African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›How Africa tweets: New research documents Twitter’s key role – By Beatrice Karanja

How Africa tweets: New research documents Twitter’s key role – By Beatrice Karanja

By Uncategorised
January 26, 2012
2528
0
img-1

img-2The key role of Twitter in the people’s revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia a year ago is well documented.  Young people embraced the immediacy and freedom of the new social networking system to escape the constraints of censorship and the security apparatus, to organise and communicate.

The vital part that Twitter played in bringing down these autocratic regimes is already being widely studied. But it has rather obscured the explosion in its use across the rest of Africa.

For Twitter is, by no means, the exclusive tool of political activists in North Africa. It has been adopted enthusiastically by young people right across the continent who are adapting it for their own far more varied daily needs.

These are the findings of the first ever attempt to map comprehensively Twitter traffic across Africa. They are part of a revolution which poses challenges not just for Governments who want a dialogue with their citizens or for businesses who want to talk to their consumers but to everyone for whom communication is important.

Twitter, which started in the United States, may have been in existence for less than six years but it has swept the globe. Over 300 million people took the opportunity last year to use their smart phones or computers to post and read short messages or “Tweets” every day. One in three does so every day, sending over 250 million Tweets – a number increasingly daily.

But despite the importance attached to Twitter in the democratic revolutions in North Africa, the continent as a whole is often totally ignored when global surveys are done about its adoption. They are much more likely to focus on the fact that Lady Gaga has the greatest number of people who have signed up to read her messages – at 18 million no less than six million more followers than US President Barack Obama, who is in second place.

As a new survey specially commissioned by Portland Communications reveals, this is a mistake.  By examining only those Tweets which made clear their authors were living in Africa – which is only a part of the total volume – it found that well over 11 million were posted in the last three months in 2011 from right across the continent.

Nor are they limited to just a few countries. The major economies of South Africa, which tops the league tables with over 5 million Tweets during the study period, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt are well represented. But it also includes countries as diverse as Niger, Mali, Algeria and Sudan.

The study also found interesting differences with the use of Twitter from Europe and North America. While in the West, it is used largely by older adults in their thirties, in Africa its adoption has been driven here by a younger audience with 60% of those posting messages in their twenties. That’s certainly the case with my friends in Nairobi and back home in Uganda.

African Tweeters also are far more likely to use their mobile phones, rather than computers, to post and read messages. Given the explosion in mobile usage across the continent, and the increasingly availability and falling price of internet-ready devices, this makes it all the more likely that the Twitter revolution has only just begun.

Another contrast is that while it is the celebrities who make most of the running in North America and Europe using it to communicate with their fans, in Africa Twitter is seen as largely a way of keeping in touch with friends. Twitter is, of course, used here as well to keep up with entertainment with over two out of three users saying they like it for celebrity gossip. But even more use it to access international news and nearly as many to keep up to date with domestic news.

Given its growing up-take and importance, what is surprising is how few senior figures – in either the political and business world – are yet to take up Twitter as a means of two-way dialogue with the population. Rwanda’s President Kagame has attracted over 44,000 followers for his regular Tweets. Safaricom chief executive Bob Collymore, who has over 38,000 followers, uses it to keep customers up to date with the company’s activities, as well as hearing directly from them.

It is clear, however, that the Twitter revolution is just beginning and that few can afford to stay out a space where dialogue will increasingly take place. We can expect it to be used increasingly by citizens and consumers to swap information and views about governments and firms, which can only help improve transparency and accountability. With Twitter, you no longer need to own a newspaper or radio station to have your views heard. And for Africa – as for the rest of the world – that can only be good.

Beatrice Karanja is the head of Portland Nairobi. Portland is a strategic communications consultancy with a specialism in pan-African campaigns. How Africa Tweets can be downloaded from www.portland-communications.com

Previous Article

What’s Diaspora Got to do with it? ...

Next Article

Ethiopia: Resettlement Debate Highlights Rights Problem – ...

img-3

Uncategorised

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Nigerian refugee in Cameroon's Far North province, photographed during a UN Security Council Field Mission to the Lake Chad Basin. (Photo courtesy: UK Mission to the UN/Lorey Campese.)
    NigeriaPoliticsTop story

    Inside the insurgency in northeastern Nigeria

  • img-5
    Africa Science Focus Podcast

    Podcast: Africa’s great cannabis debate

  • Politics

    What if Ocampo Indicts Bashir? 8

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Djibouti fiddles amid the scramble for the Red Sea
  • Why France EACOP case might embolden, not discourage, activists
  • The International Community Must Reconsider its Engagement with Somaliland
  • Unpacking the geopolitics of Uganda’s anti-gay bill
  • Why’s the AfDB siding with the Agrochemical Industrial Complex?

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksKenyaSociety

Why is Africa always portrayed as a passive woman?

Africa is often talked about as an object to be consumed. Even those who resist this discourse sometimes employ it. At the start of this month, leaders of forty African ...
  • African climate protesters at COP26 in Glasgow, UK.

    2022 is Africa’s year to lead the world on climate change

    By Mohamed Adow
    January 12, 2022
  • Earlier this month, think tanks from around Africa discussed challenges at the Africa Think Tank conference, organised by the OCP Policy Center and Think Tank and Civil Societies Program of the University of Pennsylvania. Credit: OCP.

    “Do we really need them?” Four big challenges facing African think tanks

    By James Wan
    May 29, 2018
  • img-9

    The making of a global port, and the unmaking of a people

    By Nasir M. Ali, Jutta Bakonyi & May Darwich
    December 1, 2022
  • Tunisia fake news decree threatens free speech

    Tunisia’s decree won’t stop fake news. It will stop free speech

    By Ines El Jaibi
    October 27, 2022

Brought to you by

img-11

Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.