JamiiForums is a

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...

-based social networking website in East Africa founded in 2006. The online network is notable as the most popular social media website in Tanzania, according to AllAfrica. The website emphasizes its use of user-generated content to avoid penalties faced by traditional media for reporting issues in Tanzania. According to Washington Post, recent Tanzanian bills have caused significant worry over potential media crackdown in Tanzania, though its founders faced several law charges over the years. JamiiForums was officially launched in March 2006 with the name JamboForums, and comprised several online subforums. In May 2008 they changed their name to JamiiForums due to copyright issues. In March 2016, Jamii Media filed a lawsuit against the federal Tanzanian police force, alleging that the police force's power to demand personal information of individuals suspected of crimes was unconstitutional. The case will be processed through the

High Court of Tanzania In 1964 Tanganyika and Zanzibar formed the United Republic of Tanzania. After the Treaty of the Union, the two countries continued to remain with their own legal systems including court structures. In the 1977 Constitution of the United Republic ...

Controversy

According to The Daily Beast and The Guardian, the website became a

whistle blowing A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...

platform focused on current events and news, placing the website in direct opposition with the leading Tanzanian political party Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Tom Rhodes, a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists in East Africa, described the website as notable for its function as a "cathartic tool where even disgruntled politicians go and upload sensitive documents" in the Irish Times. Due to its use as a whistle blowing platform,

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broad ...

characterized the website as an East African version of Wikileaks and noted concern over rumors that the website was being hacked by the Tanzanian government. BBC further indicated that Google's search engine had lowered the ranking of the site due to concern over government influence. Beyond user-generated content, the website advocates for freedom of media and digital rights in Tanzania. The director of the website spoke out against Tanzanian laws passed around 2016 that purportedly gave too much power to the Tanzanian National Bureau of Statistics. On December 16, 2016, its Director, Maxence Melo was arrested by Tanzania Police for allegedly refusing to disclose the identities of anonymous bloggers and contributors who, the Tanzanian authorities claim, posted sensitive information on his popular blogging site The 3 cases opened against Melo were concluded with one victory on April 8, 2020 when he was found not guilty but on the other two cases he was convicted and had to pay TZS 5million for his freedom on November 17, 2020 From June 11, 2018, JamiiForums service wa
shut down
and the platform was temporarily unavailable online due to failure of its owners to comply with government requirements of exposing users information and delaying paying registration fees as due to announcement made b
Tanzania Regulatory Authority (TCRA)
However, it resumed operation 21 days later.

References

{{reflist Tanzanian social networking websites Swahili-language websites