Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 2

Protests against misrule are becoming more and more visible in the digital age in Africa. Consider the civil disobedience in Sudan that culminated in the 11 April 2019 Sudanese coup d’état that deposed President Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power or the energetic youth-driven street protests in Algeria demanding substantive reforms even after forcing the resignation of long-serving President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April 2019. Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo President Kabila was forced not to stand for re-election after fierce protests against his continued hold on power after his term had expired in 2016. The constitution barred him from running for a third term. In Cameroon protesters have become more visible against poor performance of the government of Paul Biya, who at 86 is one of the oldest rulers in the world. In Egypt and Uganda, protests are common in spite of the heavy-handed response of the authorities. In most cases the military hold on to power or are willing to sacrifice political leaders to retain power. The book starts by mentioning these prominent cases of protests, which we argue have become more visible due to social media. In these cases, new digital tools are an important part of the political changes.

Electoral crises and squabbles between contestants have assumed new dimensions due to the influence of social media. Prior to Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections there were factionalist conflicts in the ruling party which resulted in Robert Mugabe’s forced resignation as there were growing fears that his wife Grace Mugabe would succeed him. Social media activity reflected misogyny against Grace whose ambitions were thought to be disgraceful because she was a woman. This chapter seeks to argue that Zimbabwean society’s misogyny which reached its climax at Grace’s rise eliminated any hopes of electoral democracy for female candidates. The chapter posits that voters, through ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ on Twitter, fed into the politically established frames of the female disgrace narrative in discrediting women in the 2018 elections.

This chapter draws on experiences from Uganda to interrogate social media’s potential to facilitate women’s participation in electoral processes. By taking the Pads4Girls campaign in the aftermath of the Ugandan 2016 election as a case, the chapter examines how social media can contribute to political change and electoral democracy. Social media’s potential in public communication has been demonstrated during elections globally and in heightened political situations in Uganda. Some of the most vibrant debates in Uganda were on Facebook and Twitter during the 2011 and 2016 elections and their aftermath. The data were collected through analysis of Facebook content about the Pads4Girls campaign and interviewing. The chapter builds on debates about media and gender and argues that social media facilitate conversation on electoral matters but their role depends on the context within which they are applied. The Pads4Girls campaign ended with the imprisonment of its architect over cyber harassment.

This chapter analyses the treatment of female Zimbabwean politicians on social media through an examination of posts on Twitter. Female politicians during the run-up to the July 2018 elections had to contend with diverse forms of sexist harassment online. Although social media offers female politicians a space of self-actualisation, this same space is used to harass them. Through an analysis of specifically selected tweets, this chapter contends that the entrance of women into the previously masculine realm of politics represents a symbolic challenging of masculine power and dominance. The verbal violence and harassment against female politicians online sets out to call them to submission to the patriarchal gatekeepers of political power. Drawing on representational theories particularly Goffman’s work on framing and Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony in conjunction with feminist readings of Lara and Chigumadzi, the chapter concludes that notwithstanding the rampant sexism that female politicians in Zimbabwe have to deal with, both offline and online, they have been able to find and deploy their own agency.

The growing availability of low-cost smartphone devices and the affordable rates of data connectivity mean that more and more young people in Africa have access to mobile telephones. With these visible changes, there is an optimistic view that social media will play a central role in addressing a range of social issues by liberating, empowering, and enabling participation and engagement in political issues. However, the influence of social media on political engagement is determined by the discursive opportunity structures afforded by the context. This chapter examines the young people’s participation in the political digital public sphere in the Kenyan context. It argues that the political and cultural opportunity structures in Kenya create their own set of unequal participatory mechanisms that perpetuate a digital divide.

This chapter examines the interpretations and meaning-making amongst young people at Rhodes University, South Africa, of political party messages during the 2016 local government elections on social media. In addition, the chapter seeks to understand whether youth at Rhodes University actively sought out political party messages on social media or whether the messages they encountered were incidental on their timelines. Finally, the chapter provides an understanding of whether the media messages resonated with the young people and spoke to the issues faced by them in their particular context. Using qualitative research methods and through the lens of Stuart Hall’s models of reception analysis, the chapter uncovers the particular relationship that young people had with political party messages on social media in the 2016 local government elections. It argues that rather than the often-lamented apathetic youth, these young people are actively engaged and highly critical of what they engage with online.

Media pluralism exists in Algeria in the official texts but in practice there is still a situation of disrespect for fundamental news values, media ethics and independence. The media have not objectively met the public’s needs and expectations because of political interferences and commercial pressures. The results are a big public shift to social media, considered as a new source of news, empowerment and press freedom. The chapter describes and analyses how social media are gaining more ground, credibility and popularity by offering platforms and spaces to speak out on public affairs. Algeria has since the 22nd of February 2019 embarked on a series of street demonstrations and protests. Protesters brandish one of the slogans: ‘from platforms, blogs and websites to the street, to reality’. It is a pertinent indication that social media is having an impact on real political and social life in Algeria. New social media users and followers are empowering themselves using new tools to exert pressure and influence on everyday political events and ultimately on the future constitutional agenda of the country.

Dialogue in the public sphere includes the biopower of the individual, his or her agency and legitimacy as an activist. Digital technology and social media platforms provide individuals and groups with opportunities to communicate their personal experiences and to share their opinions and views within various continually evolving digital networks that may or may not consist of structures that can facilitate protest action. Digital dialogue has drastically altered our social and political realities as well as our modes of participation within the virtual public spheres. The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to explore the opportunities dialogue in the virtual public sphere offers political protestors to influence more diverse groups, increase their resistance of normative hierarchies and improve quality of participation from like-minded citizens. The discussion is contextualised within a political protest in the Alexandra Township, South Africa.

This qualitative study demonstrates how Zimbabweans are rejecting and appropriating certain national identity icons and reclaiming others as a way of challenging the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)’s contested stranglehold on power. In a context where the ruling elite have deployed patriotic history and other related nationalistic paraphernalia, the creative use of the national flag by #ThisFlag protestors suggests that ordinary people have the agency to mount an oppositional and revisionist historiography. The chapter also argues that digital media technologies have made it possible for cyber-communities to sprout and gain traction as ordinary citizens in the diaspora and mainland reclaim their country. It also interrogates the ambivalent roles of the clergy in postcolonial Zimbabwe given the cooptation and demonization tendencies of ZANU-PF towards those who critique its ruling style.

This chapter explores the challenges caused by political polarisation (homophily) and populism propelled by the propensity to create one’s own echo-chamber of like-mindedness in social media. The research question guiding this study is: To what extent do the Twitter accounts of selected political leaders in South Africa evidence the presence of echo-chambers, homophily and populism during a political crisis such as #ZumaMustFall and what is the relationship between these three concepts? The finding is that albeit there is homophily as politicians attempt to create their own echo-chambers, Twitter brings forth diversity as the public (tweeps) permeates political echo-chambers searching for resonate political opinions. Furthermore, the study found a direct link between populism and homophily as well as a link between politicians’ personalities and their political communication styles on Twitter. I argue, therefore, that echo-chambers are not necessarily a negative political challenge in the second generation of digital democracy as they are an alternative form of political deliberation that is unique from the singular argumentative public sphere to the fragmentation of many agreeable public spheres, which taken together may create informed and rational debates.

This chapter examines The Punch and The Guardian newspapers’ coverage of hate speech issues in Nigeria. The objectives are to examine the source(s) of stories reported in The Punch and The Guardian online/offline editions on hate speech issues and to determine which section of the newspapers featured stories on hate speech. The chapter uses content analysis to examine the extent to which The Punch and The Guardian newspapers cover hate speeches in Nigeria. It uses purposive sampling to analyse online/offline editions from January to June 2018. The chapter is anchored on the argumentativeness, aggressiveness and verbal assertiveness theory as well as gate-keeping theory. The focus is important for engaging with digital deliberative democracy in an African context.

During the 2015 General Election in Nigeria, satirical images and memes were disseminated across social media, comprising both real life and cartooned images of mainly the two key presidential election aspirants. This research, firstly through semiotic analysis, deconstructs the meanings embedded within the images, and maps how they shaped discourses during the election and possibly after it. Secondly, through focus group interviews, the study explores the dominant readings given to the images and how much they influenced people’s opinions regarding the electoral process and its key actors. The study extends understanding of political communication by providing a more nuanced overview of how we may attach meanings to transgressive, user-generated political memes that had the potential to ‘take a life of their own’ and to generate polysemic meanings.

Political advertisements have now become common in South Africa. This chapter discusses the political campaign advertisement officially perceived to be negative and banned. During South Africa’s fifth national elections in 2014, the political advertisement titled ‘i-ANC Ayisafani’ (the ANC is no longer the same) was perceived as negative and consequently banned by the South African Public Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). The advert portrays the then Democratic Alliance’s (DA) spokesperson and now leader (Mmusi Maimane) making serious corruption and maladministration claims against the governing ANC. Using the reception theory, this chapter specifically focuses on the reception of the advert on the YouTube page on which it has been widely made available. The findings from our analysis illustrates that social media plays an important role as an ‘uncensored virtual’ public sphere. On the positive, the advertisement elicited rigorous debates about the state of governance and political party loyalty in South Africa and resulted in a Streisand effect. On the negative, it confirms that negative political advertising sometimes works against the sponsoring candidates by engendering support for a target candidate.