Regulating Social Media in the Global South

In recent years, the disinformation crisis has made regulating social media platforms a necessity. The consequences of disinformation campaigns are not only limited to election interferences or political debates, but have also included fatal consequences. In response, scholars have generally focused on regulating social media companies in the United States without paying much attention to these companies’ global impact, particularly in the Global South. Lost in the quest to fight disinformation is addressing the social media companies’ neglect of consumer rights in the Global South. Countries in the Global North, such as the United States, have the power to regulate social media companies should they choose to do so. However, the current power asymmetry between major social media companies and countries in the Global South limits the ability of many of such countries to have any meaningful bargaining power to advocate for their citizens’ consumer rights and their ability to manage misinformation campaigns in their sovereign territories. In some countries, it is even unclear if there is any political will from their respective government to advocate for consumer rights. This problem will not be resolved by relying on corporate social responsibility or corporate self-governance. Thus, this Article argues that unless countries in the Global South act collectively, they should not expect any major change from powerful social media companies in handling misinformation in their countries or promoting their citizens’ consumer rights. Regional treaties among countries, as a form of collective action, could push social media companies to be more attentive to their actions outside the Global North and bear responsibility in a transnational space. Ultimately, collective action in the Global South could inspire a global coalition and promote global accountability

#Democracy : a case study of social media use amongst members of the public sphere during the 2014 South African general election.

Master of Arts in English, Media and Performance Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2016.At present social media is used by 28% of the world’s population. The use has naturally penetrated the political sphere where social media presence in election periods is a global growing phenomenon. However, limited research has been conducted examining political social media use in South Africa despite calls for social media research in developing contexts and the pervasiveness of social media use amongst the country’s netizens. In addressing this the dissertation defines the uses of social media during election periods and illustrates how social media was used during the 2014 South African general election. Finally, the study also determines whether social media contributed to the democracy of the country. The researcher used Jϋrgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere as the theoretical underpinning of the study. An exploratory case study method was employed as the main research method with web archiving, a thematic analysis of Twitter trends and observation adopted as sub-methods. Research was limited to the most popular social media sites in the country: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Mxit. The findings demonstrate that social media was used by the country’s public, the traditional mass media, politicians and political parties, civil society actors and the IEC as part of their undertakings during the election period. The study also found that during the election period an online public sphere was realised in the country and, as a result, facilitated the creation of public opinion by creating communication channels between the electorate and other electoral actors. The dialogues that took place online showed signs of deliberation and was given consideration by the relevant authorities. Finally, the online public sphere regulated the state by enlightening them on public concerns and holding them accountable for their actions

Investigating the radical democratic potential of social media use by new social movements in South Africa

Since its inception, the internet ‒ and in particular Web 2.0 ‒ have been valorized as potentially revolutionary democratic spaces. Despite the emergence of concerns over the progressively neoliberal orientation and narcissistic effects of the internet, evidence of the radical democratic potential of this media has received considerable attention. This thesis is orientated around both an exploration of such evidence, and a consideration of its relevance for South Africa. In this regard, the thesis commences with an exploration of the neoliberal underpinnings of the internet and the growing translation of dominant neoliberal discourses into the online practices of mainstream liberal democratic politics. Focus then shifts toward the mounting influence of alternative radical democratic positions online, through an investigation of the virtual manifestations of deliberative, autonomous, and agonistic approaches to radical democracy. And following an examination of the online political practices of selected recent global social movements, the primacy of agonism in online expressions of radical democracy is advanced. In turn, resonances and dissonances between the online activity and practices of such global social movements, and the use of the internet and social media by well-known South African new social movements, are explored. Finally, this thesis concludes by recommending a fourfold new media approach through which the agonistic radical democratic potential of the internet can be realized more fully by the new social movements of South Africa

WWF's Earth Hour Campaign: ‘Global Village' or Eco-Imperialism?

The rapid spread of digital information and communication technologies since the turn of the century has led to renewed debates about globalisation and the power of new media to connect users across national, political and cultural borders. Environmental campaigns like WWF's Earth Hour, which touts itself as “the world's largest grassroots movement for the environment,” often adopt a utopian view of globalisation that celebrates what Marshall McLuhan termed the ‘global village'. While this global ethos might be useful in engaging the publics in collective action, this article argues that the way Earth Hour and similar campaigns actively construct representations of a single global village overlooks the lived inequalities between and among peoples within this imagined community. This article explores this tension using a quantitative and qualitative mixed-methods approach that combines a semiotic analysis of the Earth Hour 2019 promotional video, social media analysis of the use of #Connect2Earth hashtag among South African Twitter users, and in-depth interviews with current and former WWF-South Africa employees. This strategic approach is designed to juxtapose socially constructed representations of Earth Hour with on-the-ground user engagement in South Africa, and then triangulating these findings with qualitative interviews. The dissertation aims to explore the research question: In what ways does WWF's Earth Hour embody Marshall McLuhan's ideal ‘global village' and in what ways might it engender a form of eco-imperialism? This research question is operationalised through three subquestions: What kind of environmentalism do global environmental campaigns like Earth Hour promote? How do audiences in South Africa engage with Earth Hour on social media? How do local WWF of ices adapt global environmental campaigns to suit local audiences? This research contributes to emerging scholarship, rooted in environmental justice and decolonial studies, that is critical of mainstream environmental movements not to discourage environmental consciousness but to ultimately reformulate it

Screening for Erdoğanism: television, post-truth and political fear

The majority of current political communication studies focus on digital and social media, and overlook the centrality of television for the production and endurance of strongman politics in the Global South. By focusing on the journalistic television productions aired during the June 2018 election period in Turkey, this article unpacks the televisual logic that is incarnated in different modalities of telling and narrating of televisual genres. I propose two main themes: the ‘political fear’ of physical and social security threats, and ‘post-truth communications’ as the main televisual idioms for a vision of the future that is either secure or chaotic, that is, with or without Erdoğan. By combining political economy, content and textual analysis, I scrutinise the production dynamics of the televisual economy and the control and content of factual segments

#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

"Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. #identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

The Making of a Global Health Crisis: Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis and Global Science in Rural South Africa

This dissertation is a study of the social, scientific, political and rhetorical origins of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and the ability of a technical medical term, in concert with local clinical and government responses, to influence global biomedical action. XDR-TB, a form of tuberculosis that is resistant to most anti-tuberculosis drugs, was first creatively named and defined in 2005 in the context of a global laboratory survey documenting increasing tuberculosis drug resistance patterns around the world. In 2006, XDR-TB attracted international attention after a deadly cluster of drug-resistant tuberculosis was discovered in the rural South African town of Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal. International media and global health workers, responding to this news, defined XDR-TB as a critical threat to global health emanating from Southern Africa. As this dissertation shows, the association of XDR-TB with South Africa shaped the global response to XDR-TB, tying it closely to HIV/AIDS and linking it to the well-known history of South African AIDS denialism and public health inaction. The careful scrutiny given to South African XDR-TB by global public health experts profoundly impacted South African government responses to XDR-TB at the national, provincial, and regional levels. This detailed, multifaceted case study of global health knowledge in-the-making is based on nearly two years of fieldwork in South African clinical and community settings and interviews with international and South African tuberculosis researchers, policy makers, clinicians, administrators and patients. Widely circulated representations of XDR-TB are juxtaposed with the personal experience of South African nurses and local government administrators to make the case that responsibility for and control of successful global health interventions is more broadly distributed than common conceptions of global health research imply. In addition, this research uses published documents, unpublished policy literature, and promotional materials to trace how medical, public, and political understandings of XDR-TB in South Africa changed over time and across geographical space. This research changes our understanding of the politics and practices of health interventions in Africa by linking together activities ranging from the crafting of scientific publication, to global policy decision making, local public resource allocation and in-home nursing care

Constructing Israeli apartheid discourse in Israeli English media

The main research question of this master’s thesis is “How is the apartheid discourse recontextualized in Israeli English media?” I analysed the corpora of Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post of over 2,5 million words during the period 2000-2016 in the collocational level of word use–a method used by linguists to write definitions of words into dictionaries. The apartheid Israel discourse in Israeli English media is a comparative one, drawing parallels with the original South African apartheid system. It deals with naming a discourse–calling Israel an apartheid state like South Africa. The main social actors of the discourse are the Palestinians and global civil society organizations against the state of Israel, and comparatively the blacks against the white racist policies of South Africa. This kind of naming the apartheid Israel discourse is an antagonistic and counter-hegemonical ideological struggle against the hegemon in poststructuralist political philosophy. Apartheid Israel discourse is also concerned with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, racism, apartheid policies, colonialism, the security fence, boycotts against Israel, Palestinians’ struggle, binationalism etc. Apartheid Israel discourse is recontextualized in texts by drawing the chains of equivalences between discourse objects and actions, actors and events, indicated by the most frequently used verb and noun word classes. This interdisciplinary discourse linguistic analysis enables to research the creation and development of political ideas quantitatively on the level of their common definitional meaning–a very insightful research method to investigate the creation and development of political and social ideas.http://www.ester.ee/record=b5144673*es

Regulatory Annexation and the Matrix of Dependence: The Regulation of Social Media in Nigeria

This research addresses social media regulation targeted at users in Nigeria, while also considering issues related to the regulation and governance of social media and new media technologies across the world. This includes debates over online safety versus freedom of expression, platform power versus state influence, and structural inequalities that exist between the Global North and South in terms of the use, design, and regulation of new media technologies. The thesis centres around political economy and theoretical insights drawn from studies into internet and social media regulation, the securitisation of online harms, and practical approaches to regulating social media content. The analysis is based on a methodology that combines policy analysis, case study, interview, and social media analysis to explore how social media regulation can be understood from the standpoint of policy, politics, opposition, and alternatives. Based on these, the study argues that social media regulation in Nigeria mirrors broadcasting regulation in what I call regulatory annexation, given the matrix of dependence that relegates the Global South to regulatory decisions made by governments and platforms in the Global North. To establish this argument, I define the matrix of dependence as Nigeria’s reliance on the West for new media regulatory outcomes of virtually any kind. Platformatisation further places Nigeria on the disadvantaged side of a balance of power with global tech platforms. The country, therefore, turns to users, intending to maintain on social media the same level of control it wields over the traditional media – a concept that I introduce for the first time as regulatory annexation. This results in the opposition that users deploy on Twitter, the central platform for activist discourse, using othering tactics that often shape state-citizen relations in Nigeria. I conclude the thesis by suggesting the need for research that expands on regulatory annexation and the matrix of dependence, focusing on the implications that they portend for regulatory interventions in other contexts, particularly in the Global South, the kind of regulation that is more likely to target users

Swedwatch’s reports 2011-2013: what happened next and why? An analysis of trends in outcomes of investigated cases by the Swedish NGO Swedwatch

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a term increasingly used in academic discussions, political debates, media, corporate reports, Non-Governmental Organizations’ (NGOs) reports, and even by civil society and the public. But what does CSR actually mean? What do CSR practices actually constitute? Another increasingly debated issue is the growing power of the business sector and its direct effect on peoples’ lives, especially in the global South. A Swedish NGO called Swedwatch works with investigating and reporting the activities of Swedish corporations (mainly) in the global South. Based on their investigations they applaud exemplary CSR methods as well as critique corporate operations. Swedwatch’s reports have several times indicated that Swedish corporations (and also the Swedish state) are involved in operations directly linked to vast environmental damage, labour rights violations, and sometimes even human rights violations. In order to improve these actors’ Corporate Social Engagement (CSE - which in this thesis will be a term used when referring to actors’ operations and engagement in corporate responsibility), Swedwatch consistently includes a list of recommendations in their reports targeting investigated and/or relevant actors. Global corporations will continue to influence the economic, social and political spheres in which they operate when aiming to increase their profits. Questions regarding whose role it is to control this sector (and who is actually capable of doing so) is becoming the centre of attention for many organisations and governments. This thesis looks into the results of Swedwatch’s reports published 2011-2013. By drawing on information in the reports, internal result-related documents produced by Swedwatch, an interview with the director of Swedwatch and investigated corporations’ comments, the conclusions are made. The aim of this study is to discern trends and factors that can be argued should be focused on by organisations like Swedwatch and the CSR sphere in general when pushing the business sector to develop and improve their CSE. The three trends/factors which will be argued have been and will be important in future work are: (1) media attention, (2) customer closeness/’friendliness’, (3) and working with additional social strategies