26 Oct 2017

Vice President, Mr Mokgweetsi Masisi has cautioned Batswana against using social media platforms for unproductive activities.

Giving a keynote address during a social media and cyber security symposium yesterday, Mr Masisi said while it was gratifying that internet usage, in particular the use of social media platforms was growing phenomenally in Botswana, it was disheartening that productivity was on the decline.

He said productivity indices continued to single out productivity as the country’ single biggest challenge for global competitiveness, something which he said meant that the majority of users of social media platforms used it for non-productive purposes.

The vice president, who is also MP for Moshupa-Manyana, said according to productivity indicators, Batswana’s use of digital technology was not yielding positive results, saying it was consequently imperative for the nation to begin to appreciate sufficiently, like other people in other parts of the world, the value of social media.

On the one hand, Mr Masisi said while social media networks had created enhanced platforms for intimate discourse on a global scale, they lacked the traditional safeguards of the professional human element in the form of gate-keepers.

“But more than anything else, you would see that these platforms are somewhat devoid of attributes of humanity,” he said; observing that because of their facelessness and insensitivity, some of their users assumed that they were unidentifiable and could thus do as they please

Here, he indicated, was where legal instruments came in, to bring under check those users who felt that because of their facelessness in social media, they could act without regard to the law.

Sharing statistics on internet usage, the vice president said, while generally Africans’ usage of digital technology was low with only 160 million people, translating into 15 per cent of the continent’s population, regularly used the internet; the figures for Botswana looked impressive.

The low levels of access, he said, were indicative of the fact that Africans were as a result, disproportionately disadvantaged comparative to people of other continents.

He indicated that according to Statistics Botswana’s 2014 survey, 40.6 per cent of Botswana’s population had internet access, and 94.3 per cent of the internet traffic was through cellphones.

Mr Masisi said of the total, 78.4 per cent access social media platforms.

He said the International Communications Union reported that there were currently 923 528 internet users in Botswana, compared to about 15 000 individual users in the year 2000.

“So the sheer scope, the intensity and the rate of growth is phenomenal relative to our population size and our geographic spread,” he noted.

On the notion of fake news, Vice President Masisi observed that news was only fake to the extent to which it was perceived as such.

“Fake news is only as fake as it is perceived to be fake, or is only as fake as it has been generated to be fake, because the minute it gets to a consumer who is unsuspecting or uninformed, it is not fake news,” he said, stating that what then mattered was one’s ethical conduct and professional determination of what they projected as content.

For his part, the director of public prosecutions,. Mr Stephen Tiroyakgosi noted that cyber space created an environment for interesting human stories, some of which were good, some in between and some outright evil.

Indicating that in Botswana the Electronic Evidence Act was one legal instrument through which criminal activities in cyber space were being addressed; he pointed out however that the law was a step behind and could thus not keep pace with criminal conduct.

Mr Tiroyakgosi attributed the status quo to the process through which laws were passed.

Acting CEO of the Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, Mr Tshoganetso Kepaletswe implored Batswana to protect themselves while in cyber space the same way they did in the physical world.

He said while people did not easily hand over their personal details to strangers in the physical world, they did so without a whim in cyber space.

Mr Kepaletswe, who also spoke on cyber security, underscored the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration on issues pertaining to activities taking place in cyber space.

He said public awareness was also important to ensure that members of the public did not continue to fall prey to cyber criminals.

One of the speakers at the symposium was South Africa’s Advocate Gerrie Nel, who led the prosecution team in the famous Oscar Pistorius case. ENDS