Jesus Comes to South Africa: Black Twitter as Citizen Journalism in South African Politics

ABSTRACT

This is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of “citizen” and “voter” voice, which neatly links with citizen journalism, I argue that new media in politics suffuses political relationships between citizens and leaders in ways that cannot be ignored. While in some cases social media-assisted citizen activism as a practice has wrought positive influences in society, in others it has been detrimental. However, the concern here is on how Black Twitter negotiated mainly ANC’s political messages and how they used Twitter as an alternative public sphere and counter-hegemonic tool to express their voting patterns, their “political” identities, frustration, and understandings or readings of political ideologies and citizen power in the South African body politic.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Twitter
• elections
• hashtags
• ANC
• Jacob Zuma
• counter-public sphere
• citizen journalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Shepherd Mpofu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5924-5721