Social media in Africa in the context of global digital politics

AfriStadi Twin Talk October 22, 2024
Common Room, Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies
Fabianinkatu 24A, third floor
15:15-16:45
Social media in Africa in the context of global digital politics

Social media in Africa in the context of global digital politics

AfriStadi Twin Talk October 22, 2024
Common Room, Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies
Fabianinkatu 24A, third floor
15:15-16:45

 

Talk 1: Social Media, Ethics and Youth Engagement in Africa: Balancing Parrhesia and Reputation

Nick Mdika Tembo
Department of Literary Studies 
University of Malawi

The singular and exceptionally rewarding aspect of social media platforms in Africa is that they have made it very easy for people to access information. Unlike traditional media, social platforms enable instantaneous, widespread dissemination of information. Using Malawi as a case study, this study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining netnography and quantitative surveys to examine both the opportunities and risks of social media use among African youth. It will examine how platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp have been harnessed by Malawian social media influencers to foster grassroots activism, raise awareness, and amplify marginalised voices. The paper will also address the underbelly of social media in Africa: rising cases of cancel culture, disinformation, and misinformation that continue to filter into public consciousness, highlighting how African youths have equally been at the centre of litigations because of the doubt that is often cast over the veracity of social media posts.

Key Words: Social media, digital activism, parrhesia, cancel culture, African youth

 

BIO

Nick Mdika Tembo is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Malawi. He is also a Research Fellow in the Department of English at University of the Free State, South Africa. The primary focus of his research is in trauma and memory studies and his thematic fields include holocaust and genocide studies, childhood studies, child soldier narratives, African life writing, and social media technologies. He has extensively published in these research areas.

 

Talk 2: What does it mean to do research on social media politics in Africa: or the promises and perils of understanding the “context” of digital politics globally?

Matti Pohjonen 
Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), 
University of Helsinki 

Abstract. What does it mean to do research on social media politics in Africa? Understanding the “context” of social media conversations has become essential in today’s rapidly shifting communicative environments to avoid overly simplifying or normative explanations of digital politics globally. This, however, can be challenging for two reasons. Firstly, the growing popularity of using digital/computational methods to analyze large-scale social media conversations excel in identifying macro-level patterns in the data but they also risk overlooking the nuanced political and cultural idiosyncrasies underlying it. Secondly, the popular conceptual frameworks and theories used to make sense of our digitally-connected world have not been usually developed with the idiosyncrasies of the African digital media environments in mind. At worst, empirical research on social media in different African countries is still entirely lacking. At best, as Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill (2021) argue, research on digital politics in Africa (or outside the dominant Western contexts more broadly) has often been relegated to the domain of area studies and not seen as legitimate forms of theory building that also advance the “universal” disciplinary canon (see Gagliardone et al., 2021, Gagliardone, Pohjonen and Diepeveen, 2023). 

Yet, despite the growing importance of pinning down context – that is, the ability to locate events and phenomena in broader networks of historical antagonisms, political narratives and shifting cultural patterns of media use – this is by no means an easy process. It requires protracted and time-consuming efforts of capturing the nuanced political and historical trajectories that extend beyond a simple use of “methods” – often clashing with the societal urgency to rapidly understand the new crises constantly manifesting on social media (hate speech, mis/disinformation, fake news, deepfake). More fundamentally, however, what we colloquially call “context” can also be seen as something that is expandable and infinitely so. A more honest, and humble, approach is to rather acknowledge that a claim about context is just “an articulation concerning a set of connections and disconnections thought to be relevant to a specific agent that is socially and historically situated, and to a particular purpose” (Dilley 2002: 454). Which specific connections and disconnections to emphasize at any given point in the research  (and who decides on their relevance) can thus make a tremendous difference in how the results can be interpreted regardless of the methods used.

This presentation, building on over 10 years of research on digital politics in Africa, reflects on the question of what does it mean to “do research on social media in Africa?”  By focusing on the author’s work across three case studies focusing on digital politics in  Ethiopia, it reflects on the complex relationship between theory, methods and contextual interpretation that is necessary to understand the significance of social media in Africa, and in relation to violent political conflicts and digital activism in particular. 

Key Words: Social media, digital activism, conflict, digital methods, comparative research

 

BIO. Matti Pohjonen’s research revolves around developing critical research approaches and methodologies to understand digital politics in especially comparative global media contexts. This has included work on blogging cultures in India, developing new research methods using interactive radio and SMS for researching hard-to-reach populations in East Africa, comparative research on online extreme speech in Ethiopia, and work on the use of AI in social sciences and humanities research. He currently works as a Senior Researcher  for the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), University of Helsinki, leading methodological development on the use of internet and social media data and he co-leads a number of funded research projects: ARM (Authoritarian Information Suppression), InfoLead (Information and Media Leadership Programme for Judges and Policymakers) His research has been published widely and he often appears on Finnish news media to discuss digital politics in the Horn of Africa.[1][2]

References:

Cheruiyot D., Ferrer-Conill R. (2021). Pathway outta pigeonhole? De-contextualizing majority world countries. Media, Culture & Society, 43(1), 189–197.

Dilley, R.M. (2002). “The problem of context in social and cultural anthropology.” Language & Communication 22: 437–456

Gagliardone, I., Diepeveen, S., Findlay, K., Olaniran, S., Pohjonen, M., & Tallam, E. (2021). Demystifying the COVID-19 Infodemic: Conspiracies, Context, and the Agency of Users. Social Media + Society, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211044233

Gagliardone, I., Pohjonen, M., Diepeveen, S., & Olaniran, S. (2023). Clones and zombies: rethinking conspiracy theories and the digital public sphere through a (post)-colonial perspective. Information, Communication & Society, 26(12), 2419–2438. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2239890

 

[1] https://www.hs.fi/maailma/art-2000008356888.html

[2] https://yle.fi/a/3-12416862