Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. (Cameroon News) – Cameroon places a ban on mobile Twitter services
The official Twitter Mobile account revealed yesterday that “Twitter SMS on MTN Cameroon has been suspended by the Cameroonian government.”
The country’s opposition had been proposing to undertake “Egypt-like” protests against the President Paul Biya in February, but those were put to an end even before that could be started by using the physical force of the government’s security forces. This latest decision however seems a little too dramatic, as Cameroonian blogger Dibussi Tande opines, if Biya did not have an issue with Twitter activism previously, signs indicate that he does now:
“Before today’s ban, very few Cameroonians were even aware that Twitter was available in Cameroon via SMS, and the majority of those who were did not even grasp its potential as a tool for political activism.”
Tande resumes his observations:
President Paul BIya of Cameroon and President Barack H. Obama of USA along with first ladies
It seems quite evident that the present regime has not learnt any significant lessons from what took place in North Africa, especially in Tunisia where the Ben Ali dictatorship still had to be taken out in spite of the government having imposed a stringent ban on all social networking sites in the country for years together and had almost been battling with a complicated cyber attack with the anti government activists who were employing the digital space to voice their protests.
The government has also totally misinterpreted the indications of the February 23 protests; even though Twitter had been excessively involved role in conveying to the world as tow what exactly had been taking place in Cameroon, over 95% of the tweets which the international media were looking upon for periodic updates did not come from within Cameroon. It was the data secured through mobile phones, periodic SMS and email which showed up on Twitter as tweets and not real-time updates from activists on the ground.
Thus, placing a ban on the Twitter short code does very much to alter the balance of power online.
In addition, as Evgeny Morozov states and as Sudan and Zimbabwe have in the recent past indicated, dictatorial rules are much better off permitting social networking sites remain active to collect data on the opposition.
