Uproar as Uganda telecom companies implement mobile money, social media taxes

Honestly, all censorship and free speech ideas aside, I wonder if a small socia media tax could be net positive on American society? Especially in terms of relieving diminished attention spans, etc.

I have decreased my own personal usage by adding a "time tax" — I always log out after a brief session on Twitter/Facebook/etc. I also use 2FA everywhere so there's extra friction in logging back in. That extra 30 seconds of effort can be enough to say "nah, I don't need to check Twitter twice today".

To bring it back to the anglosphere, I predict mass anger towards the hobbling of social media companies by Western governments if it occurs. We have all these conversations amongst ourselves about the evils of these communication facilitating companies, often with good reason. But we should be cognizant that only the squeaky wheels are squeaking and the general public is happy with their communication platforms. Take the elitist approach of telling them what's good for them and affect their uses and the tides will turn. Not in mass media or on sites like this one, but groundswells of annoyed yet still mostly silent masses will make conscious decisions where they can and elitists will not understand what happened.

Great question! It depends what the goal of the tax is. Is the goal of the tax to raise revenue or to give the state more visibility on how its subjects use social media?

If the objective is in fact the latter objective of gaining information, having a small direct tax might be sufficient to cover the costs of setting up a new bureaucracy to more closely monitor the online activities of subjects.

In some sense, such a tax would essentially serve the same purpose as the global tax on wealth suggested by Thomas Piketty at the end of "Capital in the 21st Century". Piketty suggested that initially, some countries could decree a very low tax on wealth -- I forget the exact number, but let's say it's a 0.01% annual tax on wealth. This would require setting up all of the bureaucratic apparatus to measure and tax wealth, which as a side effect would produce a huge volume of new information that researchers, policy-makers and regulators could use as inputs to make more informed decisions about future taxation policy or controls for offshore tax evasion, etc.

See also James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State".

Of course, another objective might not be to monitor people but instead simply make it more irritating for subjects to use social media, by requiring them to first get permission from a government bureaucracy. This would discourage people from using mainstream social media and push them into something else (smaller niche services, encrypted chat, coup-d'etat, ...)

If aspects of it have the same addictive effects as cocaine, why not tax it like other vices but in this case use the revenue to address the problems which surface.

I’m saying if they are going to do this, let’s do it again n a fashion such that we might glean useful information which could benefit all users.

I wonder what is more taxing - (A) Government's social media tax or (B) One's daily time spent on these social media platforms

For me it is definitely (B). I keep off Facebook but once in a while I get into it because an email appears "XYZ posted a new photo". Tempted to see the photo, I logon to Facebook and then I lose control - I surf through the endless news feed clicking those click bait headlines and funny videos. And an hour or more just flies by. Just like that I lost my time and some of my energy. Fortunately I am able to resist the temptation to comment on FB stuff.