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The recent high risk security incidents that have occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe have seen the government temporarily shutting down the internet. Social media and cell phone reception had not been working during a critical time of political and economic turmoil in each of these countries. CNBC Africa is joined by Michael Power, Director of ALT Advisory for more on the legality of internet shut downs.

Internet shutdowns violate human rights, says ALT Advisory’s Michael Power

CAIRO/DUBAI (Reuters) &#8211; Sudanese authorities are blocking access to popular social media platforms used to organise and broadcast nationwide anti-government protests triggered by an economic crisis, internet users say.



Sudan has been rocked by near-daily demonstrations over the past two weeks. Protesters have set alight ruling party buildings and have called on President Omar al-Bashir, who took power in 1989, to step down.



In a country where the state tightly controls traditional media, the internet has become a key information battleground. Of Sudan’s 40 million people, some 13 million use the internet and more than 28 million own mobile phones, local media say.



Authorities have not repeated the internet blackout they imposed during deadly protests in 2013. But the head of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service, Salah Abdallah, told a rare news conference on Dec. 21: “There was a discussion in the government about blocking social media sites and in the end it was decided to block them.”



Users of the three main telecommunications operators in the country — Zain, MTN and Sudani — said access to Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp has only been possible through use of a virtual private network (VPN).



Though VPNs can bring their own connection problems and some Sudanese are unaware of their existence, activists have used them widely to organise and document the demonstrations.



Hashtags in Arabic such as “Sudan’s_cities_revolt” have been widely circulated from Sudan and abroad. Hashtags in English such as #SudanRevolts have also been used.



“Social media has a really big impact, and it helps with forming public opinion and transmitting what’s happening in Sudan to the outside,” said Mujtaba Musa, a Sudanese Twitter user with over 50,000 followers who has been active in documenting the protests.



NetBlocks, a digital rights NGO, said data it collected, including from thousands of Sudanese volunteers, provided evidence of “an extensive internet censorship regime”.



Bader al-Kharafi, CEO of parent company Zain Group, told Reuters: “Some websites may be blocked for technical reasons beyond the company’s specialisation.”



Neither the National Telecommunications Corporation, which oversees the sector in Sudan, nor MTN or Sudani could be reached for comment. Twitter and Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp, declined to comment.



“While Sudan has&nbsp;a long history of systematically&nbsp;censoring print and broadcast media, online media has been relatively untouched despite its exponential growth&#8230; in recent years,” said Mai Truong of U.S.-based advocacy group Freedom House.



“The authorities have only now started to follow the playbook of other authoritarian governments.”



Additional reporting by Ahmed Hagagy in Kuwait; Editing by Aidan Lewis and Gareth Jones

Why Sudan has just blocked access to popular social media platforms

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Influencer marketing facts you need to know

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Joining CNBC Africa is Oded Vanunu, Head of Products Vulnerability Research at Check Point Software Technologies. Check Point researchers recently compiled a report on how scammers have created lucrative business from scamming social media users through various schemes.

Inside the million rand social media scam industry

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A new tax of $0.05 per day on social media took effect on July 1, 2018 in Uganda. This has received uproar from Ugandans and has seen a group of influencers file a law suit against the government and others petitioning the speaker of parliament to recall parliament from recess and rescind the law that approved taxes on social media and mobile money. For more on this, CNBC Africa is joined by Kenneth Agutamba, Chief Strategist at ICS.

Ugandans take gov’t to court over social media tax

KAMPALA, July 3 (Reuters) &#8211; Uganda’s new tax on social media access limits basic rights and harms business, according to a petition filed by activists to the constitutional court against a levy that civic groups and opposition parties say is onerous.
Ugandans pay 200 shillings ($0.0517) per day to access Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, Skype and other phone apps under the tax introduced on Sunday. The government says the revenue will help fund energy, transport and other projects.
The tax is unconstitutional, according to Daniel Bill Opio, a lawyer who filed the petition with the Kampala-based Cyber Law Initiative non-profit and others.
“Youths are taking on initiatives toward innovation and technology mostly using these &#8230; platforms,” he said. “Once you introduce a tax &#8230; you are actually killing this budding entrepreneurship.”
Amnesty International called on the government on Monday to scrap the tax and said it was an attempt to smother dissent disguised as a measure to raise revenue.
Others have denounced the tax on Twitter using the hashtag #ThisTaxMustGo. Opposition parties and other critics say President Yoweri Museveni’s government imposes onerous taxes to fund wasteful spending while failing to stem corruption.
Facebook and South Africa’s MTN both declined to comment on the tax. A spokesman for Google did not respond to an email requesting comment.
The court received the petition on Monday and no hearing date has been set, said judiciary spokesman Solomon Muyita. Uganda’s courts are clogged and a suit can take years before a verdict.
$1 = 3,850.0000 Ugandan shillings Editing by Maggie Fick and Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Uganda’s new tax on social media pushes activists to file court challenge, here’s what you need to know

By Dylan Kohlstädt, entrepreneur, speaker and digital marketing expert
I recently attended a social media marketing conference, where one of the large agencies talked about Social Media 1.0 (happy Friday, everyone), 2.0 (six ways to save on insurance) and 3.0 (give us a ridiculous amount of money, so we can fly our entire creative crew to the Serengeti and film elephants romping and produce an eff off expensive advert that you can post on social media, and we can win an award, and call it social media).
That got me thinking. What are the levels of social media and what is the definition of Next Level Social Media?
When I started Shift ONE digital six years ago, I’ll admit to you that, while I knew digital marketing backwards, I wasn’t very strong on social media marketing. I had to work each social channel out, and fast.
Through the years my team has grown from just myself and an intern, to fifteen full-time, powerful, wonderful, beautiful staff members, highly skilled in what they do and who produce compelling and engaging content for our clients.
This six-year journey has come with its fair share of learnings and epiphanies. One of the biggest revelations came shortly after deciding to build my personal brand on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Web, LinkedIn and Facebook.
I wanted to turn myself into a digital influencer, simply to understand the journey and the steps to becoming internet famous. Nearly a year later, I would like to share with you all that I have learned.
Based on my experiences, I believe there are five levels to social media marketing:
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The Five Levels of Social Media Marketing: © 2018 Dylan Kohlstädt @ Shift ONE digital
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1. Level One Social Media Marketing: Dead Silence
Level One is dead silence. Masses and masses of businesses aren’t visible on social media, possibly for one of the following reasons:
● They’re intimidated by this newfangled digital voodoo
● They don’t have time to run a business, create content and manage platforms and comments all in one day
● They don’t know how to, and don’t have the time to learn
● They don’t know how to turn likes into sales
● They don’t believe their customers are on social media, so what’s the point?
If your business is at this level, the only questions I have to ask you are:
● Which platforms are your customers using?
● Can you master just one of these platforms?
Spend 20 minutes a day on this platform, familiarise yourself with your competitors’ content and what your customers are talking about. Make sure you like posts and comment to increase awareness of your own brand. From there on, decide on a thought piece or post of your own that you can publish.
Even if you only do one of the above actions, the great thing is this: it’s a 100% improvement from where your business is currently at.
Oh, and don’t worry about making a mistake and the whole world laughing at you. I assure you, unless your post is racially charged, nobody will notice your blunder. So just starting doing one thing every day, and you’ll learn and grow from there.
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2. Level Two Social Media Marketing: Hard Sell
This is usually where companies start out, posting their products, specials and company information onto social media.
After trying this for a couple of months, they complain that social media doesn’t work for them as they are not making sales from their efforts.
Here’s the problem: it’s Social Media, not SALES Media. If you want to hard sell, hire a big ad agency to make a TV advert for you – maybe a family sitting around a table, the kid runs in, his shirt is dirty from playing soccer and WHAM! The mom pulls out the detergent and his shirt is white again.
Social media won’t work with hard sell messaging, unless you have a product that sells itself, like Janine Binneman’s handmade jewellery. I can’t get enough of their finely crafted, proudly South African sparklers.
Save the hard sell for outbound call centre staff who call at all hours trying to sell you a new cellphone or short-term insurance.
Social media is made for social engagements, social content, and building community and relationships.
After this content fails, you decide to move to the next level…
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3. Level Three Social Media Marketing: Blah Blah Blah
Ever gone on a date with someone who won’t let you get a word in edgeways?
That’s what this level is about.
You’ve started posting content onto social media (probably too often) just so the box can be ticked. It doesn’t have the goal of creating engagement, eliciting a click-through to your website, or turning followers into fans. It’s just so that you can say ‘Yes, we are on social media, look at all the work we’re doing!”
There’s no problem with that. The problem centres on not replying to comments, or copy-pasting generic responses to save time.
I’ve been on so many social accounts, where followers are left out to dry, their lonely comments hanging in midair, like an ignored high-five.
If you start becoming a regular on social media, it is imperative that you not only check your replies and comments, but you also engage back in a timely fashion.
That’s what social media is made for. Social. Media.
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4. Level Four Social Media Marketing: Me Too
Ok, so you’ve ticked the box, and you’re producing content and posting it out regularly.
‘Me Too’ social media is basically your traditional content marketing. Companies on this level are posting more than just hard sell content or blah blah blah content on social media. They’re starting to post ‘Happy Friday’, or ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ posts. They might even go as far as writing a blog about ‘Seven Ways to Save Money’ or ‘Top Ice-Cream Parlors In Pretoria’.
Nothing wrong with this. It’s necessary to go through this phase, just as it’s necessary to pass through the five stages of grieving.
Usually on this level you start chasing likes &#8211; the vanity metric. Don’t get me wrong &#8211; likes are important if you’re a big, national brand. It’s expected for you to have at least a few tens of thousands of followers. So do that, get them, and then work out what you’re going to do with them.
Why? Because social media likes don’t translate into sales. It’s not SALES media. It’s SOCIAL media.
Content here is usually too glossy, and not very believable. That’s the basic flaw with most social media content plans &#8211; nobody believes you. Even though it’s soft sell, it’s still produced from your brand, for your brand, according to Neilsens. It’s not credible, but don’t stop!
There’s no shame at this level, at least you are growing and moving up the social hierarchy.
Just don’t get stuck here! Enlightenment is just a few posts away.
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5. Level Five: Kingmake Me
When I started building my own brand, we created a product called Kingmake Me, where we turn thought leaders into digital influencers using video and social media. This then went on to expand into Visionmake Me, where we use video and social media to inspire and unite a business. We did this either by filming the senior management live out the vision and values, or filming staff or even customers interacting with the brand in their day-to-day lives.
What I learned during this process, is that social media is designed for people, not brands.
If brands want to be active on social media, they have to do it as individuals, not as brands.
Sure, you can layer into your content plan the usual content marketing articles and images and videos, a few specials and products and hard sell posts, but you absolutely definitely also have to be using people (real people) in your posts.
Real people in the form of your senior management, CEO, staff, customers or other influencers.
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Video
And it has to be video. And the video has to be cool and edgy and vibey, showing what it’s like to be them, what it’s like to walk in their shoes, not dull boring ‘interview-style’. What’s great about this style of video is that the person being filmed gets used to the camera, and even forgets about it. Think of day one in the Big Brother house – the Jacuzzi starts heating up only a few hours into the first day, cameras, inhibitions, clothing and reputations all forgotten as the story takes over.
Video communicates tone, body language and personality in a way that no other medium can. I can sense your mettle just by watching you on video. We’ve won clients just by having the Maggs on Media video on our home page.
Video communicates AUTHENTICITY. You can’t fake it in front of a camera. And the great thing about creating authentic video content is that people want it to look ‘real’ and not glossy and over produced.
Imagine, instead of creating an interview-style video of your vision for the year to share with your 3,000 staff members situated globally, our camera crews follow you for a day or two, filming your day, filming how you live the vision, how you live the values, and sharing that with your team daily.
And that’s the thing… once you start making video, you can’t stop. You need to create daily snippets for your followers who want to connect with you, and feel a part of your vision, dream and day.
Remember, it’s not unusual for millennials, even Gen Y (and a few of the really with-it Gen X’s) to form relationships digitally, and to not distinguish between virtual relationships and actual friendships.
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Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing resides on this level. If you don’t want to be an influencer, then approach influencers. If you don’t want to produce this kind of content, then approach the many people who have built up a following, and ask them to collaborate. Get them to write a guest blog for you, sit on an expert panel, or review your product to their followers.
The bad thing about influencer marketing is that it’s already starting to lose its shine. Followers stop believing posts, as influencers take money to promote brands, authenticity and trust are lost, and as a result, relationships are burned.
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Community Management
Your community management has to go to the next level here too. You can’t simply reply to comments. We are talking Social Amplification here. Teams of people who are proactively building relationships, becoming friends with your followers.
&nbsp;
Live Video
Live video is being prioritised over normal video by nearly all social platforms. Live video gives your customers and followers a chance to engage with you, face-to-face, virtually. Yes, that is a thing.
Content on this highest level has to be credible, believable, authentic and build relationships. If you mix this in with your Me Too content marketing, then you are onto a winning formula.
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What’s next after Level Five?
Funnily enough, we are going full circle: from hard sell in the 50’s, to soft sell in the 80’s, to content marketing in the 00’s to face-to-face, real, genuine, person-to-person connections in the 10’s.
Virtual and augmented reality will bring you face-to-face with brands like no other technology.
Whatever’s next is going to be more relationship driven, more personalised, and more real…even if it’s virtual.
If you don’t hop onto the social media bandwagon now, it will be a rocket ship to Mars by the time you try get on board.
Start now: level two.

Why your social media sucks: The five levels of social media marketing

KAMPALA (Reuters) &#8211; Uganda plans to slap a new tax on social media users from July to raise revenue, which human rights activists denounced as another attempt by President Yoweri Museveni to stifle freedom of expression and quash dissent to his 32-year-rule.
The move is unlikely to go down well in a country where more than 40 percent of people use the internet. Data costs in Africa are already among the world’s highest, according to digital advocacy group World Wide Web Foundation.
Finance Minister Matia Kasaija told Reuters in a phone interview that the tax will charge each mobile phone subscriber using platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook 200 Ugandan shillings ($0.027) per day. He dismissed concerns it could limit people’s use of the internet.
“We’re looking for money to maintain the security of the country and extend electricity so that you people can enjoy more of social media, more often, more frequently,” he said.
Human rights activists begged to differ, and some took to social media to criticise the proposal.
“It’s part of a wider attempt to curtail freedoms of expression,” Rosebell Kagumire, a human rights activist and blogger, said.
Of Uganda’s 41 million people, 23.6 million are mobile phone subscribers and 17 million use the internet.
Kasaija said the proposal, to be included in the budget for fiscal 2018/19 starting in July, had been sent to parliament this week for review after the cabinet approved it.
The government blocked access to Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp during the last general election in 2016, a move used by other entrenched rulers in Africa in response to grassroots movements against them.
Among other governments in East Africa moving to regulate internet use, Tanzania introduced a law last month requiring any citizen operating a blog or website to pay an annual licence fee of 1 million Tanzanian shillings ($440).
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($1 = 3,690 Ugandan shillings, 2,261 Tanzanian shillings)
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Additional reporting and writing by Omar Mohammed; Editing by Maggie Fick and Hugh Lawson
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If you live in Uganda expect to pay tax if you use social media

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Digital innovations, social media and the consequential rise of fake news are changing how people consume news and how brands invest in marketing and publicity.

How the fake news problem affects PR

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The 6th edition of Social Media Week Lagos will begin next week; Co- founder and executive director Ngozi Odita of the event joins CNBC Africa to discuss what the public should expect from this year&#8217;s event.

Social Media Week Lagos 2018: Here’s how your brand can benefit

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The role of technology in social activism is a lesson that can inspire our innovators to create change for our continent and its story.
By Nnamdi Oranye
A few weeks back, we saw devastating floods in Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Many people made use of Facebook’s crisis response tool, which allows individuals to mark themselves as safe. It also provides real-time updates on loved ones to their friends and family members, rather than making them wait for time-delayed news bulletins. This is a very recent example of how social media networks have adapted to connect groups of people in ways beyond just connecting with friends – and how African innovators need to be thinking.
In one of my books, Disrupting Africa, I noted how Ushahidi, based out of Kenya, is an original African innovation that has formed the backbone of this sort of technology. The Facebook tool has also been widely used in the recent terror attacks in London, the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and natural disasters in Central America.
Twitter made the hashtag integral to modern life, and campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter turned a simple metadata tag into a collective social awareness. Arguably, you can trace this connection to the mass uprising that occurred when a young 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin, was shot in America in 2012 – marches took place in New York and all over the world after people were called to take part through social media and hashtag campaigns.
It was the first time we witnessed the power of social media for activism – and it left the commercial media scratching their heads at the time.
<h3>Using technology to mobilise groups of people</h3>
The growing trend of using technology to mobilise groups of people is not unique to Facebook and Twitter and social media in general. Organisations such as Grass Roots Campaigns have had a long history of helping communities who have a cause to organise themselves effectively. The platform they’ve built includes face-to-face campaigns along with using technology and social media, but is also not limited to those tools.
In India, another campaigning organisation called Jhatkaa mobilised hundreds of workers that were affected by mercury exposure at Hindustan Unilever factory. Using SMS, IVR (interactive voice response), missed calls, and social media, they were able to use readily available technology for a cause that had no commercial benefit or advertising opportunities.
It intrigues me what our response in Africa is to these social concerns and the role technology plays in this. Ushahidi’s public debut was actually in Kenya’s 2007 election. Last year, it monitored the U.S. election as well – and is being used all over the world in such instances.
<h3>Wi-Fi cut in many campuses during SA&#8217;s #FeesMust Fall protests</h3>
During last year’s university protests in South Africa, a community advocacy organisation, amandla.mobi, used mobile data to support the “Fees Must Fall” campaign. Students that were unable to join the physical protest wanted to show their solidarity but were cut off because the universities switched off the Wi-Fi in many campuses. By providing the students with mobile data, amandla.mobi supported the students’ cause in the most practical way.
The same progressive thinking that ties technology to the social activism space is what should be tapped into by innovators on the continent. It shouldn’t be limited to just social activism. Opportunities need to be made to resource the next generation in order that they can use technology in ways that we can’t yet predict.
In one of TED Talk’s most popular videos, Simon Sinek elaborates on the importance of knowing why any product, service, or organisation exists. Think of what Martin Luther King Jr achieved for the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. At a time, void of social media and the Internet, a quarter of a million people (some spending days on public transport to get there) arrived in Washington to hear him speak.
<h3>Martin Luther King Jr had a gift to rally people</h3>
As Sinek says , “Dr King wasn’t the only man in America who was a great orator; he wasn’t the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But, he had a gift. He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,’ he told people.
&#8220;People who believed what he believed took his cause and they made it their own, and they told people about it. And some of those people created structures to get the word out. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day, at the right time, to hear him speak”.
It appears that King was able to inspire social activism because he believed in his ideology. Technology, products, even social movements, don’t succeed because they are inspirational or cutting-edge. They are the by-products of leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators who are inspirational. Leaders who believe in something greater than what the technology, product, or social movement may represent. These are the leaders who create products and services that change the face of society.
<h3>The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism</h3>
In Africa’s socio-political landscape, technology has a powerful role to play. I’ve established that it’s a role that will fail or succeed depending on the innovators themselves. In his 2010 article for the New Yorker, titled “Small Change”, it seems Malcolm Gladwell foresaw this particular juncture we’re faced with.
He said, “The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.”
There is a clear distinction that needs to be made between “real” activists and “online” activists. Updating one’s Facebook status, commenting on an organisation’s page, retweeting a politician’s tweet, or using a hashtag are not the same as protesting in the streets or lobbying for new policies in the courts. However, there is still a significant role for technology to play with regard to social activism. As Gladwell mentions, technology is effective at increasing participation.
<h3>Slacktivism is effective in building networks</h3>
Social media activism, or Slacktivism, will never replace high-risk activism but it is effective in building networks between groups of people. The ties between these groups of people may be weak in the real-world but have a notable benefit.
Sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed that our acquaintances – not our friends – are our greatest source of new ideas and information. “The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation&#8230;” he says. The role of the innovator and entrepreneur is critical in developing technology that harnesses these networks of people, keeping in mind that the technology doesn’t replace the role of people in bringing about change.
African innovators have the potential to inspire the development of products and companies that change our continent, if they believe why it is important. Then, if we organise – if we get around the many why’s we have – we can create change.
#knowyourchange

Op-Ed: Africa – Know Your Change

Craig Blewett, University of KwaZulu-Natal
It’s a rather impressive, if controversial, resume for a teenager: blamed for the election of Donald Trump, increased divorce rates, rising syphilis cases, and the advent of fake news.
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Facebook turns 14 on February 4. And the controversies continue unabated. But there’s one aspect of Facebook that should not be lost in all the noise: the extraordinary change it has brought about in how we connect, communicate, consume and share content – in the classroom, as well as in other spaces.
Putting the words “Facebook” and “learning” together may seem like an oxymoron. But my research has delved into the role Facebook has played in shaping how the new generation consumes and shares content. Understanding this is pivotal to understanding how we should be using technology to teach in the digital age. Quite simply, Facebook has changed the way that children learn.
<h2>How students learn</h2>
That’s what I’ve discovered through my research, which used a cyber-ethnography approach to try and determine how students are learning in our modern digital age. This involved essentially “living” with students while they connected, communicated, and learned in a Facebook space.
I spent an entire semester watching and interacting with students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa as they used a Facebook page as their primary learning portal. The students were given admin access to the space. This meant they could determine how the space was used: who had access to it, how it was designed, what was posted on the page, and even the level of anonymity of their posts.
This provided me with an opportunity to watch the students learn, unfettered from traditional learning constraints. However, it would take a while for the students to fully explore their learning within this new space. Initially the students would often attempt to defer to me and my guidance. Only after I repeatedly refused to control their learning experience did they begin to behave in a self-oraganising way and allow me to observe their “natural” learning patterns.
The research revealed that Facebook provided students with a series of learning affordances. Affordances are “can do” oppportunies, some intentional and others unintentional, that technology spaces provide. In this instance the research revealed that the affordances at play were accessibility, connection, communication, control and construction. These affordances provide valuable insights into how students learn in digital spaces.
Once I understood this, I could turn my attention to the key need: developing ways of teaching, called pedagogies, that are appropriate for the digital age. Currently the focus on technology – the what, has distracted us from pedagogy: the how. Without understanding how best to apply these new technologies’ affordances, educators will not be able to effectively impact teaching in the modern classroom.
However, providing educators with a list of “how tos” isn’t much use without a system that makes the list easy to implement. As Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says:
&#8220;I can tell people they need to teach better. But if I don’t give them things that are easy for them to implement, they won’t do it.&#8221;
<h2>Activating the classroom</h2>
That’s where the Activated Classroom Teaching (ACT) model comes in. I developed this model in a bid to create a taxonomy of teaching and learning for 21st century classrooms. A taxonomy is an ordered arrangement of items. One of the most famous of these is Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking. The ACT model attempts to provide a taxonomy of digital-age teaching approaches.
The ACT model consists of five digital-age pedagogies that seek to maximise the affordances of technology, modern students’ approaches to learning and the development of key 21st century skills such as creativity, problem solving, curiosity, critical thinking, etc.
The focus is a shift from passive ways of teaching (consumption) to active approaches (curation, conversation, correction, creation and chaos). This aligns with research that shows children are spending more than half their online time actively engaging: creating content, getting involved in “interactive consumption” and communicating.
Ignoring the tectonic shifts taking place in our classrooms is not the solution. Simply dropping technology into our classrooms is not the solution. Simply training teachers to use computers is not the solution. As British author and education expert Sir Ken Robinson has said, we need a paradigm shift, but it’s more than that &#8211; we need a pedagogy shift.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90552/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />The young teen, Facebook, has changed how we connect and learn. But, as the OECD pointed out in its global study about educational technology: “If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”
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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Op-Ed: Why putting the words ‘learning’ and ‘Facebook’ together isn’t an oxymoron

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With over 270 million Twitter users and 1.2 billion Facebook users, Social media could be a powerful tool for SME&#8217;s. Susan Okoh, Strategic Planning Officer, corporate banking at Diamond Bank joins CNBC Africa for more.

Impact of social media on small businesses

George Ogola | University of Central Lancashire
The recent Kenyan elections firmly demonstrated the incursion and perhaps even gradual institutionalisation of fake news as an actor in modern politics, particularly during elections. Although the term fake news is now so liberally used to the extent it eludes precise definition, many agree it’s the deliberate dissemination of false informationexpressly intended to misinform.
The presidential election, which pitted the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta against his political nemesis, opposition leader Raila Odinga, was fiercely fought on many fronts. One of these fronts, arguably the most significant, was the unprecedented investment in political messaging.
Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party and Odinga’s National Super Alliance (NASA) invested heavily in media and public relations consultants, communication experts and political advertising. The Jubilee Party even enlisted the services of  Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analysis company credited with playing an influential role in the election of US President Donald Trump. The company also had a hand in the UK’s Brexit campaign.
Added to this heady mix was clandestine messaging through fake newson social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Numerous fake news stories were widely circulated on social media as unsubstantiated allegations were posted against both parties, some even through paid adverts on Google.
This was a step up from previous elections where politicians would pay backstreet newspaper publishers to tarnish the names of their opponents. Kenya has always had publishers for hire, a particularly thriving industry at election time. These publishers quite often have no known addresses, are defined by their impermanence and therefore impossible to sue even when one is legitimately aggrieved by their publications.
In 2017 the mudslinging migrated online and become much more nuanced and sophisticated. Stories that featured fake opinion polls and others that directly attacked the characters of both Kenyatta and Odinga were widely circulated online and in print. Some of these were slickly produced videos that were passed off as originating from CNN and the BBC.
In one fake CNN video Kenyatta’s popularity rating was shown to be well ahead of Odinga’s. Another fake video, this time purportedly an outtake from the BBC’s Focus on Africa  programme, also featured an opinion poll showing Kenyatta beating Odinga.
And fake newspapers bearing the plagiarised mastheads of widely circulating dailies including the Daily Nation and The Star were sold to unsuspecting readers.
This proliferation of fake news in Kenya can be explained on two grounds. The first relates to the history of the country’s media, and the second to the increasing importance of online platforms in shaping the African news agenda.
<h2>The Kenyan media</h2>
The Kenyan media has become a prisoner of its history. It remains shackled to the consequences of its role in the country’s 2007 disputed presidential elections. A section of the press were accused of actively promoting the violence that engulfed the country in the aftermath of the polls. At least 1,000 people died and more than 500,000 thousand were displaced.
This legacy has turned the media into a bystander in the political process, especially at election time. In 2013 it hardly raised any objections to electoral malpractices that led to the disputed presidential election. Instead, media houses promoted “peace” to preempt a repeat of the 2007-2008 post-election violence.
It was a decision that was supported financially by a number of local and international agencies who spent months training the local press in “peace journalism”. This peace narrative has now became normalised in election coverage in the country. The consequence has been the creation of an information vacuum which has now been filled by fake news.
<h2>Rise of social media</h2>
The circulation of fake news also seems to have benefited from the changing profile of the Kenyan voter. Nearly half of about 20 million registered voters in Kenya are aged between 18 and 35. A significant number source their news from social media where fake news circulates the most.
According to a recent consumer survey only 28% of young Kenyans read newspapers regularly. Social media is slowly but surely becoming their platform of choice for news.
And the audience for fake news is growing given that two out of three young Kenyans now either own a mobile device or have access to one, and Internet connectivity costs go down annually.
This election revealed the fact that fake news has not only become commonplace, it’s become mainstream and is evolving into a distinct news genre.
Fake news thrives on the modern news consumer’s insatiable appetite for speedy information. We are living in a news ecosystem where urgency trumps the core values of journalism such as accuracy, fact checking and objectivity.
Traditional news media, with brands built on the back of their ability to fact check or investigate stories before publication, are struggling to do so when they are simultaneously expected to publish with speed. While gate keeping is key to ensure that news outlets remain trustworthy, the speed at which audiences now expect information has seen media houses haemorrhage audiences.
That lag in providing speedy information has created a vacuum which fake news producers are exploiting. They don’t have brands or reputations to protect. Fake news is positively sustained by an online economy which prioritises sensationalism over quality. Sensational ‘news’ very quickly goes viral and this is its most effective weapon.
Fake news is slowly intruding on virtually every aspect of life. We must first understand its appeal and then make every effort to counter it. This is especially the case because it is now a genre sustained by a much larger social, economic and political infrastructure that the news media alone is incapable of dealing with.
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This article was first published on The Conversation.

How social media and fake news are battering traditional media in Kenya

Mlenga Jere and Raymond van Niekerk | University of Cape Town
More than 20 years after democracy it seems incredible that a leading South African insurance company, Outsurance would put out a Father’s Day advertisement which featured mostly white dads. If their marketing team didn’t see the problem, citizens on social media certainly did and helped the company to see the error of its ways – and fast.
Within hours of screening the advertisement, a twitter storm had broken out and the commercial was retracted. Outsurance issued an apology for any offence caused. It was a quick and decisive response – which is generally the right way to respond in a crisis – spoiled only by the fact that the company subsequently laid the blame at the door of a “junior lady” on the social media team.
The Outsurance experience underlines the growing importance of social media in branding. Branding scholars Chiranjeev Kohli and Anuj Kapoor point out that:
Outsurance isn’t the only firm to have been caught in a social media storm. Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to step down after a prolonged online assault leading to a “shareholder revolt”. London based public relations firm, Bell Pottinger, had to lock its twitter handle recently because it had been twitter bombed by South Africans outraged at the firm’s service to the controversial Gupta family.
Another South African business, the family restaurant franchise Spur, suffered considerable brand damage after a video showing an altercation between a (white) man and a (black) woman at a Johannesburg outlet went viral, causing a racially charged firestorm. Spur was castigated from different directions for mishandling the matter.
These cases show how social media gives consumers the ability to influence business behaviour. But, we argue, this power should be channelled in a constructive way to affect lasting change.
<h2>A new kind of activism</h2>
There are many examples of deliberate online anti-brand behaviours targeting well-known brands such as American Express, Coca Cola, and Wal-Mart. Widely respected New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo recently noted, that online campaigns against brands have become a powerful force in business by handing power to consumers. It has also given birth to a new kind of political activism:
<blockquote>Posting a hashtag and threatening to back it up by withholding dollars can bring about a much quicker, more visible change in the world than, say, calling your representative.</blockquote>
This is of course not good news to most corporations, businesses and politicians. Those operating in the public domain know the importance of protecting their reputation and fear the power of social media. Many organisations pay research companies for daily feedback on how their brand is perceived. In addition to newspaper clippings and magazine articles, they also have to sift through thousands of tweets and emails.
Not all negative comments deserve to be dealt with publicly. Some outrage may be the result of a vindictive individual or interest groups with less honourable intentions. Responding to comments such as these may only fan the fire, doing more harm than good.
But the power of social media is such that even a falsehood can cause immense damage, ruining businesses and individuals. Social media can awaken the mob mentality in people. All that’s required is for people to become angry – and have access to a medium where they can be relatively anonymous and vent their fury.
Social media brings out the best and the worst in people. On the one hand, it gives the power to do untold damage. On the other it can be used to do tremendous good.
<h2>Disciplining business</h2>
Take the case of American airline United Airlines. The video of how security dragged Dr David Dao off a flight in April 2017 after he refused to leave his seat when he was selected to be bumped off due to overbooking went viral on the Internet.
Millions of people saw Dr Dao being dragged, bleeding and injured, off the plane. There was an enormous backlash from consumers slamming the airline – and other airlines – for the practice of overbooking.
The consequences of all the anger led to the airline revising its policy and operations and spilled over into wider investigations into general procedures at airlines. This resulted in new legislation being drafted in the US, which could prevent airlines from forcibly removing passengers seated on an overbooked flight and providing compensation for those not allowed to board.
<h2>A double-edged sword</h2>
Social media is here to stay – if anything its use is set to become more sophisticated. According to Pew Internet Research, YouTube reaches more 18- to 34-year-olds than any cable network in the US, 76% of Facebook users visited the site daily last year with over 1.6 billion daily visitors, and 51% of Instagram users engage with the platform daily. These trends are spreading across the globe.
Users may also become more discerning about which sites they visit and how often. For companies, this means a need to remain vigilant and being aware of how to react appropriately. They undoubtedly stand to profit as well – through clever marketing campaigns that make use of social media platforms.
But the biggest winners could be consumers – should they learn to properly use the power of social media to organise into interest groups, define objectives and agree on courses of action – thereby exerting pressure on companies to see the kind of change in corporations that they would like to see in society as well.
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This article was published on The Conversation.

South African social media is giving consumers power to discipline corporations

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Apps like True Caller have the potential to disrupt the way we do business in Africa and we’re not preparing ourselves enough for that disruption, writes Nnamdi Oranye.
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True Caller is one of those disrupting apps that always seem to just slip under the radar, quietly building huge traction without big PR and fanfare through providing a valuable service to the consumer, while gaining tremendous potential to disrupt industries and the way many companies do business – including businesses in Africa. For this reason, we ought to take notice, because if we don’t, it has the potential to disrupt our businesses in ways we aren’t prepared for right now.
How does it work? True Caller, which is a relatively small company, develops an app that lets you know the identity behind a number calling or SMSing you. It boasts of having a database of over three billion numbers, collected since 2009 through its users. It allows you to put numbers into spam lists and basically block calls and SMS’s from certain numbers coming through. It’s a great tool for keeping you from receiving unwanted calls from call centres and telemarketers and that friend who keeps asking for money.
<h4>Can legitimate communication end up as spam?</h4>
But what if the call you receive is actually legit? By having your Bank’s number in the spam list, for instance, you also miss out on relevant communication – SMS’s giving your latest balance, or asking you to confirm a purchase on your credit card, or a payment reminder, and so on. I noticed this happened to me when I was using the app – most of my legitimate communication ended up in my spam and I didn’t know, and I would only see it sometime later when I went looking because I was wondering why I never got that SMS from the bank confirming my balance. This also happens to users when they receive communication from their telecommunications provider – for example, an SMS telling them how their airtime balance is looking. So what we see is many large corporates are being blocked and listed as spam. That’s great for the consumer in many ways, but not very good for business.
This also happens to users when they receive communication from their telecommunications provider – for example, an SMS telling them how their airtime balance is looking. So what we see is many large corporates are being blocked and listed as spam. That’s great for the consumer in many ways, but not very good for business.
Perhaps you might think they deserve to be labelled as spam, and perhaps in many cases you would be right. Many people do agree. I was recently at a conference and decided to do an informal survey to find out how many people use the app. The audience at the conference was predominantly made up of professionals (in their 30’s and 40’s) and I found that about 50 percent of those I surveyed used the app.
<h4>Wide reach among Millennials and Gen Xers</h4>
So it arguably has a wide reach, and especially among Millennials and Generation Xers. The use of such an app shows that these generations communicate with their phone in a very different way to older generations (even though the older generation has cottoned on). Telemarketing and cold calls are rejected right from the outset. You simply will not get through. You’re either blocked outright or your call is ignored.
Today’s large corporates, such as banks and telecommunications providers and services companies, have a huge investment in customer research and make a major focus on understanding and knowing the customer. All this investment, however, is worthless if you actually can’t even get through to your customer. If you are considered a spammer, it doesn’t matter how slick your image is or how much your product will add value or how well trained your sales staff are, you are automatically tarnished with a certain brush and all that investment and effort isn’t worth much.
<h4>Could True Caller become the gatekeeper to your customer and cut you out?</h4>
This means that inadvertently, True Caller owns access to your customer. The more it grows, the more it has this sort of ownership. I think this may be exactly what True Caller is actually looking to do long-term. Have a look at its privacy policy for a clue into how it makes money in the background:
“Truecaller may also share personal information with third party advertisers, agencies and networks. Such third parties may use this information for analytical and marketing purposes e.g. to provide measurement services and targeted ads and for improvement of products and services.”
[<a href="http://phandroid.com/2017/08/10/how-does-truecaller-work/">http://phandroid.com/2017/08/10/how-does-truecaller-work/</a>]
Most users probably never bothered to read that. When you sign up for True Caller, you actually give personal info to the company. This is so that it can track who is calling you and figure out how you manage these sorts of things, in the name of making its service better. But like most of today’s tech disruptors, you have to sacrifice personal info and privacy to use the service and help it improve. Ironically, it gathers personal info that it probably intends to sell to the very companies you are blocking off as spam.
<h4>Reaching your customer through social media</h4>
But there is more to it than that, and here is where African businesses need to take notice. Much of that information would probably go to the likes of social media companies such as Facebook. And most of that information will go to companies looking to advertise via social media like Facebook. This makes a lot of sense because if you can’t reach your customer through the phone, you probably can reach them via social media. When it comes to today’s generation, you’re practically guaranteed as such.
Owning the customer is paramount and today’s younger generations are certainly more reachable through social media than any other. That changes the landscape of business considerably. If you cannot own your customer or access them because there is a new gatekeeper in town, then you need to go through that gatekeeper. Essentially, these sorts of disruptors don’t just want to have eyes on their news feeds but want to own access to your customer bases. So what concerns
Essentially, these sorts of disruptors don’t just want to have eyes on their news feeds but want to own access to your customer bases. So what concerns me, even more, is if the likes of Facebook scoops up True Caller entirely, because then it can pretty much own the customer base in Africa.
I keep writing that, as Africans, we need to take on this sort of Silicon Valley disruption and work with it or work in competition with it. We have to consider these sorts of things quite seriously. In my upcoming book, Taking on Silicon Valley: How Africa’s Innovators Will Shape Its Future, I go into some detail with this argument.
I think True Caller is the perfect example of an app that has the potential to pull the rug under us in many ways but we’re just not talking about it. We’re not preparing ourselves for the possibilities. We need to look at such apps and think beyond just the consumer experience and consider what it means for business as a whole. We need to take a more macro view.

Op-Ed: Could True Caller eventually own your customer?

Congolese authorities ordered internet capacity be slowed down so that it cannot be used to transmit images via social media, a senior telecoms official based in Kinshasa said.
The move comes as opposition is growing to President Joseph Kabila, who refused to step down when his mandate expires in December, with nationwide strikes planned for Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Monday, clashes between Congolese security forces and anti-government sect Bundu dia Kongo killed at least 14 people.
&#8220;In order to prevent the exchange of abusive images via social media by your subscribers, I ask you to &#8230; take technical measures to restrict to a minimum the capacity to transmit images,&#8221; post and telecoms chief regulator Oscar Manikunda Musata said in a signed letter seen by Reuters.
He listed social media he wanted the measure to target, including Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Twitter.
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Reporting by Patient Ligodi; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Louise Ireland
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