On Wednesday, the day after opposition leader Bobi Wine told people to download “Bitchat,” Google Trends searches for it in Uganda went from 0 to 100.
Bobi Wine, a Ugandan politician and opposition leader, is telling his supporters to download Jack Dorsey’s decentralised peer-to-peer messaging program, Bitchat, before the election. He says the ruling party would try to cut down communication connections.
According to a study by the Pan-African Human Rights Defenders Network, long-time Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni barred internet and social media access for the whole country during the 2016 election and again in 2021, saying it was for security and safety reasons.
Wine said in a post on X on Tuesday that something similar is planned for the days leading up to the Uganda 2026 presidential election, which will take place on January 15.
They turn off the internet to stop people from talking to each other and to make sure that citizens don’t organise, check their election results, or demand accountability for the huge election theft.
The Pan-African Human Rights Defenders Network says that the social media blackouts hurt the political opposition the most because they use the sites to plan protests and campaigns.
The Ugandan government argued that the steps were necessary for the safety of the country and to keep order during the election.
Starlink restrictions and connectivity controls
Last week, Reuters said that there was a government letter to limit the importation of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet equipment. This equipment can deliver high-speed internet in places where there weren’t any good options before.
In July, Dorsey started a beta version of Bitchat. It uses Bluetooth mesh networks to send encrypted messages without the internet. The white paper says that the network is completely decentralised, with no central servers, accounts, email addresses, phone numbers to register, or infrastructure requirements.
During the election, Wine said Bitchat would let people talk to “thousands of people in record time” and help share “other important information with specific or other users.”
He is the head of the National Unity Platform political party and ran for president of Uganda in 2021, but Museveni beat him. Wine says that Museveni rigged the election, although Museveni disputes this and has been in charge of Uganda since 1986.
Bitchat becomes a top search topic in Uganda
On Wednesday, Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “Bitchat” in Uganda went from 0 to 100. “Bitchat apk download” and “how to use Bitchat” were two of the top five related searches. They were marked as “breakout topics,” which means they had a “tremendous increase” in activity.
Since it came out, Bitchat has been downloaded 936,104 times, with more than 4,252 of those downloads happening in the last day and more than 32,524 in the last week.