Globally, social media is credited for substantively changing the course of affairs.
Humanity has grown to accept and pattern its life around the ultra-dynamic fabric enabled by the fast and functional global interconnectedness through social media. As such, while social media is a tool for building personal bonds among family and friends, it plays a role in the large scale integration of people as well as expression of their socio-political opinions, at all societal levels.
Political opinions flood social media today, as it is too many, a safer and quicker avenue to express how they feel and what they envision in relation to the public affairs and politics.
In social media public opinion is built by evidence-based consensus. When an injustice is published on social media, it influences how the collective response of people who access social media will be towards whoever is responsible.
Ideally, for interest of safety in online spaces, participation in social media is regulated to ensure that all users are real, verifiable, and safe, and the platform is not misused under cover of privacy.
However, browsing through Tanzania’s popular social media accounts such as those of social and political commentators, influencers and political actors, one immediately notices comments by fake accounts, or human-operated “bots.”
These bots replicate their political opinion all over these comment spaces. These comments are repeated such that sometimes a fake account has over 20 repeated comments on one post, hence flooding the comment sections to suffocate normal comments.
They do this mostly for posts of leaders, especially when there are many people who express dissatisfaction and disagreement in those spaces. In normal circumstances, comments from real people are linked to real accounts that have a sense of permanence and identity, with at least evidence of continued use and a community around them, or things they like, etc. But the uniqueness of this new downpour is that these fake accounts are often publicly tagged “new,” with very few followers (less than 20), and linked to a bunch of similar accounts.
This online tug of war between normal people and anonymous keyboard warriors behind fake accounts that are pro X party leave more questions than answers because of the unnatural desperation, especially for the latter, who are oftentimes also pouring insults and even unimaginable threats.
The very existence of these accounts, and the silence of regulatory authorities on the same, validates a conclusion that our socio-political life needs an overhaul.
In posts that ask critical questions, these fake accounts pour repeated comments in praise of their leader, and the importance of protecting “peace” in the country. Same accounts are used to publish extremely negative comments: threats, harassment, insults, and abuses against critics.
Similar accounts also take sides of certain religions, attempting to make political problems to be religious ones and instigating a religious conflict.
Same accounts have been used to manipulate the closure of accounts of critics by mass-reporting, or what experts call ‘brigading,’ which is a kind of cyberbullying.
The questions remain: ‘Why are the questions asked by the critics not answered?’, and secondly: ‘Who is the beneficiary of this commotion in public online spaces?’
As a regular internet user, the human-operated “bots” disaster appears to me as engineered; given the patterns.
Most likely the purpose is to disrupt the trend of critical socio-political maturation that happens via the social media, especially among young people. But again, ‘No one is master of the obvious.’
The current generation of young people ought to remember that freedom in different countries around the world was brought about by young people, through the quality of their opinion, and engagement in politics with genuine intentions to serve their country.
It is a shameful defeat of a generation, if in an age where 75 per cent of the population are below the age of 35, young people are still being bought for political canvasing for peanuts, an evidence of which is the self-sabotage by young people who choose a side different from that which genuinely pursues justice. Young people ought to have a mind of their own, and not to be puppets that are manipulated for little shameful money.
While it is obvious that the human-operated loyalist bots are run by young people, who are jobless, and accept such a shameful task as a job, against the dream of a just society that fellow young people are fighting for, the matter of who is engineering it is open for personal deliberation based on the sides of those bots, and it is beyond the reach of this discourse.
Nonetheless, the huge sums of money spent to silence whistle-blowers, to manipulate media, and to block free expression of political opinions could be diverted to gathering such bits of opinion and working on them. But the latter is not the case.
It is time those in public service answer questions by facts, and not by unfounded political opinions on the obvious.
The whole fiasco of human-operated bots siding anonymously with the ruling circles is not because there is so much to admire, but because there is a desire to hide things.
This dead-on-arrival defensive move is directly linked with injustices that every normal person is mourning about, and which should be addressed responsibly, before we reach a chaotic state of no return.
