Legal standards, norms for internet governance

A lack of global norms leaves Uganda’s government able to manipulate social media

COMMENT | SOLOMON WINYI | Uganda is facing many of the same challenges with social media as other countries but the lack of globally accepted regulations has left a path for an authoritarian regime to stifle the public sphere.

The global proliferation of social media has led to a quest for legal standards and norms for internet governance. In its own attempt to govern this space, Uganda has gradually instituted laws, occasionally shut down the internet and levied taxes to regulate social media use. Initially, these practices were introduced ostensibly to limit the negative consequences of social media use, such as hate speech, incitement, and misinformation. However, the regime in Kampala has since used this pretext to curtail collective voices, dissent, and the freedom of expression that social media brings into the political sphere.

The platform X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and WhatsApp are the most popular social media platforms in Ugandan politics. Also, in 2011, the platforms acted as venues for free expression around the world, helping to spark the Arab Spring, a series of public uprisings and rebellions against authoritarian regimes. Similar protests shook the Ugandan regime, which has been in power for more than 30 years. Because of the protests, the government introduced The Computer Misuse Act of 2011 (CMA) and the Social Media Tax in 2018.

The CMA 2018 was used to arrest opposition politicians and political activists who used social media to expose corruption and also mobilise youth against the regime. The social media tax by 2019 had cut off many youths from the platforms as they could not afford the daily two hundred Ugandan shillings that was levied on them to access WhatsApp, Facebook, X, and Instagram among others. The intent of these laws was not to regulate the negative consequences of social media but to limit the number of people who used social media to voice support for the political opposition and to mobilise youth.

Despite these actions, the long reign of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime has continued to attract political dissent and resistance through social media in Uganda. The opposition has kept the youth engaged in online debates through social media accessed through Virtual Private Networks (VPN) with crafted messages that combine satire, memes, and poetic themes.

The dilemma of laxity and conformity to international norms

Regulation of social media was initially delegated to engineering and technological groups but later assumed by international organisations and government agencies.

There have been divergent opinions between ‘founder’ countries (such as the U.S.) and countries like Uganda that have adopted the social media platforms. The U.S. and Europe have advocated for established principles and standards, such as free expression and privacy which do not fit the authoritarian ideals of regimes such as that in Uganda. On the other side, Russia and China believe and support internet sovereignty that perfectly fits Uganda’s autocratic needs and its quest for international legitimacy.

Social media regulation remains a contested space of geopolitical competition and between companies and national governments. Facebook, for example, suspended some accounts that were in support of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni in the 2021 general elections citing alleged manipulation of the public debate ahead of the election in the same year.

Such tensions between governments and private technology companies have created a dilemma about available tools for regulation in both private and government law. These suspensions by private companies have ignited debates on freedom of expression among world leaders. At the same time, people in autocratic states where platforms are also limited or controlled by the government want freedom of speech.

Uganda has many of the signs of an autocratic regime and is sometimes called a dictatorship. The practice of dictatorships interfering in communication is not new; some classic work on authoritarian rule highlights the role of autocrats in controlling public and private information. President Museveni has, therefore, found solace in countries such as Russia and China that have given him the confidence to restrict social media use when he detects political dissent and mobilisation.

Internationally, there are ambiguous debates worldwide about the appropriate timing for rightfully restricting or shutting down the internet. Even in places where freedom of speech is highly valued and not controlled, shutdowns are used to address political uprisings. For instance, in the U.S. there have been instances where mobile services have been cut for hours to avert anticipated protests. Such scenarios give confidence and justification to autocratic leaders worldwide to put in place well-tailored regulations and policies to control political action in disguise of national security.

The Ugandan regime has achieved its objective of not only controlling political dissent and activism but also surveillance and control of the social media platforms at large. Social media companies have exercised excessive control over social media use, creating a rift among the states that has led to questioning the principle of freedom of expression and who decides its form and practice as an international norm. Therefore, the lack of standardised rules and norms on social media has created a dilemma for developing countries as well as an opportunity for authoritarian states to use regulations to serve their interests.

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Solomon Winyi lectures in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Makerere University in Uganda. His PhD research was on Social Media Use and Youth Political Participation in Uganda from Makerere University.