Content uploaded by Farooq Kperogi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Farooq Kperogi on Oct 31, 2024
Content may be subject to copyright.
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
Not for distribution
This book reects on the rapid rise of social media across the African conti-
nent and the legal and extra-legal eorts 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 reects on the Chinese inuence 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
Not for distribution
This series features innovative and original research on African media, cul-
ture and communication from scholars both within and outside of Africa.
With Africa still under-represented in media and cultural studies literature,
this series provides a much-needed platform for comparative and interdis-
ciplinary research that highlights the perspectives and needs of Africans as
consumers and producers.
Digital Dissidence and Social Media Censorship in Africa
Edited by Farooq A. Kperogi
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.
com/Routledge-African-Media-Culture-and-Communication-Studies/
book-series/RAM
Routledge African Media, Culture and
Communication Studies
Not for distribution
Edited by Farooq A. Kperogi
Digital Dissidence and Social
Media Censorship in Africa
Not for distribution
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Farooq A. Kperogi; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Farooq A. Kperogi to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kperogi, Farooq A., 1973- editor.
Title: Digital dissidence and social media censorship in Africa / edited by
Farooq A. Kperogi.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022003502 (print) | LCCN 2022003503 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032232263 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032232287 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003276326 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social media--Censorship--Africa. | Social media--Political
aspects--Africa. | Social media--Law and legislation--Africa. | Protest
movements--Africa. | Social control--Africa.
Classif ication: LCC HM742 .D55 2023 (print) | LCC HM742 (ebook) |
DDC 302.23/1096--dc23/eng/20220131
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003502
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003503
ISBN: 978-1-032-23226-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-23228-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27632-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003276326
Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Not for distribution
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
Not for distribution
viii Contents
PART II
PROTEST JOURNALISM AND CITIZEN
DISSIDENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA 99
5 Countering Hegemony in Zimbabwe’s Cyber Sphere:
A Study of Dissident Digital Native Group #Tajamuka 101
TRUST MATSILELE
6 Cyber Space as Battlefield for Nationalist
and Separatist Groups: A Study of Nigeria’s
Indigenous People of Biafra Online Propaganda 119
FLORIBERT PATRICK C. EN DONG A ND PAUL OBI
7 Social Media, Censorship and Counter-Censorship
of Female Performances in Morocco and Egypt 139
EBTESAM M. EL SHOK ROFY
8 From Facebook to FaceBimeeza: How Ugandans
Used Facebook to Replace Banned Radio Political
Debate During the 2016 Presidential Elections 155
MARION O. ALINA
9 Digital Dissidents or Whistle-Blowers?
A Critical Analysis of Microbloggers in Kenya 175
JOB M WAUR A
PART III
SOCIAL MEDIA REPRESSION AND
STATE SURVEILLANCE 195
10 Social Media Usage and Digital Rights
Restrictions in the Republic of Chad 197
AKWASI BOSOMPEM BOATENG
11 Powers, Interests and Actors: The Influence of
China in Africa’s Digital Surveillance Practices 209
ALLEN MUNORIYARWA AND SAR AH H ELEN CHIUMBU
12 Social Mediated Crisis Communication: Legitimacy,
Significant Choice, and Censorship in the Armed
Conf lict in Cameroon 230
VINCENT DOH MANZIE
Not for distribution
Contents ix
13 Case Studies on Anti-Social Media Laws in
African Countries 242
ANNA NAKAAYI
Index 267
Not for distribution
DOI: 10.4324/9781003276326-1
Introduction
The Gatekeeper State Meets
Digital Citizen Panoptic Gaze
Farooq A. Kperogi
One of the most consequential developments of the last decade on the
African continent has been the inexorably relentless growth and democrati-
sation of social media platforms and the migration of discursive formations
from traditional deliberative arenas to digital spaces. In more ways than one,
social media networks have expanded the boundaries of the electronic agora
(Kperogi, 2016a) provided the interlocutory resources to reverse what has
been theorised as the systemic deliberation decit of political cultures on
the continent (Obadare, 2004) and are helping much of the continent to
exit what Castells (1998) has called the “global Fourth World,” by which he
meant societies that are disaliated from the global network society.
With what seems like the irretrievable collapse of the symbolic, cultural,
and political power of oligopolistic news media organisations, social media
platforms have emerged as sites for the push and pull of competing discur-
sive regimes, rebellion, resistance, domestic and transnational collaborations,
social movements, and even governance (Mutsvairo, 2016; Nyabola, 2018;
Salgado, 2014). They have also emerged as locations for self-expression and
for national self-fashioning by the continent’s restlessly energic and conta-
giously creative youth, and have contributed to the perceptual transmutation
of the continent from the “heart of darkness” to one that is “rising” in the
global popular imaginary (Bunce, Franks, & Paterson, 2016).
This fact has inspired a deep, as yet unaccounted but nonetheless momen-
tous, cultural rupture. The familiar boundaries of acceptable and unaccept-
able speech, the limits of rebellion, the contours of social movements, the
depth and breadth of transnational collaborations, the borders of rhetorical
interactions with people in the orbit of power, and all the hitherto habitual
forms of state-citizen relations have been disrupted. The all-powerful but
insecure African state, which Frederick Cooper (2002, p. 6) described as a
“gatekeeper state,” where “ruling elites tended to use patronage, coercion,
scapegoating of opponents, and other resources to reinforce their position,
narrowing the channels of access even further,” is being weakened or defa-
miliarised by an emergent, diused, and horizontal form of social media-
mediated interaction that puts previously disempowered citizens at the core
of the communication process.
Not for distribution
2 Farooq A. Kperogi
The gatekeeper state in Africa has not only been thrust into the decentred,
slippery universe of irreverent online sociality, it has also become subject to what
might be called a reverse panoptic gaze from previously marginal sections of the
society. To understand the reverse panoptic gaze, it is rst important to concep-
tualise what the panoptic gaze entails. The notion of the panoptic gaze was rst
put forward by Michel Foucault to capture the potent, invisible, ever-present
forms of mental control that the state exercises on citizens. It has been deployed
to explain how awareness of surveillance technologies subconsciously structures
citizens to impose restraint on themselves. As Foucault points out:
There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a
gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight
will end by internalizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each
individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A
superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to
be a minimal cost.
(Foucault, 1980, p. 155)
Foucauldian panopticism traces ideational descent from Jeremy Bentham’s
model prison design, called the Panopticon or the Inspection House, where
the prison is intentionally constructed as a multiple-step globular structure
with a closed guard tower in the middle to create the illusion of permanent
surveillance of prisoners conned to it. As Martin (2013, p. 8) describes it:
Each cell would be open to the center so that it could be under surveilled
from the guard tower. Moreover, the prisoners would never know when
they were watched. According to Bentham, this type of prison would
function as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its innovative
design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the ‘inspector’ who con-
ducted surveillance from the privileged central tower. Since the prisoner
could never know when he was surveilled, the mental uncertainty would
prove to be a crucial instrument of self-discipline and control. The price
for this control would be total loss of any sense of privacy.
Several scholars have construed the Internet – and its unobtrusive but perva-
sive surveillance and algorithmic capabilities – as the electronic manifestation
of Bentham’s panopticon (Campbell & Carlson, 2002; Lyon, 1994; Lyon,
2001; Whitaker, 1999). Lyon (1994, p. 4), for instance, argues that “to partic-
ipate in modern society is to be under electronic surveillance.” At the heart
of this contention is the notion that the Internet has emerged as Foucault’s
metaphoric Panopticon for the social control of everyday citizens by gov-
ernments and corporations. As Fox (2001, p. 267) points out, a prevailing
conception of the Internet in the early 2000s was that the “latest forms of sur-
veillance” that the Internet enabled were “more akin to Bentham’s utopian
idea of a ‘panopticon’ than Orwell’s dystopian ‘Big Brother’.”
Not for distribution
Introduction 3
Nonetheless, although intrusive and unobtrusive surveillance has become
central to the contemporary network society and has been weaponised as a
tool for social control by governments, supra-state institutions, and corpo-
rations through elaborate databases, pernicious mass surveillance, biometric
identiers, retention of the digital footprints of Internet users, and participa-
tory surveillance practices such as the use of cookies to determine people’s
browsing history and behaviour (Ball & Webster, 2003; Bennett, 2010), the
digital panopticon also empowers citizens to reverse the gaze with varying
degrees of success.
Increasingly, we are witnessing the incipience of “an inverse, contradi-
rectional, many-to-many, collaborative panoptic gaze on the state and its
institutions by politically conscious, smartphone-wielding” citizens in Africa
and all over the world (Kperogi, 2020, p. 169). Social media have aorded
everyday citizens the power to capture police brutality on cellphones and
to share them on social media in real time, to expose top-secret govern-
ment documents, to thwart eorts to surreptitiously enact injurious laws, to
organise and confront tyranny (Kperogi, 2016b), and to build transcontinen-
tal linkages and activate what Keck and Sikkink (1998, p. x) have called a
“boomerang process” where “[v]oices that are suppressed in their own soci-
eties may nd that networks can project and amplify their concerns into an
international arena, which in turn can echo back into their own countries.”
This is at the core of digital dissidence, which I conceptualise as taking
advantage of the discursive and organisational opportunity structures of the
Internet to articulate resistance to repression by governments and other hegem-
onic entities through counternarratives that challenge and upend dominant,
ocial perspectives. In other words, digital resistance entails individual and
collaborative deance and resistance to the tyranny of oppressive states and
their agents using the instrumentality of what Larry Diamond (2010, p. 70) has
called “liberation technology,” which “enables citizens to report news, expose
wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scruti-
nize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.”
Digital resistance expands and enlivens the public sphere, trammels authori-
tarianism, horizontalises the playing eld for people who are enraged to have
the latitude to be engaged, and mobilises citizens for action. Tunisia and Egypt
blazed the trail on the continent in instrumentalising mass discontent to disrupt
oppressive regimes through social media. In their seminal work on the Arab
Spring in 2011, Howard et al. (2011) found that:
social media was used heavily to conduct political conversations by a key
demographic group in the revolution— young, urban, relatively well
educated individuals, many of whom were women. Both before and
during the revolutions, these individuals used Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube to put pressure on their governments. In some cases, they used
new technologies in creative ways such as in Tunisia where democracy
advocates embarrassed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by streaming
Not for distribution
4 Farooq A. Kperogi
video of his wife using a government jet to make expensive shopping
trips to Europe. (p. 1)
The relative success of digital dissidence in Tunisia and Egypt inspired con-
dence in the capacity of social media platforms to serve as platforms of digital
liberatory struggles. As Matsilele and Ruhanya (2021, p. 392) have noted in
their study of social media dissidence in Zimbabwe, “Dissidence activities
in Zimbabwe, to a greater extent, echoes similar movements in the Arab
world such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Bahrain Uprising of 2011…
where activist resistance against authoritarian practices was mediated on dig-
ital media spaces.” This is not limited to Zimbabwe.
In October 2020 in Nigeria, the #EndSARS movement instrumentalised
disparate resentments against bad governance and police brutality, which
quickly coalesced into a mass resistance that migrated to social media, then
blossomed into a massively spontaneous protest, and culminated in a seismic,
youth-led oine rebellion that convulsed the foundations of Nigeria. Evidence
of the contributions of social media in the spontaneous, leaderless, and decentred
#EndSARS rebellion can be distilled from the fact that by October 11, 2020,
the hashtag #EndSARS had generated nearly 30 million tweets in 24 hours,
which is several folds greater than the 3.7 million tweets #BlackLivesMatter
generated in a day during its peak in June 2020 (Essien, 2020).
The relative ease with which digital dissidents on the African continent
have deployed social media to articulate their grievances, organise dispa-
rate elements of the society, and galvanise them into action instantiates the
observation that social media have the capacity to “provide a movement with
powerful, speedy, and relatively low-cost tools for recruitment, fund-raising,
the distribution of information and images, collective discussions, and mobi-
lization for action” (Wolfsfeld, Segev, & Sheafer, 2013, p. 117).
In many countries in Africa where the state is weak and its juridical power
tenuous, where state institutions are shaky and territorial jurisdictions are
poorly policed, where political instability and ssiparity in the polity are
the norm rather than the exception, but where the state persists nonethe-
less ( Jackson & Rosberg, 1982), the instability, horizontality, and discursive
openness that social media platforms oer can be disruptive and threatening
to people who dominate and control the cultural and political power struc-
ture. This is, of course, not unique to Africa. Most countries that have been
labelled as “partly free” or “not free” in Freedom House’s typology of global
freedoms have, to varying degrees, squirmed in discomfort by the disruptive-
ness of Internet freedoms and have sought to curtail it. As Clark et al. (2017,
p. 3) have noted:
Repressive states are more likely to block political content, and when
they block political content, they most often target political views that
are critical of the government. Those states that have less respect for free-
dom of expression and human rights tend to take an aggressive approach
Not for distribution
Introduction 5
to blocking online content and use all available means to discourage
political activity online. Because of the scale, global reach, and rapid
production of online content, aggressive Internet ltering regimes typi-
cally delegate to third parties—usually private companies that specialize
in selling ltering technologies—decisions over which websites to block.
For countries that value freedom of expression, due process, and rule of
law, carrying out such large-scale blocking is a step too far. Those coun-
tries that lter the Internet are those that are able to make such freedom
of speech decisions by administrative at.
Many African governments t this description. Their hitherto near rm grip
on domestic informational ows – through broadcast industry regulations
and subtle and not too subtle control of the private print media by way of
control over advertising patronage and the outright intimidation and con-
tainment of critical voices – is loosening. The digital sphere in general and
social media in particular have become, instead of being sole instruments
by governments to gaze at their citizens, reverse panopticons for everyday
citizens to x a penetrating collective gaze at their governments, to share
information, to organise, and to hold governments accountable in ways that
have no precedent. To be sure, this fact has not eliminated governmental sur-
veillance of citizens or completely undermined the coercive powers of gov-
ernments, but it counterpoises the hitherto largely unchallenged dominance
of governments in informational ows in domestic public spheres.
Governments, unaccustomed to the unprecedented expansion of the
deliberative space and the irreverent discursive protocols that social media
platforms have instigated, have devised various strategies to constrict and
constrain the rhetorical luxuriance of the social media and digital spheres. In
many countries, people in government have deployed “fake news” and “hate
speech” as both rhetorical cudgels and emotional crutches to squelch dissent.
“Hate speech” bills are being enacted in many countries on the continent
even though the bills, such as in Nigeria, are fundamentally rooted in, and
nurtured by, crass and deep-seated ignorance of the very meaning of “hate
speech.”
Although hate speech laws all over the world are enacted to protect weak,
defenceless, and marginal social, religious, ethnic, cultural, sexual, and
gender groups from the tyranny of dominant, mainstream groups (see, for
instance, Brown, 2017; Nemes, 2002; Slagle, 2009; Valeri & Borgeson, 2005)
“hate speech laws” in many African countries are designed to punish speech
that hurts the sensibilities of government ocials or that that insults powerful
individuals. For example, Nigeria’s Cybercrime Act, which former President
Goodluck Jonathan signed into law in 2015, prescribes a three-year jail term
or a ne of 7 million naira (equivalent to about $20,000) or both for anyone
convicted of “causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult,
injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety
to another.” In 2019, Mr. Omoyele Sowore, publisher and founder of the
Not for distribution
6 Farooq A. Kperogi
radical, New York-based online newspaper Sahara Reporters, was charged
with violating the Cybercrime Act by “insulting” Nigeria’s president during
a TV interview.
The reason for Sowore’s detention and prosecution, according to the charge
sheet from the government’s prosecutors, was “That you Omoyele Stephen
Sowore… did commit an oence to wit: you knowingly sent messages by
means of press interview granted on ‘Arise Television’ network which you
knew to be false for the purpose of causing insult, enmity, hatred and ill-will
on the person of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” (Owolabi,
2019). In other words, “hate speech” laws are more concerned about protect-
ing oppressive, overpampered, corrupt, and unaccountable government o-
cials from the searing scrutiny of the governed than they are about protecting
weak, marginal populations.
Since social media platforms have emerged as the preferred arenas for
online sociality and deliberative practices in Africa, governments have set
their focus on social media chatter for evidence of “hate speech” and have
habitually sought to inhibit or censor critical, dissident conversations and to
punish people who take part in them. As Gumede (2016) points out:
Many African governments and leaders acutely aware of the liberating
power of the Internet and social media are increasingly censoring these
platforms and those using them. Online publications are routinely closed
down, and bloggers and social media activists are increasingly impris-
oned for criticizing African governments. Many African governments
are monitoring and intercepting e-mail and Internet communications in
a bid to stie opposition views from being disseminated widely. (p. 415)
From Tanzania requiring bloggers to pay $900 a year for the privilege
to blog (Dahir, 2018) to Uganda imposing a tax on citizens to use social
media (Namubiru, 2018), to Nigeria snooping on citizens’ calls and texts
(TheCable, 2020), to Lesotho requiring social media users with more than
100 followers to register with the government as “internet broadcasters” and
subject to the same regulation as traditional broadcasters (Karombo, 2020),
to Cameroon’s periodic shutting down of the Internet to hinder the spread of
digital rebellion against the government (Monks, 2018), to various African
leaders deploying surveillance technology to spy on citizens critical of gov-
ernments (Mojeed, 2019), to restrictive laws designed to asphyxiate dissent
in such countries as Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mali, Rwanda, Ethiopia,
Sudan, and others, there is a sustained assault on Internet freedom on the
continent and an active campaign to constrict the discursive space of the
continent’s various virtual public spheres.
The incipience of the systematic censorship of social media voices, which is
coterminous with the luxuriance and mainstreaming of social media on the
continent, can be placed around the early 2010s ( Dwyer & Molony, 2019;
Gumede, 2016). In 2010, in one of the earliest cases of social media censorship
Not for distribution
Introduction 7
in Mozambique, the government forced telecommunication companies to
disable text messaging capabilities for prepaid cell phone users because pro-
testers used text messages to organise a protest against the government over
the hyperinationary conagration that had gripped economically distressed
parts of the city of Maputo, which caused the death of 14 people (BBC,
2010). The protests not only triggered social tremors in the country, they
also recongured the locus and praxis of liberatory politics there. Protests
against unpopular government policies in the country used to be exclusively
organised by professional civil society activists. The protests decentred the
professional activists and put everyday Mozambican youth at its core. As
Iwilade (2013, p. 1061) pointed out, “civil society organizations were rele-
gated to the sidelines of the movement and reduced to merely making post-
hoc statements, condemning the price increases and encouraging protesters
to remain steadfast.” Five years later, the government led criminal charges
against Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco and Fernando Mbanze because of crit-
ical Facebook status updates they wrote against former president Armando
Guebuza (Amnesty International, 2015).
As early as 2011, the Sudanese government established what it called a
“Cber Jihadist Unit” to surveil the morality of the Sudanese people on social
media, to monitor the social chatter of government critics, and “to lter
web content, censor emails and other internet communications, and spy
on the political opposition and journalists” (Abubkr, 2014, para 6). During
demonstrations against the removal of fuel subsidies in the country between
September and October 2013, the government shut down the Internet,
blocked phones from being able to send and receive text messages, slowed
Internet speeds, and blocked social media platforms (Abubkr, 2014).
The Ugandan government also started social media repression since
2011. According to the New York-based Freedom House, in April of 2011,
the Ugandan government directed telecommunications companies in the
country to block access to Facebook and Twitter for an extended period
“in response to the ‘walk to work’ protests over rising food and fuel prices”
(Freedom House, 2015). In 2016, in the run-up to the country’s presi-
dential election, the government also blocked social media access for vast
swaths of the Ugandan population ostensibly because of “complaints from
the country’s electoral commission that the platforms were being used to
bribe voters and to campaign past [the] campaigning deadline” (Windsor,
2016, para 1).
In 2015, Egypt was so incensed at Facebook’s refusal “to give authorities
access to user accounts” that it blocked Facebook’s “Free Basics” Internet
service program, which “oers limited Internet access to people in 37 devel-
oping countries” (Habib, 2016, para 6). The service, which benetted more
than 3 million Egyptians, oered “uncontrolled communication… to every-
one without even surveillance, which means less control over that medium”
(Habib, 2016, para 7). The government also arrested people who managed
Facebook pages that were critical of people in power.
Not for distribution
8 Farooq A. Kperogi
On June 5, 2021, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari instructed
telecommunications companies in the country to “indenitely suspend”
Twitter’s operations in the country “two days after Twitter deleted a tweet
by President Muhammadu Buhari that was widely perceived as oensive,”
although the government said the ban on Twitter was triggered by the fact
that the platform was being used “for activities that are capable of undermin-
ing Nigeria’s corporate existence” (Princewill & Busari, 2021). Although
the ocial narrative for banning Twitter in Nigeria was that Twitter was
the platform that digital dissidents, such as the Indigenous People of Biafra’s
Nnamdi Kanu, deployed to amplify their separatist rhetoric, Daily Beast’s
reporting showed that Twitter’s deletion of Buhari’s tweet, which threatened
genocide against the Igbo ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria for advo-
cating secession from Nigeria, both angered and embarrassed Muhammadu
Buhari and that these emotions were further exacerbated when Facebook
also deleted his post. The paper reported that Buhari wanted to ban both
Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop but “succumbed to pressure from his
closest aides not to immediately target Facebook… so that it isn’t blatantly
obvious that he was acting in response to the deleted posts” (Obaji, 2021).
The Nigerian government’s ban on Twitter came about ve months after
the government had instructed Nigeria’s major telecommunications com-
panies – MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile. – to block access to the website of the
Peoples Gazette, a new, intrepid, doggedly muckraking, evidence-based,
digital-native investigative reporting outt that exposes corruption in
high places. MTN, Nigeria’s largest mobile telecommunications com-
pany, told the lawyer to the Peoples Gazette “network access restriction
for https://peoplesgazette.com is pursuant to the directives of the Nigerian
Communications Commission… dated 26 January 2021. As a responsi-
ble corporate organisation, MTN complied with the said directive in line
with both the provisions of Section 146 of the Nigeria Communications
Act, 2003 and the applicable terms and conditions of MTNN’s operating
licenses” (Olubayo, 2021, para 2).
Ethiopia, Chad, Guinea, Somalia, Burundi, Togo, and Senegal were also
among some of the most egregious violators of online freedom and free speech
on social media in 2020, according to an analysis by Bloomberg (Prinsloo &
Cohen, 2021). The steady, unabating rise in government-sanctioned social
media censorship and Internet shutdowns in Africa inspired the International
Journal of Communication to dedicate a special issue on the topic in 2020 (see
Bergère, 2020; de Gregorio & Stremlau, 2020; Marchant & Stremlau, 2020a,
b; Mare, 2020; Parks & Thompson, 2020; Rydzak, Karanja, & Opiyo, 2020;
Marchant & Stremlau, 2020b).
State-sponsored war on legitimate digital dissidence has also activated
pushback against insecure and intolerant African governments and central-
ised a tensile push and pull between citizens and governments in the African
public sphere (Matfess & Smith, 2018). For instance, apart from creating
transnational publicity against social media censorship, activists and everyday
Not for distribution
Introduction 9
citizens have also embraced subversive technologies such as virtual private
networks, or VPN, to circumvent government censorship (Welle, 2018).
For example, in the aftermath of the Twitter ban in Nigeria in 2021, sev-
eral Nigerians used VPNs not only to evade the ban but also to amplify
anti-Buhari rhetoric on Twitter on an unexampled scale globally. Because
millions of Nigerians circumvent the ban through VPNs, which used mostly
US and UK IP addresses, anti-Buhari memes and themes dominated US
and UK Twitter trends, which is in turn invited deservedly critical foreign
media coverage of the regime. Journalists in the West routinely use trends on
Twitter to report on the news, and since Nigerian issues topped the trends
charts in their countries in the immediate aftermath of the Twitter ban, many
Nigeria-centric issues that used to be conned to the Nigerian public sphere –
or Nigerian trends when Twitter was not banned in Nigeria and Nigerians
had no need to use VPN to tweet – attracted the attention of American,
British, and Canadian journalists, which translated to consistently negative
coverage from the international media.
For a government that prized positive global media coverage so much that
the only consequential interviews President Buhari granted to journalists
were to foreign journalists on foreign soil and that “hired two American
lobbying and public relations rms to plant opinion articles favourable to
the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration in American newspa-
pers” (Okakwu, 2018, para 1) the Twitter ban was an unanticipated own
goal in addition to the fact that, according to British tech rm Top10VPN
which used “a tool developed by internet governance watchdog organization
Netblocks, and Internet Society, a US advocacy nonprot” to calculate, the ban
disrupted the livelihoods of 104.4 million Nigerian Internet users and led to
losses that added up to $366.9 million between June 5, 2021 and August 5, 2021
(Onukwue, 2021). In the entire world in 2021, only Myanmar and India suf-
fered a worse nancial haemorrhage than Nigeria as a consequence of a social
media shutdown. Uganda was fourth.
The policing of critical social media spaces and of digital dissidents in Africa
has always had transnational dimensions. African governments regularly deploy
foreign expertise to track, inltrate, apprehend, and punish social media
activists with the goal of freezing dissent and inspiring self-censorship in
activist social media communities. The Israeli cyber warfare vendor NSO
Group Technologies, for instance, was used by African governments to
snoop on social media activists at home and in the diaspora, particularly on
WhatsApp, using the infamous Pegasus spyware. A mapping of the NSO’s
spyware attacks on social media activists between August 2016 and August
2018 showed that it targeted social media activists and journalists in at least
12 African countries: Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Ivory Coast,
Togo, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, and South Africa. NSO’s espionage
has had a chilling eect on activists and social media activism.
A December 2020 report by University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (Marczak,
Scott-Railton, Rao, Anstis, & Deibert, 2020) found that such African
Not for distribution
10 Farooq A. Kperogi
countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Equatorial Guinea,
Morocco, and Zambia – along with other authoritarian countries in the
world – are clients to surveillance rm Circles, which is associated with NSO
Group, manufacturer of the notoriously invasive Pegasus spyware. The report
disclosed that Circles “exploits weaknesses in the global mobile phone sys-
tem to snoop on calls, texts, and the location of phones” (p. 1) of opponents,
critics, activists, and human rights advocates. It cited “a 2016 investigation by
Nigerian newspaper Premium Times… that two state governors in Nigeria
acquired Circles systems and used them to spy on political opponents” (p. 3).
China has also emerged as a consequential facilitator of African govern-
ments’ censorship of the Internet in general and of social media in particular
(see Chapter 11 of this book). Although Gagliardone (2019) has noted African
countries are self-aware agential players and not passive recipients of China’s
ICT policies, he has admitted that China has, over the years, expanded its
trails in Africa’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) land-
scape and is reshaping it. In addition to Chinese Tech giant Huawei provid-
ing technical support to African governments to surveil and squelch dissent
(Parkinson, Bariyo, & Chin, 2019), several African countries are copying the
Chinese government’s playbook on Internet censorship (Bailey, 2017).
In fact, in June 2021, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism reported
that in the aftermath of the Nigerian government’s ban on Twitter, ocials
of the Nigerian presidency “reached out to the Cyberspace Administration
of China (CAC) to discuss plans to build an internet rewall” (Mbamalu,
2021, para 1) that will allow the government to have a rmer control of the
Internet and social media. The Council on Foreign Relations described the
Great Firewall as “the center of the government’s online censorship and sur-
veillance eort. Its methods include bandwidth throttling, keyword ltering,
and blocking access to certain websites” (Xu & Albert, 2017).
Nevertheless, it should be noted that although social media have func-
tioned as “liberation technologies” to animate digital resistance, challenge
authoritarianism, nurture emancipatory counterculture, they have also
served as goldmines for Big Tech companies in the West to impose data
and algorithmic colonialism of the continent (Birhane, 2020; Couldry &
Mejias, 2019). Zubo (2019) also shows how “surveillance capitalism oper-
ates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that
accrues to knowledge.” This state of aairs, she points out, results in our
lives being “scraped and sold to fund the freedom of surveillance capitalists
and our subjugation,” juxtaposing “their knowledge and our ignorance about
what they know.” For all the valorisations of the unprecedented capacities of
digital and social media to horizontalise the discursive playing eld, Zuboof
argues that they, in the nal analysis, represent “an overthrow of the people’s
sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic
deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies.”
There is also an unequal, exploitative relationship between social media
users on the African continent and social media companies. User data is often
monetised without the consent of users, and user proles can often be mined
Not for distribution
Introduction 11
and manipulated by malevolent actors to achieve predetermined goals. For
example, in 2018, it came to light that Cambridge Analytical, the defunct
London-based data-mining rm that was exposed for harvesting the “private
information of more than 50 million” Facebook users (Cadwalladr & Graham-
Harrison, 2018), exploited the zero data protection environment in Africa to
inuence elections in Nigeria and Kenya (Solomon, 2018). In other words,
governmental repression is not the only form of constraint that exists on social
media. A Manichean, dualist conception of social media which pits a putatively
progressive youth population against regressive and repressive regimes over-
simplies a complex issue and uncritically endorses the self-serving, hegemonic
discourses that Big Tech companies treasure and actively promote.
In addition, overenthusiastic celebrations of the liberatory potential of social
media, which are usually pushed by tech giants, also risk being guilty of what
Standage (1998) has called “technological utopianism” (2010) and “chronocen-
tricity,” which he denes as “the egotism that one’s own generation is poised
on the very cusp of history” (p. 213). The so-called Twitter Revolution in Iran
in 2009, for instance, turned out to be an uncritical, factually defective valori-
sation of Twitter. Schectman (2009) found out, for example, that out of Iran’s
more than 70 million people, fewer than 9,000 people had Twitter accounts,
which undermines the widespread claims in Western media narratives that the
June 2009 youth-led Iranian rebellion was fuelled by Twitter. Nonetheless,
it is undeniable that social media platforms – particularly Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and TikTok – continue to shape and reshape the contours of Africa’s
media ecosystem in many signicant and unexampled ways.
This volume aggregates the research of many well-regarded scholars from
across the continent on social media dissidence in a variety of African coun-
tries and the legal and extra-legal eorts governments have invented to con-
tain the vibrance of the social media scene. Contributors explore themes
such as the form and nature of social media and government censorship in
representative African countries, case studies of antisocial media laws, the
artful deployment of the rhetoric of “fake news” as a smokescreen to muzzle
critical voices, state cybersurveillance, subversive technologies to circumvent
social media censorship, social media and social movement, the inuence of
China in shaping and reshaping, and so on.
These contributions from dierent disciplinary and methodological orien-
tations on various dimensions of the unfolding phenomenon of social media
censorship from all regions of Africa provide signicant contributions to the
literature on social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in
transitional societies, and censorship on the Internet.
Summary of Chapters
The rst chapter by Farooq A. Kperogi traces the history and evolution of
social media in Africa, explains the factors that aided the growth of social
media on the continent, and argues that the progressive quotidianisation of
social media in Africa signals a demotic turn in the media ecology of the
Not for distribution
12 Farooq A. Kperogi
continent. In Chapter 2, Shepherd Mpofu explores the concept of elite meg-
alomania in Africa, which he calls the “Big Man Syndrome.” He uses it to
explain the all-too-familiar predisposition for people in positions of power
to shut down the Internet when their exaggerated sense of self-importance is
hurt by the horizontality and casual sociality of social media.
In Chapter 3, Eric Karikari takes a political economy perspective to show
how the state can exclude marginal voices from the social media public sphere
through collusion with neoliberal telecommunications companies, which
are regulated by the government, to price data plans beyond the reach of
economically dislocated but politically active citizens. In Chapter 4, Tendai
Chari transcends the familiar conceptions of Internet shutdowns as an instan-
tiation of democratic decit and a drain on the economy and explores the
eects the shutdowns have on the quotidian lives and perceptual reections
of everyday Zimbabweans, journalists, experts, and civil society activists.
In Chapter 5, Trust Matsilele studied the Zimbabwean digital native dissi-
dent group called #Tajamuka and showed how dissident groups in authoritar-
ian societies can take advantage of the disembodied, anonymic cover of social
media to confront state oppression, bend the boundaries of previously settled
discursive regimes, and evade oine consequences. In Chapter 6, Floribert
Patrick C. Endong and Paul Obi lend insights into the social media strategies
that Nigerian secessionist group IPOB deploys to ght the Nigerian govern-
ment and court international sympathy even after the government declared
it a “terrorist” group.
In Chapter 7, Ebtesam M. El Shokrofy explores how Muslim female per-
formers of the irreverent Vagina Monologues episodic play deployed such
social media platforms as YouTube and other stealthy strategies to circumvent
the intrusive surveillance of both self-appointed moral police and govern-
ment censors in Morocco and Egypt. In Chapter 8, Marion O. Alina exam-
ines the emergence and luxuriance of Facebook as the veritable Ugandan
public sphere in the aftermath of the Ugandan government’s crackdown on
a wildly popular participatory phone-on radio programme called ebimeeza,
which literally translates as “table talk” in Luganda, Uganda’s major lan-
guage, which had acted as the Ugandan public sphere before Facebook.
In Chapter 9, Job Mwaura highlights the symbolic power of blogging in
the Kenyan media ecosystem, chronicles the migration of Kenya’s top blog-
gers of the early 2000s from traditional blogging platforms to social media
spaces, and how their social media activism shapes national discourse even at
the expense of governmental repression. In Chapter 10, Akwasi Bosompem
Boateng argues that vast Internet penetration and mass migration to online
discursive spaces are not the only conditions that spook governments in
Africa to be paranoid about the disruptive power of online activism. He
shows that although Chad has one of the lowest Internet penetrations and
social media users in the world, the government there shut down social media
platforms and restricted the digital rights of its citizens in the run-up to a
general election.
Not for distribution
Introduction 13
In Chapter 11, Allen Munoriyarwa and Sarah H. Chiumbu delve into the
proliferation of China’s digital surveillance infrastructural investments in
Africa, particularly in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and show how these technol-
ogies of surveillance inuence African governments’ repression of the digital
rights of their citizens. In Chapter 12, Vincent Doh Manzie analyses how
social media have emerged as sites for Cameroon’s Anglophone separatist
dissidents at home and in the diaspora to publicise their cause, and how the
Cameroonian central government not only uses social media to ght back
against the dissidents but to also punish them through Internet shutdowns
and draconian social media laws. The nal chapter by Anna Nakaayi oers
a panoramic and perspectival survey of repressive social media laws in repre-
sentative African countries.
References
Abubkr, L. E. (2014, April 11). Online surveillance and censorship in Sudan. Association
for Progressive Communications, https://www.apc.org/en/blog/online-surveillance-and-
censorship-sudan.
Amnesty International. (2015, September 15). Mozambique: Conviction of academic
and editor over Facebook post would set dangerous precedent. Amnesty International,
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2015/09/mozambique-conviction-
of-academic-and-editor-over-facebook-post-would-set-dangerous-precedent/.
Bailey, N. (2017, October 24). East African states adopt China’s playbook on Internet
censorship. Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/article/east-african-states-adopt-
chinas-playbook-internet-censorship.
Ball, K., & Webster, F. (2003). The intensication of surveillance. In K. Ball, & F.
Webster (Eds.), The Intensication of Surveillance: Crime, terrorism and warfare in the infor-
mation era. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1–15.
BBC (2010, September 14). Mozambique ‘blocked texts’ during food riots. BBC, h t t p s: //
www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-11300211
Bennett, C.J. (2010). The privacy advocates: Resisting the spread of surveillance. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Bergère, C. (2020). “Don’t tax my megabytes”: Digital infrastructure and the regulation
of citizenship in Africa. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4309–4326.
Birhane, A. (2020). Algorithmic colonization of Africa. SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law,
Technology & Society, 17 (2), 389, https://script-ed.org/?p=3888. DOI: 10.2966/
scrip.170220.389
Brown, A. (2017). What is hate speech? Part 1: The myth of hate. Law and Philos, 36,
419– 468.
Bunce, M., Franks, S., & Paterson, C. (Eds.) (2016). Africa’s media image in the 21st century:
From the “Heart of Darkness” to “Africa rising.” London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Cadwalladr, C., & Graham-Harrison, E. (2018, March 17). Revealed: 50 million Facebook
proles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. Guardian, https://www.
theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-
us-election
Campbell, J., & Carlson, M. (2002). Panopticon.com: Online surveillance and the com-
modication of privacy. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 46 (4), 586–606.
Not for distribution
14 Farooq A. Kperogi
Castells, M. (1998). End of millennium. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Clark, J., Faris, R., Morrison-Westphal, R., Noman, H., Tilton, C., & Zittrain, J. (2017).
The shifting landscape of global internet censorship. Cambridge, MA: Berkman Klein Center
for Internet & Society Research Publication.
Cooper, F. (2002). Africa since 1940: The past of the present. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life
and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dahir, A. L. (2018, April 10). You now have to pay the government over $900 a year
to be a blogger in Tanzania. Quartz, https://qz.com/africa/1248762/tanzania-social-
media-and-blogging-regulations-charge-to-operate-online/
Diamond, Larry. (2010). Liberation technology. Journal of Democracy, 21 (3), 69–83.
Dwyer, M., & Molony, T. (2019). Social media and politics in Africa: Democracy, censorship and
security. London: ZED Books.
Essien, H. (2020, October 11). #EndSARS surpasses #BlackLivesMatter, packs nearly
30 million tweets in two days. Peoples Gazette, https://gazettengr.com/endsars-
surpasses-blacklivesmatter-packs-nearly-30-million-tweets-in-two-days/
Foucault, M. (1980). The eye of power. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected
interviews and other writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, pp. 146–165. Sussex: Harvester
Press.
Fox, R. (2001). Someone to watch over us. Back to the panopticon? Criminal Justice, 1
(3), 251–276.
Freedom House. (2015, October 28). Freedom on the net 2015 – Uganda, https://www.
refworld.org/docid/563217a73.html
Gagliardone, I. (2019). China, Africa, and the future of the internet. London: Zed Books.
de Gregorio, G., & Stremlau, N. (2020). Internet shutdowns and the limits of law.
International Journal of Communication, 14, 4224–4243.
Gumede, W. (2016). Rise in censorship of the Internet and social media in Africa. Journal
of African Media Studies, 8 (3), 413–421.
Habib, H. (2016, April 6), Egypt arrested people for their Facebook comments. Now
it’s trying to block Facebook itself. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/06/egypt-lawmakers-call-for-new-legislation-
for-containing-dangers-of-facebook/
Howard, P. N., Duy, A., Freelon, D., Hussain, M. M., Mari, W., & Maziad, M. (2011).
Opening closed regimes: What was the role of social media during the Arab Spring?
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2595096 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2595096
Iwilade, A. (2013). Crisis as opportunity: youth, social media and the renegotiation of
power in Africa. Journal of Youth Studies, 16 (8), 1054–1068.
Jackson, R. H., & Rosberg, C. G. (1982). Why Africa’s weak states persist: The empirical
and the juridical in statehood. World Politics, 35 (1), 1–24.
Karombo, T. (2020, October). More African governments are quietly tightening rules and
laws on social media. Quartz Africa, https://qz.com/africa/1915941/lesotho-uganda-
tanzania-introduce-social-media-rules/
Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in interna-
tional politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kperogi, F. A. (2016a). Networked social journalism: Media, citizen participation,
and democracy in Nigeria. In B. Mutsvairo (Ed.), Participatory politics and citizen jour-
nalism in a networked Africa: A connected continent, pp. 19–33. Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Not for distribution
Introduction 15
Kperogi, F. A. (2016b). Habermas in the African e-village: Deliberative practices of dias-
poran Nigerians on the Internet. In D. Coombs, & S. Collister (Eds.), Debates for the
digital age: The good, the bad, and the ugly of our online world, pp. 287–304. New York, NY:
Praeger/ABC-CLIO.
Kperogi, F.A. (2020). Nigeria’s digital diaspora: Citizen media, democracy, participation.
Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press.
Lyon, D. (1994). The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Lyon, D. (2001). Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life. Philadelphia, PA: Open
University Press.
Marchant, E., & Stremlau, N. (2020a). The changing landscape of Internet shutdowns in
Africa. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4216–4223.
Marchant, E., & Stremlau, N. (2020b). A spectrum of shutdowns: Reframing Internet
shutdowns from Africa. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4327–4342.
Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J., Rao, S. P., Anstis, S., & Deibert, R. (2020). Running in
circles: Uncovering the clients of cyberespionage rm circles. Citizen Lab Research
Report No. 133, University of Toronto.
Mare, A. (2020). State-ordered internet shutdowns and digital authoritarianism in
Zimbabwe. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4244–4263.
Martin, C. D. (2013). The Internet as a reverse Panopticon. ACM Inroads, 4 (1), 8–9.
Matfess, H., & Smith, J. (2018, July 13). Africa’s attack on internet freedom. Foreign Policy,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/13/africas-attack-on-internet-freedom-uganda-
tanzania-ethiopia-museveni-protests/
Matsilele, T., & Ruhanya, P. (2021). Social media dissidence and activist resistance in
Zimbabwe. Media, Culture & Society, 43(2), 381–394.
Mbamalu, S. (2021, June 6). EXCLUSIVE: Presidency meets with China’s cyber regulator
to build Nigerian Internet rewall. Foundation for Investigative Journalism, https://j.ng/
article/exclusive-presidency-meets-with-chinas-cyber-regulator-to-build-nigerian-
internet-rewall/
Mojeed, A. (2019, October 28). Nigerian military using surveillance technology to spy on
Nigerians– CPJ. Premium Times, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/
359898-nigerian-military-using-surveillance-technology-to-spy-on-nigerians-cpj.html
Monks, K. (2018, January 2). Cameroon goes oine after Anglophone revolt. CNN,
https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/03/africa/internet-shutdown-cameroon/index.html
Mutsvairo, B. (2016). Digital activism in the social media era: Critical reections on emerging
trends in sub-Saharan Africa. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nyabola, N. (2018). Digital democracy, analogue politics: How the internet era is transforming
politics in Kenya. London: Zed Books.
Namubiru, L. (2018, July 3). How Uganda is implementing its controversial social media
tax. Quartz, https://qz.com/africa/1319826/how-ugandas-social-media-tax-works-
with-whatsapp-facebook-twitter-blocked/
Nemes, I. (2002). Regulating hate speech in cyberspace: Issues of desirability and e-
cacy. Information & Communications Technology Law, 11 (3), 193–220. DOI: 10.1080/
1360083022000031902
Obadare, E. (2004). In search of a public sphere: the fundamentalist challenge to civil
society in Nigeria. Patterns of Prejudice, 38 (2), 177–198.
Obaji, P. (2021, June 7). The real, petty reason this president ordered a nationwide
Twitter ban. The Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-the-real-
petty-reason-this-president-ordered-a-nationwide-twitter-ban
Not for distribution
16 Farooq A. Kperogi
Okakwu, E. (2018, September 20). EXCLUSIVE: AGF Malami hires American rms to
plant pro-Buhari op-ed in U.S. papers. Premium Times, https://www.premiumtimesng.
com/news/headlines/284606-exclusive-agf-malami-hires-american-rms-to-plant-
pro-buhari-op-ed-in-u-s-papers.html
Olubayo, O. (2021, December 4). Buhari regime ordered us to block Peoples Gazette’s
website in Nigeria: MTN. Peoples Gazette, https://gazettengr.com/buhari-regime-
ordered-us-to-block-peoples-gazettes-website-in-nigeria-mtn/
Onukwue, A. (2021, August 6). Nigeria’s Twitter ban is proving costlier than just a
regular internet shutdown. Quartz Africa, https://qz.com/africa/2043666/twitter-ban-
has-cost-nigeria-over-360-million-in-two-months/
Owolabi, F. (2019, September 20). FG charges Sowore to court for ‘insulting Buhari’.
TheCable, https://www.thecable.ng/just-in-federal-govt-charges-sowore-insulting-
buhari
Parkinson, J., Bariyo, N. & Chin, J. (2019, August 15). Huawei Technicians helped
African governments spy on political opponents. Wall Street Journal, https://www.
wsj.com/articles/huawei-technicians-helped-african-governments-spy-on-political-
opponents-11565793017
Parks, L. & Thompson, R. (2020). The slow shutdown: Information and Internet
regulation in Tanzania from 2010 to 2018 and impacts on online content creators.
International Journal of Communication, 14, 4288–4308.
Prinsloo, L., & Cohen, M. (2021, March 11). Tech giants’ dreams of free Internet wither
in African backlash. Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-
03-11/africa-news-facebook-fb-google-goog-free-internet-derailed-in-africa?sref=
QmOxnLFz
Princewill, N., & Busari, S. (2021, June 5). Nigeria bans Twitter after company deletes
President Buhari’s tweet. CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/africa/nigeria-
suspends-twitter-operations-intl/index.html
Rydzak, J., Karanja, M., & Opiyo, N. (2020). Dissent does not die in darkness:
Network shutdowns and collective action in African countries. International Journal of
Communication, 14, 4264–4287.
Salgado, S. (2014). The Internet and democracy building in Lusophone African countries.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Schectman, J. (2009). Iran’s Twitter revolution? Maybe not yet. Bloomberg, https://www.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-06-17/irans-twitter-revolution-maybe-not-yet
Slagle, M. (2009) An ethical exploration of free expression and the problem of hate
speech. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 24 (4), 238–250.
Solomon, S. (2018, March 22). Cambridge Analytica played roles in multiple African elec-
tions. VOA News, https://www.voanews.com/a/cambridge-analytica-played-roles-in-
multiple-african-elections/4309792.html
Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet. New York, NY: Berkley.
TheCable. (2020, December). REVEALED: Defence Intelligence Agency acquired
equipment to spy on calls, SMS in Nigeria. The Cable, https://www.thecable.ng/
revealed-defence-intelligence-agency-acquired-equipment-to-spy-on-calls-text-
messages-by-nigerians
Valeri, R., Borgeson, K. (2005). Identifying the face of hate. Journal of Applied Sociology,
22 (1), 91–104.
Deutsche Welle 1. (2018, August 16). Internet censorship in Africa threatens
democracy, economy. Mail & Guardian, https://mg.co.za/article/2018-08-06-internet-
censorship-in-africa-threatens-democracy-economy/
Not for distribution
Introduction 17
Whitaker, R. (1999). The end of privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality. New
York, NY: The New Press.
Windsor, M. (2016, February 18). Uganda elections 2016 social media: Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp blocked during voting. International Business Times,
https://www.ibtimes.com/uganda-elections-2016-social-media-facebook-twitter-
instagram-whatsapp-blocked-during-2312671.
Wolfsfeld, G., Segev, E., & Sheafer, T. (2013). Social media and the Arab Spring: Politics
comes rst. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18 (2), 115–137.
Xu, B., & Albert, E. (2017, February 17). Media censorship in China. Council on Foreign
Relations, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china
Zubo, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The ght for a human future at the new
frontier of power. New York, NY: Public Aairs.
Not for distribution
