum version of Twitter. It’s the version created by people who take their civil problems seriously because they’re theirs too. The disinformation, hate speech and manipulation on this platform is much worse in my worldview and Dorsey’s legacy in Africa is even more neglected and hypocritical than it is. with his legacy in the Western world.

In April 2021, almost 15 years after Twitter hit the continent, the company announced that it would open its first physical presence in Africa, a regional headquarters in Accra, Ghana. “Twitter is now on the continent,” Dorsey tweeted alongside a emoji of the flag of Ghana. However, its presence is slim. Twitter-listed job opportunities in Accra are overwhelming in advertising, engineering and media. It’s not yet clear how many people from the Trust and Safety or platform integrity team Twitter plans to send. In fact, Twitter’s policy management team for Sub-Saharan Africa is based in Europe. Like Google and Facebook before them, it’s clear that this new development has little to do with helping Africans defend free speech or push back against authoritarian governments. Africa HQ’s Twitter is not about Africans. It is effectively a colonial outpost, erected to ensure that the data and coins that Twitter mines from the continent are maintained. And the limits of this office will be tested again and again at the end of the year when Twitter is used to antagonize several African countries.

Dorsey particularly sees Nigeria as a nexus of convenience. In 2020, many Nigerians welcomed his tweets calling for donations to efforts to end the state’s brutal police regime (#EndSARS). But his championing of this is inconsistent because at the same time Twitter seems to ignore repeated calls from Nigerian journalists, researchers and activists to flag or ban many people. scams and misleading claims about #EndSARS and other abuses are rampant on the platform. Then, just two months after Twitter’s Africa office opened, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter in the country for four months. This comes after the platform deleted one of Buhari’s tweets for violating the platform’s policy on abusive behavior, but a presidential spokesman was quick to note that the ban is still on the way. than tweets. A spokesperson emailed Bloomberg: “There have been numerous problems with social media platforms in Nigeria, where disinformation and fake news spread through which have violent consequences. in the real world”. “All the while, the company has shied away from accountability.” It’s uncomfortable to agree with a dictator’s spokesman, but he has a point.

Perhaps nowhere in Africa Dorsey’s Twitter has failed more than in Ethiopia. As in Nigeria, the platform struggles with an authoritarian government that regularly conducts internet disruptions amid an escalating civil war. Last month, the platform announced that it was disabling the feature that’s trending across Ethiopia, ostensibly to quell threats of harm. “Inciting violence or degrading is against our rules” The company explained in a tweet. “We hope this measure will reduce the risk of coordination that could incite violence or cause harm.” This is a bizarre, out-of-date argument. Make no mistake: While Dorsey would never explicitly admit it, delete the vogue to be an admission of guilt. Twitter realized it couldn’t manage the rate at which hate content amplified. But instead of admitting that they designed the Trends algorithm to be easy to weaponize and make hate speech highly contagious, or note that they will make a deliberate effort to improve functionality, they effectively blame the Ethiopians (for using the feature as designed). Here, Twitter has also borrowed from the play of colonialism: Blaming Africans for the harm that colonization did to Africans.

There is a trend towards Twitter’s trending problem; it also harms Kenyans. In my own research with the Mozilla Foundation, I discovered how Twitter’s trending algorithm has helped enable Information rental industry thrives in Kenya and for Kenyans journalists are subjected to wave after wave of attacks. When Pandora Papers alluded to the president of Kenya for having millions of dollars stashed in offshore accounts, propagandists exploited Twitter to spread public outcry. When I reported my findings to Twitter, the best thing the platform did was take its typical approach, suspending or deleting a series of offending accounts that I and my fellow researchers I have specified but not provided clarity on what, if any. , it will do to prevent the propaganda from further spreading.





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