Repression, Propaganda, and Digital Resistance: New Media and Democracy in Zimbabwe

The use of Facebook for political commentary in South Africa

“…Officials indicated that the sites existed more as a means of disseminating information and of monitoring public opinion (rather than as a means of interacting with them) and so they appeared to treat it in a similar manner as to traditional media. In this way, the study contributes to existing literature on the continent (see Nyabuga andMudhai, 2009, andMoyo, 2009) by bridging the gap between more normative ideologies associated with the revitalised public realm, and the realities of online political commentary and participation in South Africa.…”

Fragile finance: The revenue models of oppositional news outlets in repressive regimes

“…For example Hughes and Lawson (2005) discuss the struggle to deepen democracy in Latin America through media diversity, while Waisbord (2007) and Becker (2011) argue that media can raise awareness and affect accountability. Moyo (2009) performs a content and form analysis of three online news services in Zimbabwe to establish the role played by the internet on democracy while Bratic (2006) argues for the potential of digital media to increase democratic participation in conflict situations. Studies suggest betterinformed citizens are more likely to vote, which encourages politicians' responsiveness (Stromberg 2004), and freedom of the media is highly correlated with broader political freedoms (Karlekar and Becker 2014).…”

Blogging down a dictatorship: Human rights, citizen journalists and the right to communicate in Zimbabwe

“…It is almost a truism now that the protracted political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe had a severe and debilitating impact on not only the principle of communicative democracy, but also the entire social, political and economic fabric of the country (Moyo, 2003(Moyo, , 2009(Moyo, , 2010Moyo and Chuma, 2010;Ranger, 2003). Although the causes of the crisis are multifaceted, the predominant view is that it was fundamentally about a breakdown in the rule of law and the observance of human rights by the state that had not only lost legitimacy as an institution, but also the credibility of elections as a consent-making mechanism.…”

“…From this perspective, alternative media can function as translocal institutions attending to and representing the interests of communities of interest, not as territorially defined entities, but 'as people sharing a common condition or problem' (Popple, 1995: 4). The internet in particular is associated with deterritorialized and transnational alternative media systems and public spheres (Moyo, 2009;Tettey, 2009). One of the fundamental processes underpinning community service in alternative media is participation (Atton, 2002;Bailey et al, 2008;Waltz, 2005).…”

“…Atton's use of the word 'philosophy' is very important because it shows that there is nothing called 'journalism' as such, but there are different ways of thinking about journalism. While the mainstream philosophies of public, state and corporate journalism conveniently disregard their philosophical statuses and attack citizen journalism as non-professional and ideological (Allan, 2006;Moyo, 2009), they themselves represent institutionalized, capitalized, routinized and 'professionalized' methods of storytelling that privilege the powerful elite at the expense of ordinary citizens (Atton, 2002;Hamilton, 2000). As demonstrated later in this article, citizen journalism is premised on a democratic participant philosophy that discourages a top-down model of public communication in favour of a bottom-up model that mainstreams the participation and empowerment of audiences in the communication process.…”