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'Africa's Internet Shutdowns: a Report on the Johannesburg Workshop'

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'Africa's Internet Shutdowns: a Report on the Johannesburg Workshop' AFRICA'S INTERNET SHUTDOWNS A R E P O R T O N T H E J O H A N N E S B U R G W O R K S H O P Eleanor Marchant & Nicole Stremlau Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy, University of Oxford 2019 This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 716686, ConflictNET). Open Access. Some rights reserved. (2019) We encourage the circulation of this work as widely as possible. Anybody can access the content without charge, and anybody can dowload this work. This is subject to the terms of our Creative Commons license. Its conditions are: • The author(s) are credited • The text is not altered and is used in full • The work is not resold • A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to the authors To find out more go to www.creativecommons.org HOW TO CITE THIS WORK? Marchant, E., & Stremlau, N. (2019). Africa's Internet Shutdowns: A report on the Johannesburg Workshop. Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), University of Oxford. This document is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs. For more information or questions about the report, please contact the authors individually. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY INTRODUCTION 3 14 THE ROOTS OF INTERNET SHUTDOWNS 6 VARYING MODES OF Justifications INTERNET Motivations & Power Relations SHUTDOWNS The Power of the Courts The Power of the Private Sector The Power of Traditional Media & the Public Non-Governmental Causes 9 THE IMPACT OF INTERNET 22 NORMATIVE SHUTDOWNS CONSIDERATIONS Economic Impact Socio-Political Impact 24 CONCLUSION 26 REFERENCES 30 APPENDIX EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Internet shutdowns – where access to the Overall, during the workshop, despite the internet is cut off within a country’s borders – rising instances of internet shutdowns in are not a new phenomenon; it is the increasing Africa, the urgent need for more research scope and scale that make this an urgent issue. became apparent, particularly research that In India, there were more than 130 separate looks in-depth at the social, political, instances of government-ordered internet economic, and legal contexts in which internet shutdowns in 2018; while the African blockages are embedded and the very continent holds the record for the longest different types of shutdowns that occur. The shutdowns, with countries like Cameroon and work of advocacy organizations serves a Chad as particularly notable cases. Choosing function in increasing public awareness, but to shut off access to the internet is choosing a the debate on this complex issue requires particularly blunt instrument, one that more nuance and time-consuming research appeals to certain governments, but also one than many advocacy organizations have the that is unlikely to persist or remain unchanged resources to do. As a result, this report is as governments increase their surveillance intended to help provide a basis for guiding capacity and improve their more targeted future work; it offers both insights on the tools for co-opting and manipulating public discussions that took place during the two-day opinion. workshop and a review of the important research that does exist. In addition, below we Given the urgency of this issue in the African offer a few key suggestions that emerged from context, a workshop on internet shutdowns the workshop about the direction we believe was jointly convened by the University of research needs to go. Such research could not Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media only help advocacy organizations, but also Law & Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal policymakers grappling with building Studies and the University of Johannesburg’s regulatory frameworks to keep up with the School of Communication in 2018 in rapid technological advancements happening Johannesburg. It hosted two dozen around the world. participants across the continent representing a wide array of academic disciplines and Internet shutdowns should be treated as a practitioner fields, including from law, spectrum rather an on/off switch communications, and computer science disciplines, and from the legal, advocacy, and Internet shutdowns should not be treated as technology sectors. Countries discussed homogeneous. Rather, they exist on a included: Burundi, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, spectrum – varying along dimensions such as Morocco, South Sudan, Uganda, and duration, breadth, depth, speed, and Zimbabwe. frequency. Treating them as such allows that discussion to stay engaged with changing debates about the evolving, and competing, norms governing the internet. Impact of shutdowns: More attention to the less military. Focusing on the kinds of power relations visible impacts of shutdowns is needed that exist and how power is exerted between them could provide productive insights into opaque There are a number of studies that focus on the government decision-making processes. economic impact of shutdowns. Yet, while the economic argument may work for governments with Normative issues: A broader debate about the a higher internet penetration rate, it may be less balance between protecting human rights online effective for others, particularly when concerns and protecting security is needed about national security, violent conflict, or terrorism are at the forefront (and have their own economic Despite vocal condemnations of internet shutdowns, impact). More research is needed that looks at the particularly from human rights organizations, the other dimensions of impact, including, for example, acceptability of some forms of internet restriction the impact on those in the poorest communities who appears to be on the rise. Following the violent lack access to the internet to begin with. attack in Sri Lanka, a handful of those who had long advocated for a free and open internet wrote Root of shutdowns: More attention to the role of approvingly in outlets like the New York Times and non-governmental actors is needed the Guardian about the government’s decision to restrict access during the attack in the hopes of In popular debates about the causes of internet minimizing the spread of misinformation. With shutdowns, governments are almost always seen as scandals like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s the perpetrators. Yet existing research and the role in perpetuating the Rohingya genocide, the era debate at the workshop show how varied the causes of seeing social media’s impact on the world as can be – from the unintentional, including severe necessarily positive has long passed. Given such weather and accidentally severed cables, to the changes, we believe a broadened debate about intentional but non-governmental, such as foreign internet shutdowns is greatly needed. One that government attacks, rogue hackers, or ISP led slow- takes us away from the previous polarization pitting downs. Even where governments are the causes, civil society and human rights advocates and social more attention needs to be payed to the role of media companies on the one side against other actors to help understand why governments governments on the other, and instead towards a make the choices they do. The role and power of a debate that takes into account the very real range of different stakeholders should be challenges many states face about how to protect considered, from the courts to mainstream the safety of their citizens at the same time as journalists, sitting government officials to political protecting human rights. candidates, domestic publics to foreign publics, and local ISPs to international social media companies, to the likes of even terrorist organizations and the INOTRUODRUCTION Internet shutdowns are not a new phenomenon; it is the increasing scope and scale that make this an urgent issue. Debates over whether there should be a ‘kill switch’ for the internet, particularly in the context of cyberwarfare, have emerged in a range of jurisdictions (including thPe US, UEK, andR TurkeyF). WhiOle much hRas beenM written aAbout theN censorsChip stratEegies of authoritarian governments, less focus has been given to the choices some make to shut off access to the internet. It is the totality, the bluntness, and the intentionality of shutdowns that stand them apart from more targeted efforts at censorship, whether blocking certain websites, arresting particular bloggers, or making it a crime to post messages about an unfolding event on social media. The current one is likely a unique moment in the life of internet shutdowns. They are a tool that appeals to certain governments but also one that is unlikely to persist or remain as popular as governments increase their surveillance capacity and improve their more targeted tools for co- opting and manipulating public opinion. More subtle tactics are gaining traction such as the unleashing of troll armies on critics that can involve many people adopting fake identities and flooding social media or particular forums with a specific message and the intention to drown out opposing voices. Bots, or automated programmes, have also been effective at distorting conversations by overwhelming certain platforms with misinformation and fake news. The growing concern is, as some have argued, not censorship or the restriction of voices but actually too much information, much of it low quality and even harmful, and the competition inherent in the modern attention economy. Governments are increasingly finding innovative ways of discouraging the use of certain social media platforms through creating networks of incentives and disincentives, whether by the implementation of social media taxes, as seen in Uganda, or through the use of social credit – looking at a variety of aspects of citizen’s behaviour both on and offline – growing in influence in China. The legacy of internet shutdowns is chequered. The trend towards using them as a tactic for managing protests really gained traction after their use in Egypt in 2011. As protests against Hosni Mubarak gained steam, the government shut off domestic access to the internet by closing four of the country’s major internet service providers (ISPs) (Richtel, 2011).
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