
Uganda has rolled out a 5-cent daily tax to access social media - djug
http://time.com/5328463/uganda-social-media-tax/
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gandi_boi
This tax is meant to curb political discussions and a one Tom Voltaire
Okwalinga , presumably a hacker whose main platform was Facebook and he was
always leaking the illegitimate governments secrets, since they don't have the
technical skills to find him and after wasting millions of dollars to
scammers, the old man devised a plan to stop the people from accessing the
platform itself. This guy has got the president , his family and tribes-mate ,
booty lickers and his party members by the balls that they get to discuss him
in tribe , party meetings and the parliament of all places.But the grand plot
of their scheme is to prevent an uprising fueled by social media Long story
short, if you happen to pay for the tax, they will link your IP to your mobile
money wallet which is linked to your simcard who's operators have details of
you national ID , and like that , you get to disappear(tortured if lucky and
worst of all whacked) for the comment you made or the post you shared or liked
made against the government.

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tern
> By making people pay for using these platforms, this tax will render these
> avenues of communication inaccessible for low income earners, robbing many
> people of their right to freedom of expression, with a chilling effect on
> other human rights

It's difficult for me to take this seriously having seen the effect of 10
years of social media on the US. I would personally welcome such a tax, and
from my perspective, if anything, it disproportionately _benefits_ the poor.

~~~
comboy
"Uganda is one of the poorest nations in the world. In 2012, 37.8 percent of
the population lived on less than $1.25 a day."[1] So if you are making $100K
per year, this tax would be equivalent to giving away $40K of that for using
social media.

Context matters. I don't know anything about Uganda, but maybe different
political situation is causing them to use social media more as unbiased news
sources rather than discussing dress colors.

If you feel like this kind of tax would benefit you, then you can likely
arrange it, on your own, or with a help of some 3rd party and send X to
charity for each day when you checked the social media (HN counts right? gov
said it counts - so it counts, no discussion).

Unrelated but I think the strategy above is not a good one if you want to
spend less time using social media. For me just sitting back and thinking what
do you really want works best.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda#Economy_and_infrastruct...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda#Economy_and_infrastructure)

~~~
tmpz22
I think you skewed your math.

If you live on $1.25 in Uganda and spend $0.05 per day you will be spending %4
of your "daily spend" on social media. In the United States [1] the average
spend is $154 per day equating to a $6.16 social media tax... or about the
cost the average bay area tech employee spends on coffee per day. Thats adds
up to $2,248 NOT $40,000 per year...

I would support this tax in the U.S. (as long as a large percentage is legally
required to go to education, medical, and social services). I probably would
not support taxation in Uganda targeted at the lower or middle class though.

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/On-how-many-dollars-does-the-
average-A...](https://www.quora.com/On-how-many-dollars-does-the-average-
American-live-off-of-each-day)

~~~
comboy
Yes, I counted for $0.5 not $0.05, so I got 40% instead of 4%. Big difference,
I'm sorry.

~~~
natecavanaugh
While the math does distract from the overall point a little, I think you're
right in that context matters. If the the government (or private corporations)
made a Social Network package that blocked access to any social networking
sites unless you pay an extra 4k per year (or raising it by 333 dollars per
month, we'd all be having a heart attack. Even if we used the more common avg
of salaries and said 4% of 50k per year, just to go on Facebook, you gotta
believe people are gonna be enraged.

~~~
tmpz22
FWIW I agree people would be enraged initially. But I believe shortly after
they'd realize "hey I don't really need this". And the world would be a better
place for it.

~~~
pavelludiq
I know multiple minimum wage workers who nonetheless spend a significant
portion of their income on tobacco products, all of them taxed at enormous
percentages. Taxation is literally the worst addiction cure in existence with
0 evidence that it works(and quite a bit of evidence that it does not and
disproportionately hurts the poor).

"hey I don't really need this" is such a naive westie hipster take at it's not
even funny. People do actually need social media, poor people and
underprivileged communities especially. Your relative is working abroad? You
need social media, your community suffers from serious corruption, you need
social media. Natural disasters happen in your area often? You need social
media. You need to find someone to barter with for old used items because you
have no credit card access? social media can help you. You work in the city
and need to make your way back home to the country on weekends? Car pooling
groups are a life saver.

Social media globally is a tremendous net benefit to humanity. Just because
the biggest ones are run by horrible SV oligarchs and infested with state
security unscrupulous spammers and that some users can't seem to keep their
face out of their phone doesn't mean the thing is bad, just that it has costs.

This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not
meant to actually help anyone, I'm confused how supposedly well educated
thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

~~~
bachbach
> People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged
> communities especially.

Lower classes need time, money and knowledge. None of that comes out of social
media, even LinkedIn is a big reach.

I'm blue collar myself by the way. The attention spans of my coworkers are
shot and the younger they are the worse it gets. You're supposed to have a
short term memory of about 5-7 items - today it's about 2-3. That's an immense
cost.

If you talk of groups with intense focus like the forums peripheral to some
activity - that is completely different to what social media is.

You know what blue collar workers need? Self Driving cars. Silicon Valley
should concentrate on making that deliverable because it is itself distracted.

> This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not
> meant to actually help anyone

Sure but often immoral motives have positive side affects.

If the Internet went down tomorrow for about a week, I wager the general
sentiment would that of relief. It could be an annual holiday from the
information stream.

It's like how when people stop watching television news they become less
neurotic.

As the phrase attention economy implies, there are limits, and for many people
the Internet has been a DOS on their brains.

> I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a
> good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

Probably because we think the world's an ecology and not a us vs them
dialectic.

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forkLding
They should have rolled this tax out for plastic straws and bags, to reduce
the waste output for things that have sustainable alternatives that dont
require constant consumption.

