Ethiopia blocks social media so that the kids can study well

Remember how all TVs and radios fall used to silent in households where a child is preparing for an impending boards exam? Well, the Ethiopian government is employing the same tactics to see its students shine in theirs. The country has blocked social media sites across the country after university entrance exams were announced, saying the ban was to prevent students being distracted from studying during the exam period.

The blocked sites include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Viber, and will be unavailable for several days while university entrance exams are taken, a government spokesman said.

Ethiopia was among the first African countries to censor the internet, and opposition blogs and human rights websites are frequently blocked. Social media sites have gone down in Ethiopia before but only for a matter of hours, with the government previously denying any involvement. This is the first time social media sites have been publicly blocked nationwide.

Last week, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution classifying the censorship of the internet as a human rights violation.

Some are viewing this move of Ethiopian government as an attempt to eventually exercise absolute control over social media. "This is a dangerous precedent. There is no transparency about who took the decision and for how long," Daniel Berhane, the editor of Horn Affairs magazine wrote on Twitter.

Traditional media in Ethiopia is already being tightly controlled by the government, leaving many reliant on social media to access and pass on information critical of the authorities. In 2012, Skype was taken down in Ethiopia amid a clampdown on VoIP (voice over internet protocol) calls. The government claimed that the service was being used for fraudulent purposes.