What you need to know:

• Uganda, like across the rest of the world, has seen an exponential adoption of the internet from the twenty tens with millions of people coming online for the first time each year for different reasons. The blocking of the internet and particularly social media channels Facebook and Twitter (now X), for the first time, on the eve of the 2016 general elections in Uganda was a key testament that it is a powerful tool to fuel social and civic expression, a tactic that has since been borrowed by several rogue regimes across the world. As reliance, hardly policed, on digital technologies to ease life grows so is online violence, from fraud to harassment against activists using it to drive social change, writes Irene Abalo Otto.