By Nanjala Nyabola THE first month of 2021 was marked by two pivotal political moments across two continents, united by a curious feature of modern communication. In the United States, right-wing extremist groups successfully radicalised, organised and militarised on social media, managing to invade the seat of Congress, while refusing to accept the result of a recent election and threatening the lives of the country’s senior-most lawmakers. And in Uganda, a highly contentious election pitted an increasingly cruel octogenarian president, who refuses to cede power, against a charismatic musician turned politician, young enough to be the former’s grandson. Although the Ugandan incumbent promised a “scientific” election in which tech would be a key factor, instead he flung the entire country back into the pre-digital era for a week using his preferred weapon of late — a national internet shutdown. The double standards in Facebook and Twitter’s Trump ban Two elections united by the changing role of technology in our public spheres more broadly, and specifically the role of social media in hosting and moderating political conversations. In the US, social media has been an enabler of rampant misinformation and hate speech that incubated groups like QAnon who infiltrated the US Capitol. In Uganda, social media was the main platform on which the opposition was able to document the violence of the ruling party, advocate for social change, and organise against the excesses of power. In the US, the social networks de-platformed the now-former President Donald Trump and disabled his accounts. In Uganda, they did the same and President Yoweri Museveni retaliated by banning social media for removing accounts allied to his party before turning off the internet wholesale. Within the first two weeks of 2021, the two extremes of what social media represents in the public sphere were on full display, underscoring how the same approach on the same platforms in different social contexts can have wildly disparate outcomes and implications. Predictably the aftermath of both elections has seen calls to enhance regulation of the social networking platforms. Unfortunately, now that the harms caused by content moderation are finally affecting US national politics, the calls for regulation are also being shaped by US perspectives and interests. It would be a tremendous mistake for rule-making around social networking sites to only take the US experience into account, particularly because activists and analysts from other parts of the world have not only been flagging these issues just as long if not longer, but would have to live with the consequences of any new regulations without the social or economic capital to make them sensitive to local contexts. Basically, we are facing a situation where a choice to ban politicians in the US leads to a choice to ban a dictator who then cracks down on the public sphere in Uganda, while a choice to do nothing results in genocide in Myanmar. Based on their origin myths and in their own descriptions of what