Facebook has suspended a number of accounts that belong Ugandan government officials.
Politicians are well known for indoctrinating their followers and spreading propaganda when they can. In this day and age it is even easier to reach the mass on social media, some Ugandan government officials have been accused of manipulating the public debate ahead of the Uganda elections which is to be held on Thursday.
Uganda has been facing some serious level of unrest and experienced rowdy parliamentary elections that led to a bloody sight. The distress has been caused by the stiff competition between Yoweri Museveni and Bobi Wine who seems like a huge threat to Museveni and his followers.
Facebook’s head of communication for sub-Saharan Africa wrote in an email, stating:
“This month, we removed a network of accounts and pages in Uganda that engaged in CIB (Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour) to target public debate ahead of the election.”
“They used fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users, re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were.”
When the accounts were investigated they were liked to the ministry of information and communications technology.
Facebook added:
“Given the impending election in Uganda, we moved quickly to investigate and take down this network.”
President Museveni’s press secretary Don Wanyama’s social media accounts were also shut down after they noted that he was trying to influence the elections on social media.
However, Mr Wanyama went to Twitter speaking against Facebook’s action.
“Shame on the foreign forces that think they can aid and plant a puppet leadership on Uganda by disabling online accounts of (ruling party) NRM supporters,”
“You won’t take away President Kaguta Museveni”, his tweet went on.
