The Committee to Nuke Elysium

With the exception of Ethiopia, which blocks a number of political and security-related websites, and a few cases of isolated Internet censorship related to political events, most of sub-Saharan Africa has historically been free of technical filtering. This week, however, the government of Uganda wrote to the heads of three of the country’s major ISPs asking them to block Facebook and “Tweeter” [sic] “to eliminate the connection and sharing of information that incites the public.” The request comes on the heels of a week of opposition protests over rising fuel and food prices. The protests have been widely advertised on Twitter using the hashtag #walk2work, and opposition leaders Kizza Besigye and Norbert Mao, among others, have been repeatedly arrested.