PGC – Ethiopia has announced it intends on building its own social media platforms to prevent silicon valley from determining what is truth and what is good. They are not the first to make this move. China was the first, and they certainly won’t be the last. The reason why has to do with the personal needs of the leaders of the nation-states these platforms are now controlling by controlling their public discouse. These individuals saw the writing on the wall back in 2020.
When Facebook and Twitter moved to check the social media access of the American President of the United States, many leaders around the world, even if they might openly celebrate the move, took serious pause and asked themselves this question, “How much power do these international social media companies have to affect our national sovereignty?”
Well, that’s the dishonest question they ask themselves, the one that preserves their nobility and prevents them from seeing the self-centered motivation behind the concern. Every leader looks into the mirror and sees Alexander the Great. It’s hard to be Alexander the Great when a power that is located in foreign lands has the ability to alter your political fortune by the particular ideology or morality it chooses to enforce upon your lands.
I predicted at the time that nations would be moving in short order to nationalize their social media platforms. China is far ahead of the rest of the world in this regard, having rejected American Silicon Valley expansion and choosing to develop their own CCP-approved social media platforms inhouse. Their social media platforms are already nationalized.
Outside of China, my suspiicion was the nations that would choose such a route would be the less powerful ones, just as I thought it would be the less powerful nations willing to take more dramatic chances with cryptocurrencies (which we see in El Salvador, which has made it the legal tender of their land). Ethiopia is just such a nation, and it has a real need to control narratives as it is in the midst of a civl war that feeds on the extreme fears and hopes of peoples who have suffered authentic injustices.
Ethiopia has been battling with Facebook over what it censors and what it does not, so now, it’s had enough. It has decided to develop its own social media network, something well within the capacity of most nation-states, even the smaller ones. The biggest expense in social media is in the servers and the human monitors. If your platform is serving only one nation, your cost of operation goes down to levels that allow almost any nation-state, and many larger free associative groups (if they so chose, and they will,in time, they will) can afford to develop and support.
The leadership of Ethiopia might not be proponents of free speech themselves, but they are the first of a small few among many to follow among nation-states to take the route that they are choosing now. The balkanization of the internet is coming, and Silicon Valley’s hubristic assumptions it could play God with morality and truth is to blame for creating the conditions that made it worth the investment of nation-stations to blunt. Nation-states are led by individuals, individuals that look in the mirror and see Alexander the Great, a man that would never tolerate the gordian knot of distant power controlling nation-state public discourse and opinion, that’s Alexander’s job, not yours.
Alexander would march to the Silicon Valley and shell it to a fine powder. Short of that, he would build walls to keep it out, even if it meant he had to build new digital roads within.
Ethiopia to build local rival to Facebook, other platforms
From www.reuters.com
2021-08-23 12:02:00
Excerpt:
ADDIS ABABA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Ethiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency said on Monday.
Ethiopia has been engulfed since last year in an armed conflict pitting the federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls the Tigray region in the country’s north.
Supporters of both sides have waged a parallel war of words on social media.
The government wants its local platform to “replace” Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Zoom, the director general of the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), Shumete Gizaw,
said.
Shumete accused Facebook of deleting posts and user accounts which he said were “disseminating the true reality about Ethiopia”.
International human rights groups have criticized the Ethiopian government for unexplained shutdowns to social media services including Facebook…
