Africa-Press – Tanzania. THE Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Dr Faustine Ndugulile, has asked ministries, agencies and public institutions to ensure that their social media accounts are properly verified before they go into operations to avoid hackers who use them to post disgusting materials that have been going viral to the public.
He asked ministries to verify accounts in collaboration with ICT experts from the e-Government Agency (eGA), which is under the ministry of Finance and Planning.
The Minister further advised that administrators of state owned social media platforms should be given intensive training on how to manage the accounts in order to avoid their misuse.
“At some instances we have been witnessing some public owned social media accounts liking some purely senseless issues, this tarnishes the entire image of an institution while the acts are done by a few indiscipline individuals,” he said.
Regarding verification of accounts to avoid hackers the minister gave an example of one of the Twitter account owned by the Ministry of Agriculture where someone posted a tweet admiring beauty of his girlfriend.
The tweet brought a heated discussion in the social media as members of the public questioned over the security of accounts owned by ministries. The ministry of Agriculture later withdrew the post and apologized to the public.
However, Dr Ndugulile yesterday moved to assure the public that Tanzania was among the countries in the globe with a strong cyber security.
According to him, the country had equally recorded tremendous strides in social media growth and provision of internet services, with over 6 million Facebook subscribers, 4.5 million users of Instagram and with over 6 million people using WhatsApp.
