Above: Social media activist Evan Mawarire. Below, an infuriated protestor holds a street post sign. Picture-Courtesy of Al Jazeera & Sahara
Social movements have been in existence
way before the 19th century, but there has been a shift in the past fifty years
on how the movements were brought up. There is a distinction in time as to when
certain type of movements took place; the old social movements that started
before the 1960’s and the new social movements facilitated by the media which
started since social media platforms were created in the 21stcentury. With the advent of the internet, its access to the general public and
creation of social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, social movements
have been enhanced by the use of media in spreading information from one peer
to another in a short spec of time. One well known specific movement that is
still being discussed and used as a case study in media academic researches pertaining
to the use of social media was the Arab-Spring, a revolution which started on
17 December 2010 in Tunisia spreading to other Arab nations in North Africa and
The Middle East through the use of Twitter.
This shows the power of using social media
as a platform for spreading information and mobilizing people for the cause of
starting a movement. There has to be a creation of a hashtivism on Twitter.
This is a combination of hashtags and activism, a label on social media with a
specific discourse of interest to people with a similar matter of concern. However,
at the end of creating the hashtivism, moving it from the media to the physical
arena in protesting and spreading the messages, we have to know the motive
behind every hashtivism. What purpose does it bring out and what are the
protesters main objectives?
Some social media activists may use the
building blocks very well (Activism, production and circulation, investigation,
mobilization and dialogue) but then never highlight the need of the protest or
what they tend to earn from it. A social movement bears no meaning if it lacks
a motive. It requires smart managerial tactics to bring out a movement on the
ground. That is the reason why some social and political movements in Zimbabwe
failed in the past year.
Some movements lacked a smart and strategic
managerial approach of the situation while others where effective because of
the impact of the message they disseminated. This paper will look at the
effects of social media usage on Zimbabwe’s social and political movements that
have been taking place since February 2016. It will show a detailed analysis on
whether social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have an influence on
social movements outside the realm of the internet and if they are effective. Furthermore,
this paper will give some information for someone to figure out reasons on how
other social media movements where successful and how others failed.
This paper was inspired by the use of
social media by protesters like Evan Mawarire to inform Zimbabweans, urge them
to take action and also mobilize them to protest against the government. There
was a number of social movements that erupted in Zimbabwe since April 2016 and
it is believed that all of them were as a result of the use of social media.
However, what boggles the mind of many analysts is why some of those movements
failed at the same time some succeeded. Completion of this paper will later aid
analysts, Zimbabwean opposition parties and individuals on whether the use of
social media is influential in organizing or enhancing social and political
movements. It will also give a brief information on the steps to be taken in
order for a movement enhanced by social media to be successful and effective.
In the past year, there has been a
fluctuation and eruption of political movements in Zimbabwe. Civilians have
been trying to bring up protests in order to overthrow the 92-year-old
President Robert Mugabe who has been ruling the country for the past 37 years.
Quite a few people were abducted while these movements were in process and most
civilians blame the president to be involved behind these atrocious acts. One
well know citizen, Itai Dzamara, a journalist and Political activists of
“Occupy Unity Square”, a campaign that was launched against President Mugabe’s
government and ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front
(Zanu PF). Dzamara went missing shortly after protesting against Mugabe on
March 9, 2015 and he has not been found since then.
A social media movement #Tajamuka also
known as #EnoughIsEnough was then brought up. However, the most effective
hashtivism which managed to draw people’s attention around the country is
#ThisFlag. It was started by Evan Mawarire, on Facebook and then later expanded
to Twitter. The Zimbabwean flag has colors that symbolize the country’s social,
economic and political status for its citizens. Mawarire took his frustration
to social media by recording a video and sharing it on Facebook and where he
was questioning Mugabe’s achievements stating that the flag no longer has a
useful meaning to the citizens.
Civilians are not being paid, the economic
structure has crumbled and there is a high unemployment rate. Another social
movement called #TeaTime on Facebook was started in January 2017 by Kuda
Musasiwa, a citizen who has been frustrated by the unscrupulous actions of
public officials and law enforcing officers. Musasiwa conducts a short live
video session on Facebook everyday criticizing the day-to-day actions and
decisions taken by the Zimbabwean government. Between January and April 2017,
he has gaining almost to 2 thousand views on a video on Facebook. He has turned his
#TeaTime campaign into a series and currently at season 2 episode 7. He seems to be
slowly engaging people and for some to really get an understanding of his
message, one would just watch his videos from the pilot episode further on.
When Itai Dzamara was abducted, very few
people knew about the abduction. In most cases, those who knew about it risked
their lives discussing the issue in any Zimbabwean public domain. This was a
way to prevent citizens from being accused of instigating violence. In
Zimbabwe, criticizing the President’s actions is sometimes tantamount to
treason. Individuals that had access to the internet, resorted to using Twitter
and Facebook to inform people, discuss the situation and start up campaigns
like #Dzamara. In such cases, people would use different twitter handles to
prevent being tracked, unlike in the case of Bahar Mustafa in United Kingdom who
was easily identified and accused of using the hashtag #killallwhitemen. The
#Dzamara movement was initiated by Itai’s young brother as a way of engaging
people and putting more pressure on Mugabe’s corrupt security officials so that
they bring his brother back home from wherever he had been taken to.
A lot more social media activisms
especially those targeting Mugabe started evolving tremendously. Even from
those who used to serve in his government like Acie Lumumba, a former member of
the political party, ZANU PF, who got expelled after numerous accusations of him
misappropriating state funds. Well, that is what Mugabe does when he now needs
to let go of a Member of Parliament or individual in one of his ministries.
Lumumba then started the #digdeeper movement through YouTube, Facebook and
Twitter as a way of awakening Zimbabweans. The downside of this movement was
that he just informed the citizens of what the President had been doing in
terms of governance.
This movement was not effective on the
social media platforms used and it did not last longer than five months. This
was due to mismanagement of the platform because it did not have much effect in
engaging people in the movement. At the end, people could not see a positive and
meaningful objective for what he claimed to be a movement. According to Jenkins
and Shrethova’s Circulation and Attention conception, “movements that do not have a specific meaning
as to why the activists are launching it, are usually regarded as merely
attention seeking activists.”
Movements should mainly be brought up when there would be a main motive towards
it otherwise it does not have much effect towards the person or organization it
may be directed to.
One very good example but poorly
constructed movement in terms of meaning and lacking an effective call to
action is the #Kony21012 movement. People just talked about it but they did not
have a call to action or an objective on what the people should do about it. People
were informed globally and had a massive spreadability ratio as compared to
many movements that have taken place since new social movements emerged. The
downside of it was that it lacked a specific call to action, which led to some
people labelling it as an attention seeking movement, posing that the Ugandan
government just wanted to be on the global mainstream platform.
Many people have had different views about
certain social movements and how effective or purposeful they are. Hashtivism
or basically a social media movement must have a call to action, something that
will influence people into producing a tangible outcome. Emotional scene
setting, an effective aspect in engaging people in a movement, is very
important when one intends to start a movement in the hopes of influencing
people to do something like to occupy an area within a city or resist being
involved in work activity by shutting down work premises.
If an individual, institution, government
or organization is using social media as a way to influence people, it should
have a measurement of the return on interest and have a goal it intends to
reach. The #digdeeper campaign by Acie Lumumba lacked a specific goal. As the
audience of his social media presence, we cannot clearly state whether he had
intended to merely inform us so that we get a further understanding of what takes
place within the government board or he intended to mobilize us to protest or
probe the President and his government. If a campaign lacks a goal, it will not
have any productive outcomes. This is the major reason why the campaign did not
last for a long period of time both on social media and in the public domain.
Evan Mawarire, the social media activist,
sort to use Facebook and Twitter as an effective way to mobilize people.
Twitter is basically the cyber platform of sharing common ideas and life issues
with people of a similar background/upbringing. Jay C. Kang in his New York
Times article ‘Our Demand is Simpler: Stop Killing Us’, mentions that “DeRay
Mckesson” an American social media activist, “used social network not just for the site of revolution, but as a
conduit for his ideas.” Just
like Evan Mawarire, he used #ThisFlag as a way of sharing his ideas, what needs
to be done and furthermore, drive people to protest against the governments
illegal actions.
The #ThisFlag campaign was now a way of
urging people to stand up for their rights in solidarity against Mugabe’s
misadministration and corrupt activists. There has been a huge success in the
campaign which has brought people together in the fight against Mugabe. Since
he recorded the video and shared it on the social media platform, Mawarire has obtained
slightly less than fifty thousand followers on Facebook and just below seventy
thousand followers on Twitter to this date.
Being an advocate of Clay Shirky’s
ideology, I believe that in order to have a movement with a core motive and for
the protestors to be well engaged, there must be the use of online social media
in order to spread the message very effectively. One other major component I
have analyzed during the course, is that identity construction also plays a
major role of collective action. It allows the protestors to view themselves as
people of shared interests, background and values henceforth giving them a
parallel understanding and cause of the movement. This results in the movement
not entirely being labelled as a mere attention seeking movement but one with a
meaningful cause. Mawarire created a community on social media engaging people
with the same frustrations who craved for better solutions to solve the
problem.
Della Porta states that “social networks are not only a facilitator but
also a product of collective action”. People actively get involved in a movement with
people whom they have a personal connection with. People engaged through those
connections may find it easy to overcome various obstacles during the process
of the movement such as resisting counter-movements and accusations of only
seeking attention. A movement is deemed useless, moreover an attention seeking
one if it bears no specific motive or call to action.
Contemporary
Social Movements somehow emerge from the social media by people who start a
petition and encouraging people to resist a prospective actions taken by a
government or business institution. Social media plays a huge role in
mobilizing people, informing and instigating them to form a social or political
movement only when there are certain factors instilled; like good management
and presence of the social page on the social media platform, easy access to
the social page and internet by the followers or people targeted to mobilize
for the movement, proper dissemination of the messages and an effective call to
action.
Firstly, one must have a specific
targeted audience when creating a movement on social media. In the case of
Zimbabwe’s political movements, the audience to be targeted are those who are
affected by the government’s mismanagement of tax payers’ funds, corrupt
activities, police harassments and brutality and the unemployed.
When the audience are targeted, there is
now the need to use a strategic social media platform that is easily used by
the audience; in this case it could either be Facebook or Twitter because a
majority of Zimbabweans are well acquainted with these two. The downside of
this issue is that, Zimbabwe, with a population of 16.3 million people, only 6.9
million have access to the internet and around 1.4 million are registered on
Facebook. There is also a problem of the lack of sufficient electrical supply
in most regions which results in the cutting of electricity at certain time
slots in most suburbs within the country. This results in people not being able
to get connected to the internet because the connection is either off or their
mobile phones, tablets and computers do not have electric supply or they are
completely turned off.
Launching social movements through social
media networks can be affected by the issue of insufficient supply of
electricity and the inaccessibility of internet in most African countries, Zimbabwe
included. Therefore the mobilizer’s message reaches a minute group of people,
mainly those in the working class who have an easy access to the internet and
who can afford to have electricity throughout.
However, there may be slacktivism from
those who will be following up and getting the information, liking, retweeting
and sharing the campaigns posts without doing anything effective like
contributing in the actually protest at ground. Slacktivism is the idea of
contributing to the political or social campaign by merely participating online
without having a positive impact. There have been many incidences of
slacktivism during the campaigns and Evan Mawarire once addressed the issue
that “as citizens, we will not achieve anything if we just watch his videos,
share, and retweet them,” citizens also have to act outside of the social media
realm.
The way in which social movements are
brought up has changed over the past decades specifically with the use of the
media. Movements were only conducted in the public sphere but now it can start
in the private sphere with the use of the social media through networks like
Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat going outwards to the public sphere.
Zimbabweans are not radical people and have a great fear of losing their lives.
If these political movements where started in the public sphere, very few
people would have been engaged in them because citizens do not like to be
identified as opposing the President Mugabe. Doing so would result in them
likely to be abducted by Mugabe’s secret service. Papacharissi states “that activities pursued in the public
realm” are today practiced in the private realm “with greater autonomy,
flexibility, and potential for expression”. The use of
social media has managed to pave a way for people to be united in creating an
effective public political movement like #ThisFlag.
Although social media plays a huge role in
the contemporary movements in Zimbabwe, we cannot base on the fact that it is
the only source that starts up or drives the movement. To a certain extent I
agree with Gladwell when he mentioned that a movement can still take place
without the presence of social networks. However, it has enhanced the expansion
of movements and disseminating the message in mobilizing people and uniting for
a movement. Majority of the social movements in Zimbabwe have been driven by
the use of social media. Without the use of social media in Zimbabwe, the
movements would likely have not evolved because they helped individuals
understand more of what needs to be done by networking with one another.
However there are factors that draw it back like the fact that only a certain
number of people in the country can have full access to the internet.
Bibliography
Bryfonski, Dedria. The Global Impact
of Social Media. Detroit, MI, Greenhaven Press, 2012.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario
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Jay C. Kang Our Demand is Simple: Stop killing us https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/magazine/our-demand-is-simple-stop-killing-us.html?_r=0
Jenkins, Henry. By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. New York, New York
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