Historicising and Theorising Social Media and the Demotic Turn in Communication in Africa

Abstract

Social media platforms have exploded in the last decade and have emerged as the arenas for discursive democracy, sociality, and digital dissidence across Africa. This chapter historicises and genealogises the exponential, if slightly imperceptible but nonetheless phenomenal, growth, maturation, and spread of social media on a continent that had been described in the scholarly literature as the blackhole of informational capitalism. It argues that the progressive centrality of social media in the quotidian lives of Africans, which has invited consternation and censorship from many African governments and inspired precarity in the traditional media sphere, instantiates the materialisation of the demotic turn in communication, which situates the ordinary person as the fulcrum of the communicative process.

Full text

DIGITAL DISSIDENCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP IN AFRICA
Edited by Farooq A. Kperogi
DIGITAL DISSIDENCE
AND SOCIAL MEDIA
CENSORSHIP IN AFRICA
Edited by Farooq A. Kperogi
Routledge African Media, Culture and Communication Studies
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This book reects on the rapid rise of social media across the African conti-
nent and the legal and extra-legal eorts 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 pro-
vided 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 gov-
ernment 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 reects on the Chinese inuence 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.
Farooq A. Kperogi, PhD, is Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media
at Kennesaw State University’s School of Communication and Media where
he teaches and researches global communication, journalism, social media,
communication research methods, global English articulations, virtual real-
ity journalism, alternative media, citizen journalism, diasporic media, and a
host of other communication topics.
Digital Dissidence and Social
Media Censorship in Africa
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First published 2023
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Title: Digital dissidence and social media censorship in Africa / edited by
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Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022003502 (print) | LCCN 2022003503 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032232263 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032232287 (hardback) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Social media--Censorship--Africa. | Social media--Political
aspects--Africa. | Social media--Law and legislation--Africa. | Protest
movements--Africa. | Social control--Africa.
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003276326
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List of figures x
List of tables xi
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction: The Gatekeeper State Meets
Digital Citizen Panoptic Gaze 1
FAROOQ A . K PEROGI
PART I
BACKGROUND ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND
INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN AFRICA 19
1 Historicising and Theorising Social Media
and the Demotic Turn in Communication in Africa 21
FAROOQ A . K PEROGI
2 His Excellency, the Internet and Outraged Citizens:
An Analysis of the Big Man Syndrome and
Internet Shutdowns in Africa 37
SHEPHERD MPOFU
3 Capital, the State, and the Digital Divide: A Critical
Ref lection on Social Media Censorship in Ghana 58
ERIC KARIKARI
4 Between State Interests and Citizen Digital Rights:
Making Sense of Internet Shutdowns in Zimbabwe 76
TENDAI CHARI
Contents
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003276326-3
1Historicising and
Theorising Social Media
and the Demotic Turn in
Communication in Africa1
Farooq A. Kperogi
Introduction
Social media have not only become core constituents of today’s media ecosys-
tem, they have also transgured into, as Marshall McLuhan (1964) would put,
an extension of our bodies and of nature itself (Strate, 2008). They are now
the primary platforms that people deploy to connect, collaborate, organise,
and interact across vast geographic and temporal boundaries. More than ever
before, social networking accounts for the preponderance of time spent online
in the world. According to Statista, for instance, “As of 2019, the average daily
social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 144 minutes per
day, up from 142 minutes in the previous year” (Clement, 2020).
By 2020, worldwide social media usage rocketed even higher to an average
of more than three hours a day (Whatagraph, 2020).2. When one considers
that in 2012, the average worldwide social media usage was mere 90 minutes,
the trend points to a relentlessly exponential growth. Thus, social media
platforms have become both unavoidable and the primary reason why most
people use the Internet.
Nonetheless, while there is universal acknowledgement in social science
scholarship of the intricate embeddedness of social media in the everyday
lives of people in the West and parts of Asia, not much has been written about
the initially imperceptible evolution but ultimately phenomenal profusion
of social media usage on the African continent, which had for long been a
digital pariah in a social media-suused world. This chapter chronicles the
emergence, growth, and democratisation of social media in Africa’s media
culture—or what has been called the demotic turn in communication, which
the next section briey conceptualises and connects to the mainstreaming of
social media usage in Africa.
The Demotic Turn in Media Usage: A Review
As an everyday term, “demotic” means relating to or about ordinary people.
To describe something as demotic is to denote its everydayness, its popularity,
its ubiquity, and its ever-present colloquiality. It is derived from “demos,” the
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22 Farooq A. Kperogi
Greek word for “the people.” That means “demotic” shares etymological an-
ities with “democracy” because, as Ober (2007, 1) points out, “Democracy…
[i]n origin…is… a composite of demos and kratos. Since demos can be translated
as ‘the people’ (qua ‘native adult male residents of a polis’) and kratos as ‘power,’
democracy has a root meaning of ‘the power of the people.’”
However, although “democratic” and “demotic” are etymological kin,
they are not always semantic kith. As Chouliaraki (2015) found out in her
study of the citizen journalistic coverage of post-Arab Spring conict in
the Middle East, “The rise of citizen voice constitutes, in this context, a
‘demotic,’ rather than a ‘democratic,’ turn in that, by trading professional
validity for personal authenticity, [it] prioritises the immediacy of experience
over fact-checking and expert analysis” (p. 4). In other words, what is com-
monplace, or demotic, is not always common sense or democratic. While
this is an ontologically problematic claim to make because democracy also
has within it the seeds of its own destruction, such as its capacity to spawn
toxic populism, understanding the dierence between the demotic and the
democratic is important.
The notion of the “demotic turn” in communication was rst deployed by
Graeme Turner (2004) to encapsulate the “increasing visibility of the ‘ordi-
nary person’ as they have turned themselves into media content through
celebrity culture, reality TV, DIY web-sites, talk radio and the like” (p. 2).
It is, in many ways, similar to Henry Jenkins’ (2001) notion of “media con-
vergence,” which, he said, “fosters a new participatory folk culture by giv-
ing average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate
content.” In essence, the demotic turn centres the everyday communicator,
rather than oligopolistic media institutions, as the fulcrum of communicative
encounters in an increasingly networked, Internet-fuelled society.
In his book titled Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn, Turner
(2010) further expanded and problematised the contours and content of the
demotic turn in communication by arguing, for instance, that while the
world has seen the unmatched proliferation of delivery technologies, plat-
form diversity, collaborative content creation, a cornucopia of choices for
the consumer, empowerment of the ordinary media user, “consumption of
media has become so individualized and fragmented” (p. 2) that the eman-
cipatory potential of democratised and demotic media access is undermined.
He nonetheless praised the “interactivity of ‘web 2.0’ and digital culture, in
which the ordinary person is more producer than consumer, more represent-
ing than represented” (West, 2012, 84).
The demotic turn in communication or media usage is therefore what one
might characterise as the quotidianisation or de-elitisation of communication
or media usage. In other words, it is the communication culture in which
everyday people become both consumers and co-creators of media messages,
where the process of communication is decentred and de-hierarchised. It is
the turn that empowers hitherto powerless people, that gives voice to the
voiceless, that provides platforms to represent the unrepresented, and that
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 23
gives a face to the previously invisible. The demotic turn, in short, centres
the hitherto decentred in emergent, more liberalised, and less hierarchised
communicative spaces.
Since the social media landscape is horizontal, pervasive, invites collective
participation, and draws more people into it than any other media ecological
sphere before it, it is the most fully realised manifestation of the demotic turn
in communication. The next section conceptualises social media and shows
how its vigorous diusion in Africa has transformed the continent’s commu-
nicative landscape.
Social Media and Media Culture in Africa
Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010) denition of social media as “a group of
Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological
foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User
Generated Content” (61) has become canonical even if it is a little dated since
it does not capture mobile applications through which most social media
platforms are now accessed, but it nonetheless capsulises the supremacy of
the collaborative and co-creative energies of everyday people to the idea of
social media. Without ordinary people creating and co-creating volitional
and free content to give expression to their subjectivities, there would be no
social media.
The denition of social network sites by Boyd and Ellison (2008) also
centralises the intrinsically collaborative character of social media. According
to them,
We dene social network sites as web-based services that allow individ-
uals to (1) construct a public or semi-public prole within a bounded
system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connec-
tion, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made
by others within the system. (p. 211)
As the denition makes clear, individual users—in intentional, spontaneous,
collaborative exchanges with other users—are the building blocks of social
media networks. In other words, the idea of social media is powered by a
kind of demotic “voluntary cultural labor” (Kperogi, 2011, 321) that builds
on what Andrew Ross (2000, 6) has called the principle of “cultural dis-
count,” which ensures that “artists and other arts workers accept non-monetary
rewards – the gratication of producing art – as a compensation for their
work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labor.” In the era of social
media, this might be called demotic cultural discount.
Certain technological and philosophical foundations have been pivotal to
the growth, mass appeal, and universal acceptance of social media networks:
they are free, require no special skills to use, create opportunities for pro-
sumption (i.e., the simultaneous production and consumption of content), are
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24 Farooq A. Kperogi
devolved and non-hierarchical, are alterable sometimes immediately, and are
perpetually evolving.
In the last decade, social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Twitter,
WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok, have emerged as the most consequential
spaces for sociality, entertainment, civic engagement, public opinion for-
mation and accretion, critical democratic citizenship, citizen and traditional
journalism, social movements, identity assertion, and dissidence against
oppressive governments across Africa. The inexorably progressive intensi-
cation of Internet penetration in the continent will ensure that this will be
an abiding feature of the continent’s media ecology for the foreseeable future.
The growing importance of social media to the everyday lives of Africans is
underscored by the fact that the average daily time spent on social media in the
continent as of 2020 was three hours 10 minutes, which is similar to the global
average. This record is outrivalled only by South America where the average
time spent on social media is three hours 24 minutes. In Asia and Oceania, it
is two hours 16 minutes. In North America it is two hours 6 minutes. Europe
had the lowest at one hour 15 minutes (BroadbandSearch, n.d.).3
The diusion of social media in Africa is stimulated by the enormous
growth and explosion of mobile technology, which has helped leapfrog the
continent to the global network society ( James, 2009). The progressive low-
ering of the cost of access to the Internet is also aiding the popularisation
of social media. Every projection for the future of Internet-ready mobile
telephony in Africa (see, for instance, Ogone, 2020) points to the unstoppable
certainty of its continued growth and blossoming and for the central role it
will continue to play in powering Africa’s frenetic social media scene.
It used to be argued that what former US Secretary of State Colin Powell
once called “digital apartheid” (see Graham, 2011, 212), which consigned
much of Africa to the fringes of the information society, was actuated by a
“proximity gap” between the more industrialised countries of the world and
Africa, which impeded the sale of mobile phones to everyday folks on the
continent (Naude, 2009). From the early 2000s, however, Chinese phone
manufacturers bridged the proximity gap by ooding African markets with
cheap mobile phones that were initially derisively called “Shanzhai handsets”4
because they were crude but handy counterfeits of more established phone
brands from the West (Chen & Wen, 2016). As Olaleye, Ukpabi, Karjaluoto,
and Rizomyliotis (2019, 732) have pointed out, in time, with “the intro-
duction of the Chinese own [sic] agship Time Division Synchronous Code
Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) for 3G mobile phones [which] rev-
olutionized the Chinese mobile phone industry, leading to the emergence
of Chinese genuine mobile phone manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE,”
genuine, aordable, multifunctional phones manufactured in China replaced
the “Shanzhai handsets” in African markets, although several of the low-
cost Chinese phones sold in such countries as Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon,
and South Africa have been found to be pre-installed with malware (Ziady,
2020). In many important respects, therefore, China is central to the social
media revolution in Africa.
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 25
The inundation of the African market with low-priced Chinese smart-
phones coincided with the emergence of an African consumer middle
class and of consumerism as a lifestyle (Ncube & Lufumpa, 2015), a conti-
nent-wide youth bulge, and the strengthening of transnational connections
between many African homelands and their diasporas in the West (Kperogi,
2008; Skjerdal, 2011). These factors conduced to the incipience, maturation,
and democratisation of social media in much of Africa, although social media
access on the continent is still far from extensively diused.
Out of Africa’s roughly 1.3 billion people as of October 2021, a little over
500 million (which represents about 40 per cent of the continent’s pop-
ulation) have access to the Internet. Nonetheless, while this suggests that
Internet access and social media usage are still elitist and reect reigning
social hierarchies, an assessment of the growth and spread of the Internet,
communication technologies, and social media usage over the last two dec-
ades indicates a progressive ease of access. For instance, there has been a 100
per cent internet growth on the continent from 2000 to 2021. The number
of Internet users on the continent increased from 360,985,492 in December
2000 to 5,053,891,122 in December 2020. Ncube and Lufumpa (2015, 2)
quoted the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development as saying
that “Cellphone use has grown faster in Africa than any other region of the
world since 2003.”
But social media were not always organic to the quotidian life of Africans.
In fact, up until the 1990s, Africa used to be characterised as the world’s dig-
ital outcast; it was located on the desolate margins of the information society.
Manuel Castells (1998) even once characterised the continent as a constituent
of the “black hole of informational capitalism.” Considering the continent’s
hitherto abysmally low connectivity to the emergent digital universe of the
1990s and the early 2000s, this characterisation seemed justied.
As Hjort and Poulsen (2019) pointed out, as of 2000, there was more
Internet bandwidth in Luxembourg, one of Europe’s smallest countries, than
there was in the entire African continent. Even by 2013, only 13 per cent of
Africa had access to the Internet. However, in the last few years, much of
Africa has been “leapfrogging Internet connectivity using mobile phones”
(Masinde, 2019). Although Africa still lags the rest of the world in Internet
penetration, there has been a steadily admirable rise in Internet connectivity
and in social media usage. The next section genealogises and historicises the
emergence of social media in Africa.
A Short History of Social Media in Africa
When Sixdegrees.com, recognised by most scholars as the world’s rst social
media site (see, for example, Boyd & Ellison, 2008; Ezumah, 2013; Donath &
Boyd, 2004; Howard, 2008), was rst launched in 1997, there were scarcely,
if any, Africans among the site’s 3,500,000 members. Although Sixdgrees.
com had a “BlackPlanet” community tool—along with an “AsianAvenue”
one—which “allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating
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26 Farooq A. Kperogi
proles” (Boyd & Ellison, 2008, 214), only the Black Diaspora in the West
could participate in it since Internet access was severely inadequate on the
continent in the 1990s. The situation remained largely unchanged even up to
2001 when Sixdegrees.com closed shop.
Successors or contemporaries to Sixdegrees.com—such as LiveJournal
(launched in 1999), Friendster (launched in 2002) and MySpace (launched in
2003)—did not have many Africans from the continent for the same reason
of constrained or non-existent Internet access. An assessment of the geo-
graphic footholds of the world’s earliest social media sites shows that all of
Africa was excluded from their universes.
For instance, while Friendster was rooted in the United States, it gained
footing in the Pacic Islands. Orkut, a social media site launched in 2004
by Google, was popular in India and Brazil (Boyd & Ellison, 2008). Hi5, an
American social media site formed in 2003, grew popular in South America,
Europe, and Asia before its decline. In other words, from 1997 when the rst
social media site evolved until the turn of the century, Africans were not part
of the world’s social media conversation.
The introduction and democratisation of social media in most parts of
Africa started in earnest in the late 2000s, which is co-extensive with the
osmotic growth of Internet-enabled mobile telephony on the continent
(Essoungou, 2010). At the close of the 2000s, there were only 4,514,400
Internet users in the entire continent, but “[s]eventeen years later it had
increased to 453,329,534, giving Africa an internet penetration of 35.2%”
(Mkono, 2018). This growth popularised social media and fuelled participa-
tion in social media conversations.
As of March 2020, there were 212,911,701 Facebook subscribers in Africa,
representing a little over 40 per cent of the continent’s 526,710,313 Internet
users. Egypt leads the continent with 42,400,000 Facebook subscribers fol-
lowed by Nigeria with 27,120,000 subscribers (Internet World Stats, n.d.).
A December 2020 eMarketer report also shows that although India has the
world’s largest concentration of Facebook users, “the three fastest-growing
countries are all in Africa: Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa” (Williamson,
2020). That is a remarkable turnaround for a continent that was almost
entirely excluded from social media a decade earlier.
And the trend shows no sign of abating. Statista’s 2021 analysis of social
media penetration in Africa shows that northern and southern Africa lead the
continent in social media growth. Up to 45 per cent of people in north Africa
use social media. Southern Africa follows closely with 41 per cent. West
Africa is a distant third with 16 per cent. Eastern and central Africa are ten
and eight per cent, respectively (Galal, 2022). But these percentages obscure
country-specic dierences. For example, a 2021 report by the Global Web
Index showed that Nigerians spent the most time on social media in Africa in
2020 and were surpassed only by the Philippines in the world. Kenya ranked
fth in the world (and second in Africa) and Ghana ranked ninth in the world
(and third in Africa) (Oluwole, 2021). So, although north and central Africa
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 27
lead the continent in social media penetration, the countries that spend the
most time on social media are in west and east Africa.
The progressively massive spike in social media usage in Africa is driven
by the unrelenting penetration of smartphones. An indication of the connec-
tion between increased social media usage and mobile telephony emerged
in 2018 when Facebook revealed that 98 per cent of Africans who accessed
the social media platform did so through mobile devices (Shapshak, 2018),
which is consistent with the global pattern that shows that up to 92 per cent
of the world’s Internet trac on social media platforms come from mobile
devices (Kemp, 2020). In other words, there is an inextricable connection
between increased social media use and the growth of Internet-enabled
mobile telephony.
Twitter and Instagram are also growing exponentially in the continent,
particularly in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana. With a
growth rate of 13.92 per cent between April 2019 and January 2020, Africa
is second only to Asia’s 16.98 per cent in the growth of social media users
worldwide (Dean, 2021). From early 2020, TikTok, the video-sharing social
media network, has become popular among Africa’s youth and is one of the
fastest-growing social media networks on the continent. The app’s aggressive
marketing campaign in Africa is luring young Africans away from YouTube
and Instagram (Williams, 2020). A Senegalese-born TikTok star by the name
of Khaby Lame had the second highest TikTok following in the world with
111.8 million followers as of December 2021. A late 2021 survey has found
that “TikTok gained a 31.9% market share in Nigeria in 2020, while the
South African Social Media Landscape 2021 report by market research organi-
sation World Wide Worx and media monitoring agency Ornico estimated
that TikTok’s user numbers in South Africa have grown from 5m to 9m since
January 2020” (McBain, 2021, para 8).
The vigorous democratisation of the Internet and, with it, the evolution
of social media have vaulted the continent to the global, Internet-fuelled
network society. This fact has expanded and deepened Africa’s deliberative
spaces, inspired digital activism, nourished ecommerce, and enabled robust
citizen participation in and engagement with governance. It has also ani-
mated social movements, actuated transnational connections, disrupted set-
tled cultural certainties, and threatened the security and smug self-satisfaction
of autocracies, as the next section illustrates.
Demotic Uses of Social Media in Africa
Social media platforms have displaced the traditional media as the most con-
sequential discursive spaces in most of Africa, particularly in north, southern,
and west Africa. For instance, from at least the late 2000s, Facebook and
Twitter have become primary arenas for electoral contests in many African
countries. Both the electorate and people seeking electoral oces have come
to regard social media spaces as important showgrounds for the push and pull
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28 Farooq A. Kperogi
of contending viewpoints, for canvassing votes, for connecting with voters,
for mobilising sentiments against candidates, and for giving expression to
electoral anxieties. That was why Smyth (2013) pointed out that, “Elections
are also a boom time for discourse on social media in many African nations,
as citizens review their electoral choices, encourage each other to vote, and
report what they are seeing” (1–2).
For example, a study of the 2007 general elections in Nigeria showed
that “citizens’ access to social media electronically empowers the electorates
to be actively involved in negotiating the terms of democratic governance
with institutionally empowered politicians and leaders” (Ifukor, 2010, 407).
Similarly, a study of the 2011 elections in Nigeria showed that although citi-
zen media reports on social media platforms “did not inuence the outcome
of the election, they shaped its processes and conduct and guided its dis-
course” (Kperogi, 2012, 455). Four years later, it was found that “social media
networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter, played central roles in Nigeria’s
2015 presidential elections that saw an opposition candidate, Muhammadu
Buhari, defeat incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan” (Kperogi, 2016,
28). Scholars have also documented the increasingly visible roles that social
media platforms have played in elections in several African countries (see, for
example, Ndlela & Mano, 2020).
Africans have deployed social media not just to ght electoral battles
but also to ght against corruption (Tanga, Chenb, Zhouc, Warkentina, &
Gillensond, 2019), energise social movements, call attention to injustice, and
collaborate with global networks in holding domestic governments account-
able. As Kalyango and Adu-Kumi (2013) have found out in one of the earliest
studies on social media usage in Africa,
Netizens indicated that they experience unlimited freedom and auton-
omy from state intimidation, and as such they build selfesteem through
communicating with others and building local and international contacts
with whom they share common interests and opportunities. The major-
ity of netizens said that spending more time on virtual social network
sites such as Myspace or Friendster than at what some called physical
“drinking-joints” or “socialite-bars,” increases their awareness of “uni-
versal basic rights and the meaning of true democracy,” and it fullls their
dreams of making a change in the national discourse without the help
of their local traditional media: newspapers, radio, or television stations.
This quotation shows that right from their incipience in Africa, social media
platforms have emerged as spheres for sociality and as alternatives or comple-
ments to the traditional media. In Uganda, for instance, the hugely popular
and interactive talk radio programmes known as ebimeeza have been replaced
by Facebook, causing a Ugandan scholar to characterise Facebook in the
country as “FaceBimeeza” (see Marion Alina’s [2022] chapter in this book).
The spirit of public debate and civic journalism that the ebimeeza radio for-
mats encapsulated (Nassanga, 2008) now nd innitely more untrammelled
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 29
avenues on Facebook. Similarly, evidence has emerged that social media
platforms have robustly challenged and, in some cases, supplanted the tra-
ditional media as sources of news in South Africa (Bosch, 2014), Nigeria
(Kperogi, 2020; Uwalaka & Watkins, 2018), Egypt (Jebril & Loveless, 2017),
Zimbabwe (Ndlela, 2020), and many other countries across the continent.
In fact, the “live” feature of many social media apps, which enable real-
time, on-the-spot broadcast of events, is upending the power of traditional
broadcast journalism. For example, during the unprecedently seismic youth-
led #EndSARS protests against police brutality in Nigeria in October 2020,
young people used the “live” functions on Facebook and Instagram to
broadcast the protests. Social media livestreams captured the agonising state-
authorised mass massacres of peaceful protesters in Lekki, Lagos, in ways the
traditional broadcast media could not, both out of technical constraints and
regulatory pressures from the government.
There is also mounting trove of evidence that young Africans now increas-
ingly use Instagram as a global photographic public sphere to dispel stereo-
types of the continent by sharing photos of parts of the continent that are
often marginalised in global portrayals of Africa. Since its mass embrace
by Africans in the last half of the past decade, Instagram has evolved from
merely being a platform for photographic voyeurism and pictorial preen-
ing by youngsters to a platform to challenge negative representations of the
continent while not concealing its problems. As Zimbabwean Instagrammer
Zash Chinhara told the BBC, “We do not need to discount the bad things
that are going on; however, there is a life and a vibrancy here. We need to
paint a fuller picture of what Africa is” (Mba, 2019).
There is also a well-known Instagram handle called “EverydayAfrica,”
which is a collaborative photographic page managed by Africans on the con-
tinent and by Westerners who had lived there whose major project is to turn
“their cameras away from photographing refugees and victims of the decade-
long civil war in the Ivory Coast and instead began capturing scenes of every-
day life” (Canal & Sepehr, 2019).
TikTok has also become a platform to globalise Africa’s often provincial
gastronomic cultures. For example, fufu, the soft, stretchy, doughy staple
food popular in west and central African culinary cultures, trended globally
in “foodie TikTok” in 2021. A February 2021 report in TheWorld news site
found that “TikTok videos tagged #fufu have been watched more than 310
million times” (Hillier, 2021, para 10). This represents an intriguing case
of social mediated gastronomic globalisation of an otherwise provincial, if
staple, culinary delight.
Fake News as Smokescreen to Muzzle Social Media
But, as with every media platform, the uses of social media are not always
benign on the continent. Social media platforms have occasionally been
used to spread intentionally false news, smear innocent people, scape-
goat and demonise particular ethnic and immigrant groups, circulate hate
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30 Farooq A. Kperogi
speech, give wing to injurious slanders, and destabilise the fabric of socie-
ties (Chenzi, 2020; Mare, Mabweazara, & Moyo, 2019; Mutahi & Kimari,
2020; Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019). WhatsApp, for example, has
become a cesspit of false, malicious misinformation and a conduit for ampli-
fying false news. Research by the Centre for Democracy and Development
in Nigeria and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom on the
role WhatsApp played in elections in Africa in 2019 showed that “the plat-
form was used to mislead voters in increasingly sophisticated ways” (Fisher &
Hitchen, 2020, para 7). WhatsApp was also deployed to circularise toxic dis-
information and misinformation about COVID-19 in 2020. A study found
that more 250,000 bits of viral, COVID-related false news and memes were
shared on African WhatsApp groups just from the start of the pandemic to
June 2020, which overwhelmed governments and health ministries in the
continent (Kazeem, 2020).
Governments on the continent have used this reality as a pretext to muzzle
critical voices and to seek to constrict the deliberative space online. Calling
every true but unattering news story “fake news” even if its evidentiary
facts and narrative integrity are unquestionably manifest has become a trite
and banal rhetorical strategy that owes debt to former US president Donald
Trump who has transformed the original conception of fake news from “the
deliberate presentation of (typically) false or misleading claims as news, where
the claims are misleading by design” (Gelfert, 2018, 85–86) to anything that
people in power don’t like or, as Tong et al. (2020) put it, “anything they say!”
Labelling news stories as “fake news” has become an ocial tactic to muddy
the narrative delity of exposés of corruption and wrongdoing in high places
and to impugn the credibility of the news media platforms that purvey such
news even if the veracity of the news is self-evidently unimpeachable.
Nonetheless, as an Oxford University study has found, although govern-
ments tend to be the loudest whiners against “fake news,” they are often
its biggest, most coordinated purveyors in the world (Gordon, 2018). For
example, during the 2019 presidential election in Nigeria, the government of
Muhammadu Buhari hired Israeli disinformation agents to spread fake news
on social media against his main opponent, Atiku Abubakar. According to the
Associated Press’ summary of Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research
Lab report, “One of the pages that Facebook cancelled appeared lled with
viral misinformation attacking Abubakar, the former vice president of
Nigeria. The page’s banner image showed Abubakar as Darth Vader, the Star
Wars villain, holding up a sign reading, ‘Make Nigeria Worse Again’.” The
AP story added: “The report also featured a page that explicitly lionized and
boosted Buhari, with amateur videos eulogizing the accomplishments of his
presidency as though he were not locked in a tight battle for re-election”
(Debre, 2019).
The carefully coordinated fake news campaign on social media on behalf
the Nigerian government was executed by an Israeli lobbying rm called
Archimedes, which, before it was banned by Facebook for “coordinated and
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 31
deceptive behavior,” adorned its website with stock images of Africa, and
boasted that it took “every advantage available in order to change reality
according to our client’s wishes” using “unlimited online accounts opera-
tion” (Debre, 2019). Facebook “conducted a sweeping takedown of dozens
of accounts and hundreds of pages primarily aimed at disrupting elections
in African countries, with some scattered activity in Southeast Asia and
Latin America. Overall, the misleading accounts had reached some 2.8 mil-
lion users, and the pages had engaged over 5,000 followers, according to
Facebook’s estimates” (Debre, 2019).
Apart from hiring foreign agents to spread fake news, governments have
also sponsored troll farms on social media to muddy the discursive waters,
smear and libel critics, and silence vocal activists. The Nigerian government
under Muhammadu Buhari, for example, set up a clandestine hate and prop-
aganda factory called the Buhari Media Center (BMC) with scores of paid
propagandists whose mandate is to smear, demonise, and troll government
critics with thousands of fake, foul social media handles. BMC’s furtive cyber
operatives also ood the comment sections of news websites with false han-
dles and calculatedly duplicitous information, in addition to producing prop-
agandistic social media memes that appear to come from everyday Nigerians.
This tactic has been replicated across several African countries. Most
African governments invest enormous resources to manipulate social media
discourse through intentional misinformation. Pro- and anti-government
troll farms often luxuriate during general elections and in moments when
consequential subject matters dominate social media chatter. Zimbabwe’s e
ZANU-PF and the MDC has its “cyber warriors” who churn out “propa-
ganda through commentaries on ‘real news stories,’ gossip and planting mis-
leading information” (Banya, 2019).
Garbe, Selvik, and Lemaire (2021, 2) underscored the challenge of unques-
tioningly accepting African governments’ denitions of “fake news” as a
basis to regulate misinformation on social media when they wrote:
The fact that both humans and bots are used in several African countries
to spread government-propaganda and discredit public dissent online…
highlights the challenges related to limiting hate speech and fake news in
African contexts. Indeed, in more authoritarian contexts, domestic gov-
ernments themselves seek to manipulate both information and discourse
to ensure their regime’s survival.
In other words, while state-sponsored fake news stories proliferate on social
media with intent to pollute the discursive ebullience of citizen social media
spaces, governments have also weaponised the reality of actual fake news
purveyance by malevolent non-state actors to thwart legitimate critical dem-
ocratic digital citizenship. Therefore, governments, particularly authoritar-
ian ones that cannot brook dissent, cannot be trusted to be disinterested
regulators of misinformation.
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32 Farooq A. Kperogi
Although social media platforms have proliferated on the continent and
are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, they are now increasingly threat-
ened by regimes that are disquieted by their disruption. Amid the expansion
of the discursive space that social media have stirred is also a threat from
various African governments to constrict and constrain its luxuriance. In
most parts of the continent, governments are restricting robust deliberations,
penalising dissent, taxing social media usage in order to curtail it, enacting
laws to criminalise harmless digital dissidence, imposing constraints on social
media-enabled ecommerce (Kobo, 2021), and using the rhetoric of “fake
news” to squelch challenge to tyranny.
Conclusions
Although social media was slow to take roots in Africa—and its growth is
still uneven on the continent—it has become integral to the quotidian lives
of vast swathes of everyday Africans and is one of the fastest growing in the
world. The rise of Internet-supported mobile telephony on the continent
seems poised to ensure the continued relevance of social media in Africa’s
media culture and ecology. Traditional media formations and hitherto habit-
ual forms of sociality are being challenged and redened with breathtaking
rapidity by the inexorable march of social media spread.
The pervasively collaborative nature of the connected presence that social
media platforms enable also imbues everyday Africans with unexampled agen-
tial powers for self-presentation, digital resistance, deliberative democracy, and
sociality. Although Africa was late to embrace social media, it is not only catch-
ing up with the rest of the world, it is also in some cases surpassing others.
Social media users on the continent nd the same uses and gratication
from social media as the rest of the world. Most importantly, though, social
media use has inserted more everyday Africans into the structures of emer-
gent Internet-enabled global public spheres like never before even though
audience fragmentation and ideological silos remain ever-present hindrances
to the emergence of seamless global or even domestic public spheres on the
Internet. While the mainstreaming of social media usage on the continent
in no way suggests a path to the extirpation of the existential challenges that
plague it, it signals the transformation of its media landscape from an oli-
gopolistic, elite-driven one to a demotic one. This reality does not, of course,
elide the “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) of social media spaces
by big tech companies domiciled in the West, which expropriate the creative
energies of social media users in the Global South for prot. But it signals that
communication has taken a demotic turn in Africa.
Notes
1 A version of this chapter rst appeared as Kperogi, F. A. (2022). Social media and
the demotic turn in Africa’s media ecology. History Compass, 20 (2), e12711. ht t p s : //
doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12711.
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Historicising and Theorising Social Media 33
2 Whatagraph is an Amsterdam-based “cloud-based reporting solution designed to
help organizations create and automate marketing reports using predened tem-
plates and various data sources.”
3 According to Crunchbase, Broadband Search is a comprehensive online database
online “of all the Internet & TV Providers in the United States.”
4 Shanzhai is a Chinese coinage originally invented to semanticise fake phones from
China. The word’s meaning has now been expanded to capture any Chinese sim-
ulation of an original product. For an exploration of the emergence and evolution
of the term, see Han (2017).
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