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This book reflects on the rapid rise of social media across the African continent, and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to try to contain it. It reflects on the Chinese influence in African governments clampdown on social media and the role of Israeli NSO Group Technologies

"This book reflects on the rapid rise of social media across the African continent, and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to try to contain it. The relentless growth of social media platforms in Africa has provided the means of resistance, self-expression, and national self-fashioning for the continent's restlessly energetic and contagiously creative youth. This has provided a profound challenge to the African "gatekeeper state", which has often responded with strategies to constrict and constrain the rhetorical luxuriance of the social media and digital sphere. Drawing on cases from across the continent, contributors explore the form and nature of social media and government censorship, whether via anti-social media laws, or less overt tactics such as state cybersurveillance, spyware attacks on social media activists or the artful deployment of the rhetoric of "fake news" as a smokescreen to muzzle critical voices. The book also reflects on the Chinese influence in African governments' clampdown on social media and the role of Israeli NSO Group Technologies, as well as the tactics and technologies which activists and users are deploying to resist or circumvent social media censorship. Drawing on a range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, this book will be an important contribution to researchers with an interest in social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in transitional societies, censorship on the Internet, and Africa more broadly"--

"This book reflects on the rapid rise of social media across the African continent, and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to try to contain it. The relentless growth of social media platforms in Africa has provided the means of resistance, self-expression, and national self-fashioning for the continent's restlessly energetic and contagiously creative youth. This has provided a profound challenge to the African "gatekeeper state", which has often responded with strategies to constrict and constrain the rhetorical luxuriance of the social media and digital sphere. Drawing on cases from across the continent, contributors explore the form and nature of social media and government censorship, whether via anti-social media laws, or less overt tactics such as state cybersurveillance, spyware attacks on social media activists or the artful deployment of the rhetoric of "fake news" as a smokescreen to muzzle critical voices. The book also reflects on the Chinese influence in African governments' clampdown on social media and the role of Israeli NSO Group Technologies, as well as the tactics and technologies which activists and users are deploying to resist or circumvent social media censorship. Drawing on a range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, this book will be an important contribution to researchers with an interest in social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in transitional societies, censorship on the Internet, and Africa more broadly"--

The literature on online citizen journalism tends to construe user-generated citizen media as inherently counter-hegemonic, as the emerging, as yet unformed but nonetheless virile antithesis to the traditional media. This article argues that while the vigorous profusion of web-based citizen media has the potential to inaugurate an era of dynamic expansion of the deliberative space and even serve as a counterfoil to the suffocating dominance of the discursive space by the traditional, mainstream media, we are now witnessing a trend toward the aggressive cooptation of these citizen media by corporate media hegemons. To demonstrate this, I study 'iReport.com,' a YouTube-type, user-generated citizen news site launched by the Cable News Network (CNN). I argue that the trend toward corporate-sponsored citizen media may, in the final analysis, blur the distinction between citizen and mainstream journalism.

This article explores how America's mainline institutional media portrayed Guam, an unincorporated US territory in the Pacific Ocean that is home to important American military bases, in a time of heightened tensions between the United States and North Korea. Guamanians represent marginal racial 'others' who are nonetheless ensconced in a consequential part of the US military architecture. Using a combination of topic modelling and network analysis, our study analysed 2480 articles from 44 different mainstream newspapers in the United States between April 2017 and June 2018 in order to examine the contradictory depiction of an 'other' that is simultaneously foreign and domestic. Our results present evidence of a hegemonic portrayal of Guam as an intrinsic part of the US as well as a depiction of the threat to Guam as an attack on the US without acknowledging the marginality of Guam and its inhabitants in US politics.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION Where Is the Shaman? -- PART I CONCEPTUALIZING ELECTRONIC TRIBES -- CHAPTER 1 "A Tribe by Any Other Name . . ." -- CHAPTER 2 Mimetic Kinship: Theorizing Online "Tribalism" -- CHAPTER 3 Electronic Tribes (E-Tribes): Some Theoretical Perspectives and Implications -- CHAPTER 4 Revisiting the Impact of Tribalism on Civil Society: An Investigation of the Potential Benefits of Membership in an E-Tribe on Public Discourse -- PART II SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF ELECTRONIC TRIBALISM -- CHAPTER 5 Theorizing the E-Tribe on MySpace.com -- CHAPTER 6 Don't Date, Craftsterbate: Dialogue and Resistance on craftster.org -- CHAPTER 7 Guild Life in the World of Warcraft: Online Gaming Tribalism -- CHAPTER 8 At the Electronic Evergreen: A Computer-Mediated Ethnography of Tribalism in a Newsgroup from Montserrat and Afar -- PART III EMERGING ELECTRONIC TRIBAL CULTURES -- CHAPTER 9 "Like a neighborhood of sisters": Can Culture Be Formed Electronically? -- CHAPTER 10 Gerald M. Phillips as Electronic Tribal Chief: Socioforming Cyberspace -- CHAPTER 11 Digital Dreamtime, Sonic Talismans: Music Downloading and the Tribal Landscape -- CHAPTER 12 Magic, Myth, and Mayhem: Tribalization in the Digital Age -- PART IV CYBERCRIME AND COUNTERCULTURE AMONG ELECTRONIC TRIBES -- CHAPTER 13 Mundanes at the Gate . . . and Perverts Within: Managing Internal and External Threats to Community Online -- CHAPTER 14 Brotherhood of Blood: Aryan Tribalism and Skinhead Cybercrews -- CHAPTER 15 Radical Tribes at Warre: Primitivists on the Net -- CHAPTER 16 A "Tribe" Migrates Crime to Cyberspace: Nigerian Igbos in 419 E-Mail Scams -- About the Contributors -- Index