Society Magazine

DRC: Mobile Phone Service Providers Restore SMS & Mobile Internet But Continue To Block Facebook & Twitter

Posted on the 08 February 2015 by Aengw @alexengwete
Major telephone service providers in the Democratic Republic of Congo--including TIGO, VODACOM, and ORANGE--announced with much fanfare at the week's end they'd be restoring SMS and Mobile Internet services, blocked at the request of government since the riots of January 19, respectively on February 7 and 8.
There was a caveat that these phone service providers failed to mention to their customers: social media--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--would continue to be blocked.
These companies ought to come clean and confess to their outraged customers that they're continuing to be coerced by the government to infringe on users and citizens' rights to free access to information and the Internet.
The sooner they'd do this the better, or else they'd be seen as willing participants in the outrageous censorship of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on Mobile Internet. 
At least one  of those phone service providers, ORANGE, in which the French government owns controlling shares, is known to have aided and abetted Internet censorship in Ethiopia in 2012 by deploying Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of all Internet traffic in that country. (See my post of June 11, 2012: http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2012/06/ethiopia-cyber-dragnet-tor-project.html?m=1)

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