Papua New Guinea Bans Facebook For a Month To Root Out 'Fake Users' (theguardian.com)

The Papua New Guinean government will ban Facebook for a month in a bid to crack down on "fake users" and study the effects the website is having on the population. From a report: The communication minister, Sam Basil, said the shutdown would allow his department's analysts to carry out research and analysis on who was using the platform, and how they were using it, admits rising concerns about social well-being, security and productivity. "The time will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images, users that post false and misleading information on Facebook to be filtered and removed," Basil told the Post Courier newspaper. "This will allow genuine people with real identities to use the social network responsibly." Basil has repeatedly raised concerns about protecting the privacy of PNG's Facebook users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, which found Facebook had leaked the personal data of tens of millions of users to a private company. The minister has closely followed the US Senate inquiry into Facebook.

Comments

Ummm...

[thesupraman]

Does one somehow exclude the other? Hard to see your point here.

This guys job is 'Communications Minister', probably not his remit.
Seems like a pretty sensible idea anyway, Hopefully they simply forget to re-enable it.

Utterly Incorrect.

[mjwx]

PNG (Papua New Guinea) was an Australian Mandate for a long time. The country was on a slow and steady pathway to development and independence (keep in mind cannibalism was still practiced widely there until the 20th century). Then in the 70s, a bunch of do-gooder Australians hijacked the process in the midst of other native independence campaigns worldwide, and dumped independence on PNG even though they were still unprepared. It resulted in things like ministers and senior bureaucrats without a high school education being selected. So, PNG still has a long way to go, though they would have been in a better place if they were an Australian Mandate. I guess banning Facebook and focusing people on work and productivity is probably a good move.

And other such lies... Are you a member of Reclaim Australia, Patriots Front or other such FB Racist groups (yes, I'm calling a spade a spade, they're racists)?

PNG was a former Dutch colony until after WWII where the UN became involved for a number of years before a highly suspect vote joined PNG to Indonesia (which many Papuans rejected, so there is resistance to Indonesian control to this day). Australia never "owned" or "mandated" PNG, in fact we were barely involved beyond supporting the Dutch via the UN in their bid to create a Papuan national identity (towards an independent PNG).