Cambridge Analytica, the disgraced intelligence and data-driven communications firm at the center of the Facebook political data scandals and subsequent British and U.S. investigations, has re-emerged with an Egyptian as its sole investor and a focus on the Middle East and Africa. The new company, Auspex International, will keep former…
Facebook users were hit with a global service failure early Wednesday evening, with reports of outages from Egypt and European countries alongside those from wide swaths of Asia and North America. The outage began shortly after 5 p.m. in Cairo, with Facebook as well as Instagram users affected. As users…
Kenyan officials have proposed new regulations that would impose a fine, jail time or both for using mobile SMS and social media platforms to promote “dissemination of undesirable political messages.” Kenyan citizens are encouraged to anonymously report “potential inflammatory content,” a move that could add even more contention to a…
There are 170 million Facebook users on the African continent, including some 70 percent of people who are online, and most of them are familiar with features like “Safety Check” in times of a natural disaster or emergency. That’s true, for example, in the ongoing Western Cape wildfires where Facebook Safety…
Social media users who depend on Facebook and Twitter found themselves shutdown on Tuesday morning as a wide swath of Asia, parts of Australia and the Pacific West Coast of the United States experienced Facebook outages. And Twitter outages. And Instagram outages. The real-time outage map at Down Detector showed…
Top Facebook executive Chris Cox visited Ghana on Wednesday, part of a weeklong visit to three West African nations to connect with tech entrepreneurs. Cox, the Chief Product Officer for Facebook, checked out the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra to share ideas about innovation and business development….
Last month South Africans voiced their discontent over the country’s Telecommunications and Postal Services request to regulate over-the-top (OTT) services such as WhatsApp and Skype. Now, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have come out in support of South Africans fighting the proposed policy. In a meeting held on January 26 at…
Facebook is working with the French satellite operator, Eutelsat, to launch a satellite that will send Internet connectivity to 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The satellite is set to launch next year with service starting in the second half of 2016. The satellite named Amos-6 will be used to provide…
Facebook is set to open its first African offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, in July 2015. Nicolas Mandelsohn, Facebook’s Vice President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa told Bloomberg News that Africa “is one of the places where our next billion users are coming from. It would be a…