Digital Activism in the Social Media Era

Mobile communication is increasingly playing a leading role in the mobilization of social and political protests around the world. There seem to be no known geographical boundaries for the digital revolution which the world is currently witnessing. From Chad to Chile, Mali to Myanmar, a new breed of digitally-based social initiatives have been gathering momentum for years, undoubtedly reinventing social activism as activists and ordinary people alike, eager to empower themselves politically and socially, embrace computers, mobile phones, and other web-based devices and technologies. With activists, mobile monitors, citizen journalists and digital story-tellers based in sub-Saharan Africa joining the fray, astutely bypassing hegemonic mass media gatekeepers by navigating through the online sphere to inspire collective political and social involvement across the continent, this highly contested discipline of research has attracted more attention than ever before. In spite of this attention, regionally in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been a shocking lack of empirical accounts detailing who is doing what, why, where, when and with what impact. It is this gap that this book hopes to fill.

Focusing on two online campaigns – one initiated by the Ethiopian blogging collective known as Zone9 and demanding the Ethiopian government to #RespectTheConstitution, and the other asking to #FreeZone9Bloggers, once some of the bloggers were arrested and accused of terrorism – this chapter examines opportunities and contradictions of digital activism in closed regimes. After having analysed the content of the two campaigns, their local and global ramifications, and the reactions they provoked among national and international actors, we explain how 1) the framing of digital media as powerful and potentially revolutionary political agents may act as a ‘self-impairing prophecy’, reducing the chances they may actually serve to produce lasting political change. At the same time, the comparative analysis of the two campaigns also indicates how 2) the recurrent accusations moved by the government to political opponents to act on behalf of ‘external agents’ and use digital media to threaten national stability, may act as ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’, creating a network of global solidarity around digital activists who, despite having begun their journey to promote change locally, are progressively brought into the ambit of a more global (and often Western) discourse of ‘digital activism’.

One of the direct offshoots of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its concomitant globalization of the protest culture across the globe was the launch of the infamous Baba Jukwa Facebook page in Zimbabwe. Despite the popularity and criminal investigations which accompanied the Facebook page, there has been lack of interests among researchers in examining the blog from a social movement perspective. This chapter, which draws much of its data from social media ethnography, qualitative content analysis and in-depth interviews with some of the fans of the Baba Jukwa Facebook page, identifies various digital repertoires of contention, which were deployed by the administrators and fans to mobilize people against the authoritarian nationalist regime during the 2013 harmonized elections. It also highlights the problems associated with most of the digital repertoires of contention utilized especially as it pertains to exposing fans to surveillance, leaving digital footprints and use of real names as well as pseudonyms. It critically assesses cyber-optimistic and pessimistic claims about the potential of social media to drive political change in societies where most of the people are disconnected from the internet and are politically and economically disenfranchised. It argues that online activism backed by limited offline activism feeds into the cult of clicktivism, free-rider problem and neglects the importance of face-to-face mobilization and strategic planning. The chapter also illustrates the limitations of Facebook activism.

This chapter traces the historical development of digital activism in Uganda focusing on three historical moments relating to the country’s governance: the ‘Save Mabira’ campaign (2007 and 2011); the ‘Walk-to-work’ campaign (2011) and the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC)’s campaign to replace the National Resistance Movement government in the 2015/2016 elections. The chapter provides an an overview of the provisions for and constraints on freedom of expression and paints a picture of the political environment for any form of activism in Uganda. It presents an overvview of key arguments for and against the liberative potential of the new media in a context like Uganda’s. The major questions the chapter addresses relate to the issues driving these campaigns, the communication strategies with a focus on the new media, the achievements and the obstacles/challenges of the campaigns. The chapter thus seeks to document patterns in digital activism in Uganda. The chapter relies on a review of pertinent literature and online content, key informant interviews with leading activists in the three campaigns as well as the author’s own experience of the Ugandan political situation.

It has been argued that the internet has increasingly led to blurring of lines between the production and consumption of news. This has forced most journalists to provide more participatory and audience-centric news to keep the news business afloat. This means that reporters are increasingly seeing themselves as convergent journalists involved in both ‘pushing’ the story out to the audiences in whatever form they prefer and the ‘pulling in’ of information from members of the public who want to share their experiences with others. Ultimately, the whole relationship between the producers (journalists) and consumers(readers or audiences) has shifted from what Rosen called vertical (top-down—one to many), to horizontal (bottom-up—citizen to citizen, with the journalist more or less playing the role of the facilitator of the conversation of the networked community. This new process changes the role of the audiences from passive consumers of news to active producers and consumers while enjoying their democratic freedom of expression and participation. However, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate using frame analysis of the online coverage of the controversial sacking in September 2015 of the Sierra Leone Vice President, which provoked demonstrations in London and Washington, the news agenda of cyber-activists on social media is still largely set by mainstream journalists. This raises the question of the potential of citizen journalism and digital activists in their attempts to address the democratic deficit of mainstream journalism.

Historically, new technologies have led to major political, social and economic transformations. Social Networking Sites have become very popular, especially among youth. They have created new, exciting and convenient platforms for people to exchange information freely with little or no filters. They have altered people’s interactions, giving a larger base of people greater lateral and horizontal communication capabilities. Declining enthusiasm, growing apathy and high levels of cynicism among young people in civic and political sphere is major concern. However, young people spend more time online and social media platforms can be used to engage them. This study is based on the growing popularity of social media and their utilization in civic spaces. It relies on a survey of 600 university students in Kenya, aged between 18 and 35 and focus group discussions. The study found low levels of civic participation among young people in Kenya which points to a detached and disengaged youth. However, the findings indicate that social media have been utilized as effective platforms of social mobilization for citizens. The boundless nature of social media provides unlimited space to voice opinions, positions and political agenda to an expansive audience and helps in mainstreaming peripheral Issues and problems. The power of social media lies in their power to facilitate interactivity, sharing of uncensored information, creating online movements, bridging connections around a common cause, dissemination of information, and bypassing mainstream media and government restrictions. The study concludes that though social media do not directly influence offline engagement, online engagement can be used to supplement and support offline efforts.

To discover the reality of Chadian artists we follow here the itinerary of Didier Lalaye (‘Croquemort’). What are the new possibilities for engaged artists from a region in Africa, characterized by long and recurrent periods of unrest/conflict, but increasingly connected to ICTs and other innovative technologies including social media? Lalaye’s case shows such an environment could both be an inspiration for engaged artists and a blockage to their development. Why is it that Chadian artists hardly appear in the international scene? The contrast with Cameroon, Mali and Congo is massive and hence the Chadian environment appears, constrained. Or should we phrase it differently and say that we are observing a moment in Chadian history in which engaged artists are finally gaining a space and can contribute to political change? The analysis of the history and present-day situation is at the core of this chapter. Using the deep understanding of one person’s ideas and experiences as a point of departure, this chapter is born out of the interaction between the researcher and the artist as a deep ethnographic encounter, as a way of critiquing contemporary uses and practices of social media and ICT platforms among emerging Chadian musicians and as a way of interacting and resisting state-sanctioned tyranny.

The Fees Must Fall movement was a national, student-led protest which began in mid-October 2015, in a response to fee increases at South African universities. The protests arose from a broader context of declining government funding for higher education, as well as broader socio-economic inequalities and racial conflicts. During the height of the campaign, social networking site Twitter was used both as an organizing tool by students, and also as a space for national debate around related issues. The Fees Must Fall campaign falls into the category of what Postill describes as a viral campaign, with the main features of tweets with catchy slogans, explosive growth, social drama liminality, real time participation and intense but ephemeral news media coverage. The proposed chapter explores how the campaign used Twitter, in the context of an international growth in so-called ‘Twitter activism’, and wide-range online political participation. The methodology is a social network analysis of over a million tweets collected at the height of the protests, which will identify key actors and relationships. A qualitative content analysis will explore the purpose and nature of the online conversations via the hashtag #FeesMustFall. Much scholarly work on Twitter uses hashtags to identify tweets, to highlight particular conversations and communicative exchanges. The central question is to what extent virals such as #FeesMustFall strengthen or undermine public discourse, and whether political reality is framed by such virally shared digital content. In this instance, Twitter afforded youth an opportunity to participate in politics and set mainstream news agendas. While South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s was not marked by violent revolution, rising social inequality has resulted in ongoing community protests, and the student protests can be seen within this context. Revolutionary student movements have always been a feature of transitional societies, and are appearing with increasing frequency in Western societies. The chapter contributes to understanding the role of the internet in fostering political participation and activism. Taking into account critiques of the internet by scholars such as Morozov and Dean, the proposed chapter explores the collective experiences of social media within the context of #FeesMustFall.

The #hashtag in Twitter is hailed as a powerful tool for interaction. It can, for instance, spread and deepen democracy via citizen engagement through the inclusion of new voices into public spaces, and in fact can help create new public spaces. This research is a critical analysis of journalists’ and media personalities’ use of Twitter during the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa. The article examines social media practices by analysing responses to the University of Cape Town’s #Rhodes must fall campaign in 2015. The methods deployed are both quantitative and qualitative. First, tweets are extracted via an innovative API extraction method to assess how many people in South Africa engaged during the debate using the hashtag, and of these how many were media personalities and mainstream journalists. The commonplace assumption here is that the hashtag is used to engage with people and provoke responses. However, the question here is to what extent did this occur? Theoretically, the article is embedded in democratic theory, accepting participative democracy as a foregrounder but moving beyond this to the radical democracy model, which asserts that the more diverse voices in the various disparate publics, the more expansive and deeper democracy can be. Deploying radical democracy’s theory vis-a-vis agonistic struggle in robust and clashing spaces and views, this research scrutinizes how the new media platform Twitter, is fulfilling this potential. The article will delineate what the Rhodes Must Fall campaign was about, how the hashtag was used during the campaign, and how mainstream journalists and media personalities engaged, or did not engage, with the various publics during the campaign which captured the national and international imaginations.

Much has been written about the SABC—the South African Broadcasting Corporation—over the years, and scholars such as Ruth Teer-Tomaselli (1995, 1998, 2001, 2008), Pieter J. Fourie (1988, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2010) and Jeanette Minnie (2000) provide a comprehensive overview of its development and significance as South Africa’s public (service) broadcaster. This chapter takes a slightly different approach towards historicizing the SABC by exploring the ways through which civil society—through social media networks—makes sense of the SABC’s legislative encounters. It deals more with “talk about” the SABC and the laws that govern it, than it analyses the broadcaster itself. Looking at media and citizenship from the vantage point of civic engagement, this paper argues that social media act as a central site for the production, management and sharing of media activism and the negotiation of media policy. It therefore considers the changing legislative framework for public broadcasting from the viewpoint of social media, civil society and civic discourse. To this end, the focus here will be primarily on the negotiations regarding amendments to the South African Broadcasting Act as it pertains to Public (Service) Broadcasting.

African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) organizing has become transnational in scope, partly due to the efforts of activists who use digital strategies to bring international attention to LGBTI human rights violations and to generate wider visibility for their plans. These digital strategies have succeeded in eliciting international concern about political homophobia and anti-LGBTI discrimination and violence. However, international interest in African LGBTI organizing has generated unwanted consequences for activist organizations; these consequences include anti-LGBTI backlash and draconian anti-gay legislation. In other cases, using digital strategies has put some LGBTI activist organizations in positions that allow them to marshal international influence and to pressure government officials to capitulate to their demands. Scholars have raised ethical questions about the transnational dimensions of African LGBTI movements’ digital strategies. By publicizing local LGBTI human rights abuses, activist campaigns contribute to the image that African nations are by and large homophobic, a cause for concern. In addition, when activists in the global North become involved in transnational campaigns that draw attention to discrimination and violence against LGBTI people in different African countries, there is a risk that Northern activists can hijack online petitions and campaigns for their own ends (Gunkel 2013). In this chapter, we discuss the merits of and drawbacks to African LGBTI activists’ use of digital strategies and analyse how mobile technologies and digital tactics can betray activists’ intentions. We use several case studies to explain the contours of LGBTI movements’ deployment of digital strategies in different African countries.

Queer gender and sexuality is largely condemned in the mainstream heterosexual Zimbabwean media and culture. Politicians have politicized queer identities and sexuality to win over what is perceived to be a homophobic majority. President Robert Mugabe is probably Africa’s most articulate and virulent critic of homosexuality and queer culture. The civil society organization Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ) represents a social movement that has struggled to put its issues into the public sphere, at times winning cases in Zimbabwean courts of law. It is a social movement for lesbian, gays, bisexual, transgendered, transvestite and other so-called ‘queer’ sexuality and identities. This study focuses on how GALZ uses Facebook as an alternative platform of communication using online ethnographic interaction between defenders and critics of the LGTB community in Zimbabwe

The proliferation of the internet has shown promises and ‘potentials’ of empowering women. Politics, activism and engagements through technology seem to have been gendered spaces as evidenced by research in the developing world. This chapter attempts to demystify the ‘silent’ myth, especially prevalent in the African context, that the internet and technological activism and political domains are solely meant for men. The website ‘Her Zimbabwe’ attempts to empower women as citizens, giving them a platform to speak on issues otherwise ignored in mainstream media or frowned upon by society. It uses material from citizen journalists focusing on women’s issues. Methodologically, this study uses purposive sampling to select material from ‘Her Zimbabwe’ that speaks to issues of women activism since 2012 which is subjected to critical discourse analysis. Theoretically, the chapter is anchored on the issue of the voice in counter-digital public spheres.

Zimbabwe embarked on a fast-track land-reform programme that saw the massive transfer of land from white commercial farmers to black Zimbabweans. In the process, women accessed land and were able to set a new development pathway in which they became independent land beneficiaries. This work is based on a case study of fast track farms in South Eastern Zimbabwe examines how the media has projected the role of women as a social movement in the process of acquiring land. It is based on a case study of fast-track women farmers between 2009 and 2016. Conceptually, the gendered approach to land reform is examined in a theoretical framing in which the role that women play in agriculture alongside men is examined. Also addressed are: the ways in which processes of land reform operate in male and female spaces and how this reflects on land-reform processes; the effects of the different media projections on women`s role in land-reform programmes; policy solutions that centre on taking women as a starting-point in land-reform processes,; the value chain process in marketing; and the importance of gendered land reform.

In April 2014 over 270 girls were abducted from their school in Chibok Nigeria by an Islamist group, Boko Haram. Distraught parents launched #bringbackourgirls on Facebook and Twitter to put pressure on the Nigerian government to act speedily to recover the girls. Picked up by celebrities and world leaders, the campaign went viral and brought to light retrogressive movements rolling back some of the gains achieved worldwide in women’s education. The purpose of the chapter is to analyse the feminist content of the campaign messages. To what extent are gender lenses used to analyse the problem and proposing solutions? The analysis of the campaign discourse on Facebook shows it resonates with that of gender equality. However, the discussion fits more on the liberal-inclusive side than the progressive side of the continuum of feminism. It is widely expected that policy and legislation for gender equality within the current configuration of power will bring the changes needed to uplift the lot of girls. The prospect of transformation of power relations remains largely unacknowledged.