Related Papers
Digital Dissidence and Social Media Censorship in Africa
2022 •
Farooq Kperogi
This book reflects on the rapid rise of social media across the African continent and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to try to contain it. The relentless growth of social media platforms in Africa has provided the means of resistance, self-expression, and national self-fashioning for the continent's restlessly energetic and contagiously creative youth. This has provided a profound challenge to the African "gatekeeper state", which has often responded with strategies to constrict and constrain the rhetorical luxuriance of the social media and digital sphere. Drawing on cases from across the continent, contributors explore the form and nature of social media and government censorship, often via antisocial media laws, or less overt tactics such as state cybersurveillance, spyware attacks on social media activists, or the artful deployment of the rhetoric of "fake news" as a smokescreen to muzzle critical voices. The book also reflects on the Chinese influence in African governments' clampdown on social media and the role of Israeli NSO Group Technologies, as well as the tactics and technologies which activists and users are deploying to resist or circumvent social media censorship. Drawing on a range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, this book will be an important contribution to researchers with an interest in social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in transitional societies, censorship on the Internet, and Africa more broadly.
Special Issue "Ethnographies of Infopolitics in Africa: Connectivity, Control, and Technology Contracts.", co-edited by V. Bernal and K. Pype, in: Anthropological Quarterly 96(4): 611-624.
Pype, K. and Bernal, V. 2023 Infopolitics and Technology Contracts
2023 •
Katrien Pype
This article serves as an introduction to the main theme of this special issue. One of the basic assumptions underpinning our approach is that social and political dynamics in societies are intimately tied to the ways in which "appropriate" forms, styles, and spaces of communication are structured, transformed, challenged, conserved, modified, and sometimes even rejected. New technologies, platforms, and apps are adopted and adapted in relation to existing media ecologies, social networks, institutions, and infrastructures. The concepts of "infopolitics" and the "technology contract" offer analytical perspectives on such processes. The concepts of "infopolitics" and the "technology contract" together provide a generative framework for analysis that will be useful beyond African contexts. At the same time, our collective focus on the dyamic engagments of Africans with various media forms demonstrates how important it is to theorise our contemporary world by including and even foregrounding experiences of the global south.
African Journal of Democracy and Election Research
Digital Democracy and Democratic Decline: Unpacking the Role of Digitalization in Undermining Democracy in Africa
2023 •
Tope Akinyetun
The proliferation of the Internet and social media is undoubtedly instrumental to the growth of democracy. The adoption of social media to campaign for and secure election victory by African leaders signaled the start of an era of digital democracy in Africa. Political freedom, engagement, and equality are projected to increase as a result of the digital democratic revolution. Recent events, however, show that Africa is far from benefiting from the Internet's ability to foster civic involvement, transparency, political connections, and mobilization. The flurry of fake news, hate speech, and digital dictatorships is destroying African democracy. Anchored on the theory of Networked Authoritarianism,
Routledge - Taylor and Francis
Cabo Delgado Também é Moçambique: The Paths of Youth Digital Activism in a Restrictive Context
2023 •
Dércio Tsandzana
Digital platforms have transformed the way young people get involved in politics. Digital media have brought about “new arenas” of political engagement for the youth which transcend traditional platforms such as political parties. This chapter examines the digital activism of Cabo Delgado Também é Moçambique (in Portuguese) a Mozambican social media movement created by young people to defend victims of terrorism in northern Mozambique. The movement was composed of activists who were mobilised through social networks to promote actions of support and draw attention to the conflict taking place. The attacks began in 2017 and caused more than 900,000 to be internally displaced and over 3,000 deaths. The chapter spotlights how the movement used digital channels of communication and mobilisation between 2019 and 2021. Data were drawn from individual interviews and digital ethnography focusing how members of the movement engaged through digital activism to raise awareness about the political crisis in 2021 Cabo Delgado in a context of restrictions on democratic rights. The chapter argues that that even though Mozambique has registered low levels of Internet connection (21%), there is an emergence of youth digital activism that cannot be ignored, even if the civic space tends to be limited or restricted in the country.
Media, Culture & Society
The Janus face of social media and democracy? Reflections on Africa
2020 •
Helge Rønning
The purpose of this issue of Media Culture and Society is to discuss the possible role of social media in the struggle for democracy, against authoritarianism, and over hidden power structures. The articles included in this volume are meant to offer empirical interventions to beliefs, some of them unproven, on whether the emergence of new media technologies has driven Africa towards democratic change. Papers in this Special Issue cover a wide variety of African countries delving deep into comparative studies of participatory citizens’ media on the continent. This introduction is an attempt to offer an explanation on African democratisation and authoritarianism before conceptualising the role of social media in political processes with the backing of current case study dispatches in Africa, demonstrating the dilemmas of digital disparities in promoting or denting democratisation in Africa.
‘Digital xenophobia: The bullying of ‘self’ and the cultural caricature of a criminal Nigerian ‘other’
Toks Dele Oyedemi
Many studies have examined xenophobia in South Africa, particularly its black-onblack narrative and violent consequences. But what happens when xenophobic attacks are not directed at immigrants but those associated with them? A new form of xenophobia, proxy xenophobia, is emerging in South Africa. Using digital ethnography, this study explores reactions to an online story in the Mail & Guardian newspaper about United Nigerian Wives in South Africa (UNWISA). This is a support group of South African women married to Nigerian immigrant men; their aim is to combat the stigma they experience and the xenophobic attitudes toward Nigerians. The inherent nature of social media and computer-mediated communication allows for disinhibition and de-individuation that permit the cyber bullying of these women. This proxy xenophobia portends a troubling repercussion, as bullying online may lead to real-life consequences. For Nigerians, the cultural caricature of a criminal persists in their representation.
International Journal of Communication
Global Digital Capitalism: Mark Zuckerberg in Lagos and the Political Economy of Facebook in Africa
2019 •
Toks Dele Oyedemi
In 2016, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg traveled to Lagos, Nigeria—the first stop on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa. The trip was a commercial endeavor, a digital capitalist exploration of the potential of Africa’s largest nation. Zuckerberg’s visit provides a critical lens for examining the colonizing tendencies of global media corporations and the context of Africa in the circuit of digital capitalism. Africa is emerging as a market for digital tools, with increasing penetration of mobile telecommunications services, including mobile Internet. However, it is estimated that about 60% of the continent’s population will still be unconnected in 2020. This low penetration provides an opportunity for digital enterprises such as Facebook to explore the African market. Through benevolent capitalism, Facebook is attempting to capture a huge market in Africa. The lack of investment in an Internet infrastructure in Africa provides both challenges and opportunities for digital capitalists who, in their benevolent pursuit of digital capital, aim for global domination.
Opening Civic Space Online: Digital Rights in Africa
2021 •
Tony Roberts
This report introduces findings from ten digital rights landscape country reports on Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Sudan, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Cameroon. They analyse how the openings and closings of online civic space affect citizens’ digital rights. They show that: (1) when civic space closes offline citizens often respond by opening civic space online; (2) when civic space opens online governments often take measures to close online space; and (3) the resulting reduction in digital rights makes it impossible to achieve the kind of inclusive governance defined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We know far more about openings and closings of online civic space in the global North than we do in the global South. What little we do know about Africa is mainly about a single country, a single event, or single technology. For the first time, these reports make possible a comparative analysis of openings and closings of online civic space in Africa. Th...
Digital Rights in Closing Civic Space: Lessons from Ten African Countries
2021 •
CIPESA UGANDA
This report introduces findings from ten digital rights landscape country reports on Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Sudan, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Cameroon. They analyse how the openings and closings of online civic space affect citizens’ digital rights. They show that: (1) when civic space closes offline citizens often respond by opening civic space online; (2) when civic space opens online governments often take measures to close online space; and (3) the resulting reduction in digital rights makes it impossible to achieve the kind of inclusive governance defined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We know far more about openings and closings of online civic space in the global North than we do in the global South. What little we do know about Africa is mainly about a single country, a single event, or single technology. For the first time, these reports make possible a comparative analysis of openings and closings of online civic space in Africa. Th...
Amsterdam University Press eBooks
Mapping the Digital Divide in Africa
2019 •
Beschara Karam
