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In November 2019 Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey tweeted from Addis Ababa airport, Ethiopia that he would move to “Africa” for up to six months in 2020. His high monthly tour of the continent, where he visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia, was coming to an end and the billionaire felt sad. “Africa will determine the future (especially bitcoin!),” He wrote. Kovid will interfere with his trip, although in 2020 he managed to hang out with Jay-Z in the Hamptons, Hawaii and on a yacht, and in January 2021 he is considering banning Donald Trump from Twitter while on holiday in French Polynesia. Then, two years and two days after announcing his second messianic visit to Africa, Dorsey resigned as chief executive. We never learned where in Africa he might have meant. We know that his arrogance and failures in three of the four countries he initially visited will have a significant impact on his legacy on the continent.
In the West, Twitter under Dorsey from 2015 to 2021 often looked like an acidic, hate-fueled, raging fire in a garbage can. But what Westerners got was the platinum version of Twitter. This is the version made by people who take their civic problems seriously, because these problems are also theirs. Misinformation, hate speech and platform manipulation are much worse in my corner of the world, and Dorsey’s legacy in Africa is even more contemptuous and hypocritical than his legacy in the Western world.
In April 2021, nearly 15 years after Twitter was live on the continent, the company announced it would open its first physical presence in Africa, a regional headquarters in Accra, Ghana. “Twitter is already on the continent,” Dorsey tweeted emoji on the flag of Ghana. However, its presence is weak. The vacancies listed on Twitter in Accra were mainly in advertising, engineering and communications. It remains unclear how many people from his trust and security teams or the integrity of the Twitter platform he plans to send. In fact, Twitter’s sub-Saharan Africa policy management team is based in Europe. Like Google and Facebook before them, it quickly became clear that this new development would hardly involve helping Africans defend freedom of speech or repel authoritarian governments. Twitter’s headquarters in Africa is not for Africans. This is actually a colonial post erected to ensure that the data and money that Twitter extracts from the continent is maintained. And the boundaries of this office will be tested again and again later this year, as Twitter has been used to sow discontent around several African countries.
Dorsey treats Nigeria in particular as a convenience link. In 2020, many Nigerians applauded his tweets calling for donations for efforts to end the state’s regime of police brutality (#EndSARS). But his advocacy was inconsistent, as Twitter itself seemed to ignore repeated calls from Nigerian journalists, researchers and activists to mark or ban many scams and misleading allegations about #EndSARS and other abuses that spread on the platform. Then, just two months after the opening of the African Twitter office, Nigerian President Muhammadu Bukhari banned Twitter in the country for four months. This came after the platform deleted one of Bukhari’s tweets for violating the platform’s abuse policy, but a spokesman for the president was quick to point out that the ban was much more than a tweet. “There have been many problems with the social media platform in Nigeria, where misinformation and fake news spread through it have had violent consequences in the real world,” the spokesman said in an email to Bloomberg. “The company has been avoiding responsibility all along.” It’s awkward to agree with an authoritarian’s spokesman, but he was right.
Perhaps nowhere in Africa has Dorsey’s Twitter failed more than in Ethiopia. As in Nigeria, the platform finds itself in a difficult position with an authoritarian government that regularly interrupts the Internet amid escalating civil war. Last month, the platform announced that it was deactivating its popular function throughout Ethiopia, ostensibly to quell threats of harm. “Incitement to violence or dehumanization of people is against our rules,” the company explained in a tweet. “We hope that this measure will reduce the risk of coordination, which could lead to violence or harm. This is a strange, reverse reasoning. Make no mistake: Although Dorsey would never explicitly admit it by removing the trend section it was admission of guilt. Twitter has realized that it cannot control the speed with which it increases hateful content. But instead of acknowledging that he designed the Trends algorithm to be easily armed and making hate speech highly portable, or noting that he would make deliberate efforts to improve function, he effectively blamed the Ethiopians (for using the function, as designed). Here, too, Twitter has borrowed from the colonial book: Blame Africans for the damage the colonizers have done to Africans.
There is a tendency to the problem with Twitter trends; this also harms Kenyans. In my own research with the Mozilla Foundation, I explored how Twitter’s trend algorithm has helped the hiring disinformation industry thrive in Kenya and Kenyan journalists suffer wave after wave of attacks. When Pandora’s documents intervened the Kenyan president for millions of dollars hidden in offshore accounts, propagandists used Twitter to spread public discontent. When I reported my findings on Twitter, the best thing the platform did was that this was a typical mole approach, stopping or deleting some of the accounts in violation, which I and my fellow researchers identified, but did not clarify what if there is something that would prevent the spread of propaganda.
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