Abstract
As the digital revolution continues to become an integral part of the communication landscape in many parts of Africa, political parties and politicians turn to social media platforms as new tools for political mobilization and campaigns. Social Media and Elections in Africa, edited by Martin N Ndlela and Winston Mano, presents compelling case studies from different parts of Africa relating to the use of social media in political elections and governance. The work is organized into two volumes and focuses on how social media use has influenced the electoral process, electoral system, political activism, and political actors in the continent of Africa. Furthermore, the book presents a critical review of the importance of social media in African elections and how social media use has constituted ‘a break from failed public media systems in Africa that have been far from representative of the views of the majority’ (Vol. 2, p. 4).
Introducing the case studies presented in this book, the editors provide a vivid historical context of the intersection between media and politics in Africa from the dominated government-owned media in the 1970s and 1980s to the media liberalization in the late 1980s and 1990s as well as the emergence of social media at the beginning of the 21st century. In this historical background, the editors highlight transformational changes in the African political communication landscape, following the increased use of smartphones and mobile Internet in the election campaigns. If the political campaigns in the 1970s to the early 2000 period were characterized by oral forms of communication, mass rallies, door to door campaign, poster advertising and a few news media outlets, the rise of social media has now become a game-changer in the arena of African election campaigns as the social media platforms democratize and revolutionize political communication from the previously monopolized media access on the one hand and provide easy access to and far-reaching effects of the political campaign messages on the other.
Although the implication of social media on election campaigns in Africa is not straightforward, this new political communication mode has strategically shaped and reshaped the continent in several ways. First, the use of social media facilitates mass mobilization and exchange of ideas to challenge suppressive regimes and bring a new order in the political spectrum. The mobilization of Gambians using various social media platforms to end the dictatorship of President Yahya Jammeh in 2016 has been cited as an excellent example of how social media use sets new norms and defines political winners or survivors. Second, social media use has continuously been framed as a threat by authoritarian leaders as it challenges well-established elite control over information and circulation of political messages. As such, shutting down access to social media is often used as a way of controlling mass protest, conflicting political discourses and political unrest. Third, in the context of political campaigns, social media use creates a new political culture and new forms of political control that influence organization of political campaigns, management of a candidate’s presentation and voters’ behavior, as well as the articulation of crucial political issues. Fourth, on the downside, social media use during political campaigns has the potential of degrading the integrity of democratic elections, manifested through manipulation of information, the introduction of technological control, political misrepresentation, and speedy spread of cyber propaganda and inaccurate news, popularly known as fake news.
As already indicated, this edited book is organized into two volumes. The first volume consists of 11 chapters highlighting aspects of social media and election campaign issues in Africa. This volume also provides insights into the interplay between media and politics by examining various methodological and theoretical approaches that function as explanatory frameworks in understanding the nature of social media use in political communication, political mobilization and election campaigns. Among others, chapters in this volume adopt the use of theoretical frameworks such as the digital public sphere, media logic and social systems, political mobilization, and alternative media theory. The first chapter, written by the editors Martin N Ndlela and Winston Mano, presents an introductory background to the book by highlighting the rise in the use of social media and how this changes the face of election campaigning in Africa. In this chapter, Ndlela and Mano also document a summary of various theoretical postulations on the interplay between social media and election campaigns that inform chapters in the first volume.
Chapter 2 in the first volume discusses the technological dimension of social media by examining how the system software, codes and algorithms of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter play a crucial role in mapping, managing, filtering, ranking and selecting media content. Additionally, the chapter offers insights into the interconnectedness between algorithms and news production and consumption, and the centrality of social media algorithms and data processing in controlling the movement, circulation and dissemination of political information, election issues and campaign news. Following a similar path, Chapter 3 addresses the question of methodology and epistemology of political communication. Using a comparative scholarship as an analytical focus, the chapter argues for a cross-contextual exploration to unearth the evolving methodological and epistemological trends that inform the African political communication in comparison to the widely adopted Anglo-American approaches to various political communication practices.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the circulation and distribution of political messages using the social media platform of Twitter. Examining presidential tweets in countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, Chapter 4 advances a critical analysis of the presidents’ election messages circulated through the use of the Twitter platform. Central to the chapter is the argument that social media platforms such as Twitter open up new avenues for civic participation of citizens to challenge politicians during and after elections on the one hand and create new spaces for political activism and coping strategy by citizens in response to the struggle to survive and make sense of African politics on the other. Examining the use of Twitter in the July 2018 elections in Zimbabwe, Chapter 5 follows the same analytical trajectory by suggesting that in an authoritarian and polarized political environment characterized by state control over mainstream media like Zimbabwe, Twitter has become ‘a popular space where civilians transact largely unfettered conversations’ (p. 76), as it re-engages citizens to speak back to power and scrutinize the performance of their political leaders.
Unlike previous chapters, Chapters 6 to 11 in this volume reflect on the general use of social media concerning elections in countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Uganda. Using the lens of political mobilization theory to understand the use of social media in Ghana’s 2016 elections, Chapter 6 suggests that due to their participatory nature, social media offer an interactive power that democratizes political communication, channels unmediated feedback, and allows for wider participation of citizens in the democratic process. In the context of Ghana and Africa in general, however, this chapter points out that although social media provide a critical space for the ‘democratization of communication for active participation of citizens’, the use of social media in political campaigns and elections cannot simply ‘turn around the political fortunes of political candidates and their parties in Ghana and Africa in the immediate future unless they address the key issues of illiteracy and internet connectivity’ (pp. 114, 115). Echoing the benefits of the use of social media in political elections and utilizing data of social media use during Cameroon’s 2018 presidential election, Chapter 7 reveals a potential correlation between the high level of social media use and the election performance of the presidential candidates as the election results in Cameroon showed that candidates who used social media more often to facilitate their election campaign activities have generally been awarded positive outcomes in terms of winning the elections.
Chapters 8 and 9 attempt to fill the gap of critical investigation around the modalities and reasons that underpin the incorporation of digital communication technologies into the election communication toolkits of political parties and their candidates. Focusing on the 2018 ‘post-Mugabe’ elections in Zimbabwe, Chapter 8 suggests that while traditional campaign strategies are still very popular, social media platforms and freeware messaging applications such as WhatsApp have provided alternative spaces for political parties and their candidates to reach out to the urban and diaspora voters as these platforms enable online campaigns, direct communication with the electorate as well as direct feedback from the voters through posts, comments and views of the campaign live broadcasting. While underlining similar trends in social media use and elections in Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini, Chapter 9 notes the extent to which the high cost of and limited access to the Internet in rural areas in these countries present a challenge for online political dialogue and communication. Despite this challenge, the chapter suggests that rather than replacing traditional methods of political and election campaigns, social media use modifies, augments and reinforces them.
Chapter 10 sheds light on the intersection between music and social media by presenting the case of Bobi Wine, a Ugandan musician turned opposition politician. The success of Bobi Wine and politicians backed by him in the Ugandan political sphere and elections in 2017 and 2018 has been primarily credited to how he developed people-power-based political slogans and applied social media mobilization by rallying and encouraging people, especially young people, to take charge of their own destiny. If the Bobi Wine case demonstrates an interactive use of social media, the last chapter in this volume, Chapter 11, presents an insightful exploration of Facebook use in the 2018 intra-party election campaigns and the absence of interactive engagement in the use of social media tools by two major political parties in Ghana. Examining the use of Facebook by these political parties, this chapter discovers that while the Facebook platform extends interactive tools for political engagement, the two major political parties in Ghana did not maximize the use of the platform for interaction goals as they simply focused on disseminating information and managing the party brand/image in a one-way model of political communication. As such, the inability of the political parties to capitalize on the interactive function of Facebook through conversational engagement and public expectation management prevents them from achieving maximum support from the public.
The second volume of Social Media and Elections in Africa highlights the challenges and opportunities that social media use constitutes concerning elections in Africa. This volume presents 13 chapters and pays particular attention to the extent to which social media use influences the electoral process, actors and societal systems. The introductory chapter of this volume provides a general background on the political culture and elections in Africa and how social media platforms give voice to the taken for granted voiceless that are generally marginalized in various electoral issues.
Chapters 2 to 4 explore the intersection between gender, politics and social media. Chapter 2 and 4, in particular, advance a critical examination of gendered politics and the circulation of disgrace narrative on Twitter at the cost of the female candidates who participated in Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections. The disgrace narrative that polarized Zimbabwe’s political sphere was prompted by the blame of President Mugabe’s fall on his ambitious wife. As the narrative circulated on Twitter and other social media platforms, adverse treatment and discriminatory responses to female political candidacy occurred. As such, both chapters suggest that while social media extend democratic expressions, in the context of Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections, social media also reinforce gendered politics by mediating a biased portrayal and discriminatory narrative of women in politics. Chapter 3 analyzes the modes in which the marginalized groups often are manipulated for political gain through unfulfilled political campaign promises. Using the well-known Pads4Girls social media campaign in Uganda in 2017, this chapter examines how social media campaigns help in mobilizing public critique on the government’s failure to honor a presidential election campaign promise.
The next Chapters 5 to 7 are devoted to the analysis of social media and the political participation of young people. Given the popularity of social media use among young people, these chapters interrogate how young people’s communicative practices conducted on social media platforms may involve political communication and engagement. In this context, Chapter 5 reveals that although social media provide limitless opportunities for young people’s political engagement, socio-cultural context and persistent incivility circulated on social media in Kenya often undermine the ideal of democratic civility and hinder young people from participating actively in political affairs. Similarly, Chapter 6 presents a study on the election campaigns and political participation of university students in South Africa. This study shows that although students generally follow messages of political parties on social media, they attach their own meanings to those political texts. As a result, following political messages on social media does not necessarily imply direct intention to cast votes. Nevertheless, there is no question that social media platforms will continue to provide young people with opportunities to express their political ideals and aspirations as political parties and leaders integrate the use of social media in their political communication strategies to attract the youth, as described in Chapter 7 of this volume.
The remaining six chapters, Chapters 8 to 13, deal with the revolutionary nature of social media and present different critical interventions of social media use in African political communication. This includes analysis of digital dialogue and activism (Chapter 8), the emergence of cyber protest (Chapter 9), homophily and digital populism (Chapter 10), mediation of hate speech (Chapter 11), digital expressive culture through user-generated images and memes (Chapter 12), and digital political advertising (Chapter 13). Through analysis of these emerging vital ideas, these chapters emphasize a fundamental proposition that ‘social media offers the prospects of innovative modes of political participation and political communication that transcend the constrictions of rational deliberative exchanges’ (p. 200).
Overall the two volumes of Social Media and Elections in Africa offer illuminating accounts on the interplay between social media and political elections in Africa and present compelling cases concerning the new culture of civic engagement and communicative practices in Africa that social media platforms offer. Although the positive portrayal of the social media’s growing impact on democratization and governance in Africa may reflect utopian rhetoric, there is no doubt that the presence of social media has galvanized the political participation of citizens in many African countries, as examined by experts in this book. Given that this field of study is relatively new in the context of Africa, scholarly research on the utility of social media for political communication and resource governance and all associated issues such as access to the Internet, digital divide and adoption of digital technology remains timely. As such, analysis and case studies presented in both volumes of this book will undoubtedly benefit scholars and researchers of Internet, digital technologies and politics as well as those who are interested in the intersection between social media, political communication and election campaigns.