[4b11b4]

This should be an extremely high profile piece of news...

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..

[oefrha]

Did you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

[notavalleyman]

Wagner* and russia's Libya intervention to continuously arm and support general khalifa haftar against the internationally recognised government

[rbanffy]

Usually it’s only the propaganda outlets that get blocked, not all internet access.

[LAC-Tech]

I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.

I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.

[ForTheKidz]

> It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.

[pc86]

These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets.

That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.

[oefrha]

> These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time

Yet they’re still largely unknown. So the thought that reporting Internet interruptions in Africa => people all over planet earth will be talking about that in real life is just strange.

[technothrasher]

"That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger."

Also known as the fallacy of relative privation. This line of reasoning quickly leads to the conclusion that only bad thing worth caring about is the absolute worst thing happening.

[bilbo0s]

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

The issue is that no one would care.

There are children being sold into sexual slavery and you don't get that kind of reaction. You're definitely not going to get it because some random InstaSnapTwit in Nigeria can't get his fart app to work.

[alephnerd]

In most countries, "curfews" are viewed as a justified legal construct. In most cases, internet shutdowns are clubbed with general curfews as well.

You see this especially in most of the former British colonies listed that continue to use British Colonial Era legislation for Law and Order. You see this is South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar), and much of Africa (eg. Nigeria, Kenya) as well

It's the classic "collectivist" versus "individualist" split, and it's something only individual countries can decide.

[pabs3]

These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.

https://ooni.org/

[timewizard]

This is Africa. So the first question you should ask yourself is "do they even have electricity 24 hours of the day?" The answer is generally "they're lucky to get 8 hours in a day."

I mean, it's a disappointing that Facebook isn't available in Uganda, but I think there are some bigger ticket items on the continent to be concerned with first.

[rbanffy]

At least in Brazil, blocks are limited to specific IP ranges and happen because companies defy court orders to hand over publisher data the court considers illegal - irregular electoral propaganda, misinformation campaigns, etc. Rumble, AFAIK, is blocked in Brazil right now. Twitter and WhatsApp were blocked more than once.