By Mohamed T. Massaquoi
The Minister of Information and Communication, Mohamed Rahman Swaray has announced a collaboration between the government of Sierra Leone and the social media giant, Facebook.
Swaray said the collaboration will see the country benefit from programs like digital literacy, cyber security and training for female politicians. He said the development is a result of a meeting he attended two months ago in Kimbima Hotel, where they agreed on a digital road map for the country; which includes digital citizenship, innovation and other related matters.
“We will earnest the powers of Facebook in the partnership to ensure that they train our female politicians. Facebook has been here 15 years now, this is the very first time that they are directly engaging with Sierra Leoneans,” he said.
Swaray was updating the media last week following a meeting with the Regional Policy Representative of Facebook in Freetown. He said that meeting served as an eye opener for many government officials on the role services provided by facebook.
“Almost all the people around the table agreed they didn’t know beyond 20 percent of what this social media platform does, especially Facebook. That visit turned out to be an eye opener, a major rude wakening for Sierra Leoneans to know the kind of things we are missing,” Swaray said, speaking about the meeting with the Facebook representative.
Facebook is the most popular social media app in the world. The platform has up to 2.27 billion users across the world. Facebook also owns smaller companies like Whatsapp and Instagram.
The social media company is currently on an expansion project in Africa by investing in technical capacity of countries.
Social media use is popular in Sierra Leone, especially among young people. This popularity means people have used the platform for good and bad purposes.
Government is in talks to be able to minimize the negative effects of its use in the country. Some critics have expressed fears that this collaboration could be an attempt to censor popular social media platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp.
Government have always denied the allegations, saying it is only trying to sanitize the social media space.
© 2019 Politico Online
