NCA to lift social media ban in next 72 hours

The Director General of the National Communication Authority (NCA), Eng. Napoleon Adok Gai said on Thursday that the ban on social media will be lifted in the next 72 hours, after blurring out and removal of some gruesome video images depicting the killings of South Sudanese in neighboring Sudan.

By Benjamin Takpiny

The Director General of the National Communication Authority (NCA), Eng. Napoleon Adok Gai said on Thursday that the ban on social media will be lifted in the next 72 hours, after blurring out and removal of some gruesome video images depicting the killings of South Sudanese in neighboring Sudan.

 “We took the actions in compliance with Section 9(G) of NCA Act, which emphasized on us to guide the public’s interests in regard to the Internet’s activities. For the last three days, there have been a number of events that the country has witnessed, leading to the protests that resulted in looting of public properties and targeting certain nationals across the country,” said Adok at a press conference in Juba.

Adok said they realized that social media platforms were continuing to circulate inflammatory content that contravenes values and cultures of the country, adding that this forced them to take appropriate measures.

“These measures are combined with other technical effort that is going on; we have consulted the platform operators. Our directives were to suspend Facebook and TikTok features specifically, not the entire social media. We all understand social media is much broader than those two, but we targeted those two applications because they have a high volume of video sharing in our country at this sensitive period that our people are going through,” he disclosed.

Adok added that this decision to block the two social media platforms did not go down well with some members of the public, adding that some citizens, stakeholders and human rights groups have supported the measures taken by NCA to pull down the videos on social media platforms.

 “As a result of these efforts, Meta platforms have been in contact with us and they have taken measures to blur out and also to remove some of those gruesome images that we were really concerned about, and as such, even though we have set the date for 30 days, it means that with this compliance, there is a possibility we can lift the ban on these two social media within the next 72 hours,” he said.

Adok also noted that the intention is not to prevent South Sudanese from accessing information, but to pressure social media companies to remove these inciting and provocative videos depicting the brutal killings of South Sudanese nationals on January 11, in Wad Medani, Sudan.

“Our intention was not to give you a blackout. Our intention is to target the major distributors of these two social media content, which is Facebook and TikTok, for which  certain cache servers are within our country, so these cache servers were our target and those who are operating them have effectively complied with this and they are working with us collectively to find a solution. Our country, of course, does not have a centralized monitoring system,” he said.

Adok said that there are people who are still accessing Facebook and Tiktok platforms using VPN tunnels.

“We know that if you are responsible enough to install VPN and access that content, you will be responsible enough not to disseminate those gruesome videos. So you are not actually the target. And we are trying to deny the young people from accessing those videos. Now that we are cleaning, we are getting a good feedback from Meta and from TikTok. We are looking forward to resume the work as soon as all the data that we are targeting has been removed,” he revealed.

Adok noted that they are in consultations with all the other stakeholders in the government, media authority and access to information and the security sectors.

“We would like to appeal to the public that when you identify some gruesome images that you think are not good, you should report it to the Meta, he said, adding  that Meta has the algorithm that will be able to respond based on the number of reported users.

“I can reveal to you that we have a total of 2.7 million South Sudanese who access social media, at least who access Facebook and TikTok combined. So if all of us, this 2 million, at least a quarter of us report, identify and report those images, then the social media platform would regulate itself naturally without anybody intervening”

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